Why California Market Center matters.
California Market Center is a commanding fashion complex where Fashion District's wholesale-trade character meets immense interconnected towers, contemporary creative offices and a business campus built around the exchange of apparel and textile design.
Set along East 9th Street near South Main Street and just steps from the intersection of Ninth and Los Angeles streets, the three-building complex occupies an entire downtown block bounded by 9th Street, Main Street, Olympic Boulevard and Los Angeles Street. Thirteen-story volumes rise around an interior public plaza, with broad floor plates and exterior bridges giving the campus an unusually large horizontal dimension within the surrounding street grid. Moving through the property shifts between open-air circulation, tall glazed façades and deep interior floors configured for offices, studios, showrooms and large gatherings. Rooftop terraces and elevated connections add another physical layer above the plaza, turning circulation between buildings into a visible component of the architecture. The result is a city-block-scale complex whose mass and internal circulation make the commercial infrastructure of Los Angeles fashion physically legible.
What defines California Market Center.
California Market Center is best known for beginning as the California Mart, built by the Morse family in 1963 as the first wholesale fashion marketplace west of the Mississippi. Its arrival represented the most ambitious development yet undertaken in Los Angeles' garment district, where clothing production had expanded substantially through the preceding decades and wholesalers increasingly required concentrated display and sales facilities. The original $50 million proposal envisioned a 13-story office and showroom building, two 20-story office towers, a 16-story hotel, a 200-unit motel, a convention center and a bank building. The bank formed the first completed component in 1963, and two towers containing offices and showrooms followed by 1966. The project concentrated manufacturers, sales representatives and wholesale buyers within a purpose-built marketplace at a period when the surrounding garment economy was moving toward larger-scale distribution. Industry infrastructure expanded nearby during the same decade through a free training school for garment workers established in the Apparel Mart in 1966 and the founding of the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in 1969. Subsequent decades shifted the district increasingly toward importing, wholesaling and designer showrooms, placing the California Mart at the center of a commercial transformation that extended well beyond its original buildings. More than 1,000 active showrooms eventually operated within the complex at its peak, and 30 annual events drew fashion businesses and professionals from international markets.
A major ownership and architectural change began when Brookfield Properties acquired the property in 2017 and initiated a comprehensive redevelopment with Gensler. The project stripped substantial portions of the existing structures toward their concrete frames, removed the former bank building near the principal entrance and opened the block toward a new landscaped plaza. Exterior walls received expansive glazing, and 30-foot-wide open-air bridges were designed to connect the three towers as usable elevated decks. Phase one reached completion in January 2020 with the remaking of Building C, followed by the wider campus relaunch in December 2021 after a $250 million investment. The finished redevelopment encompasses 1.8 million square feet, with floor plates reaching 131,000 square feet and ceilings rising 12 feet across the reconfigured interiors. Buildings A and B now accommodate creative offices and studios for companies spanning fashion and entertainment, and Building C concentrates fashion showrooms and event functions. LA Textile Show, founded in 1993, remains based there as a twice-yearly international textile trade event, joined by LA Market Week and LA Kids Market. The redevelopment preserved the property's wholesale role inside a substantially altered architectural system designed to support a broader range of creative industries.
How California Market Center fits.
California Market Center works as the anchor for a downtown sequence tracing three forms of commercial performance through vaudeville, independent cinema and Art Deco retail architecture along the Broadway corridor.
Begin at Orpheum Theatre, opened on February 15, 1926 as the fourth and final Los Angeles home of the Orpheum vaudeville circuit and designed by G. Albert Lansburgh as the chain's grandest local house. Its gray terra-cotta façade carries griffins and winged helmets, and a French-inspired interior develops through a two-story marble-lined foyer, stained-glass rosettes, gilded ceiling work and enormous chandeliers. A Wurlitzer Style 240 Special, Opus 1821, arrived in 1928 for silent-film accompaniment and survives as one of the city's working theater organs. Vaudeville brought performers including Jack Benny, Lena Horne and the young Judy Garland to its stage before film and concerts assumed larger roles; a $3 million rehabilitation completed in 2001 restored historic features and upgraded the theater for renewed performance use. Continue to The United Theater on Broadway, created as the West Coast flagship of the United Artists Theater Circuit established seven years after D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin formed United Artists in 1919. Walker & Eisen designed its 13-story steel-framed office tower, and C. Howard Crane designed the theater behind it in his sole West Coast commission after a career encompassing more than 250 theaters nationally. Terra cotta, cast stone and Gothic tracery give the exterior its soaring vertical character, with the central bays extending into a 50-foot setback tower that housed mechanical equipment. The complex later carried the Petroleum Building name before a twenty-first-century rehabilitation returned the auditorium to performance use and converted the tower for hospitality. Conclude at Eastern Columbia Building, Claud Beelman's 1930 Art Deco masterwork completed in only nine months as headquarters for the Eastern Outfitting Company and Columbia Outfitting Company. Thirteen stories of steel-reinforced concrete rise behind glossy turquoise terra cotta accented with deep blue and gold, and the façade develops through recessed window bands, copper spandrels, sunbursts, zigzags, chevrons and stylized botanical and animal forms. A four-sided clock tower carrying illuminated EASTERN lettering crowns the composition, and multicolored terrazzo extends its geometric design onto the surrounding sidewalks. A $30 million conversion completed in 2006 created 140 residences, earning a Los Angeles Conservancy Preservation Award in 2008. The progression moves from vaudeville's purpose-built theatrical grandeur through the independent film industry's Broadway flagship and culminates in a retail headquarters whose architecture turned commercial ambition into one of Downtown's most distinctive Art Deco compositions.
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