Why Chick Hearn Court matters.
Chick Hearn Court is a ceremonial corridor where South Park's entertainment character meets a former numbered Downtown street recast around professional sports, public performance and the broadcasting legacy of the Los Angeles Lakers.
Running through South Park between the Financial District and University Park, the compact central-city corridor follows the former West 11th Street alignment from Figueroa Street west toward Georgia Street and L.A. Live Way within the dense blocks between Olympic Boulevard and Pico Boulevard. Its short length and exceptional width create a broad east-west opening through a district otherwise dominated by large building footprints and heavily trafficked north-south arteries. High-rise hotels, residential towers and large entertainment structures rise immediately around the route, producing a compressed urban scale far removed from the lower commercial blocks that historically characterized southern Downtown. Recent reconstruction has removed vehicular movement from the principal block and extended the ground plane across the former curbs beneath rows of palms and tall digital structures. The result is a corridor whose transformation from West 11th Street into a pedestrianized civic threshold concentrates the physical remaking of South Park into Los Angeles's principal contemporary sports and entertainment district.
What defines Chick Hearn Court.
Chick Hearn Court is best known for commemorating Francis Dayle “Chick” Hearn, whose Lakers broadcasting career became inseparable from professional basketball in Los Angeles. Hearn joined the Lakers broadcast team in 1961, one year after the franchise relocated from Minneapolis, and developed a rapid play-by-play delivery that became known as his “word's-eye view.” On November 21, 1965, he began a sequence of 3,338 consecutive Lakers broadcasts that continued until December 16, 2001, spanning more than 36 years. His tenure covered the Jerry West and Wilt Chamberlain years, the 1971-72 championship team, the Showtime era led by Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the opening championship run of Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal. Hearn helped place expressions including “slam dunk,” “air ball,” “charity stripe,” “finger roll” and “garbage time” into basketball's popular language. The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame honored him with the Curt Gowdy Media Award in 1991, and the American Sportscasters Association inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 1995. His consecutive-game streak ended after cardiac bypass surgery, yet he returned during the 2001-02 season and called his final game as the Lakers completed a sweep of the New Jersey Nets for their third consecutive NBA championship. Hearn died on August 5, 2002. Councilman Nick Pacheco subsequently organized a public naming campaign for the portion of West 11th Street beside the Lakers' home arena, with more than 2,000 participants casting votes among several proposed tributes. Chick Hearn Court led the ballot and became the official name later that year, attaching the broadcaster's legacy to the street immediately outside the building where he had called the final seasons of a career spanning more than four decades.
The street itself entered another chapter as plans emerged to eliminate automobile traffic and join the public areas on its north and south sides into a continuous pedestrian precinct. Los Angeles had incorporated the block into the Sports and Entertainment District as a public gathering area, permitting event activity during periods when traffic was restricted. City Council action in 2019 initiated changes to its street designation in preparation for permanent closure, followed by approval of the vacation between Figueroa and Georgia streets in November 2022. A revocable permit authorized construction activity during completion of the remaining conditions, allowing the former roadway to become part of a broader nine-figure redevelopment campaign surrounding the adjoining arena. Construction began during 2024, and the reconstructed plaza reached completion in 2025 with curbs and automobile lanes replaced by an uninterrupted pedestrian surface. Poon Design developed ten sculptural media towers for the project, with three reaching 58 feet and seven reaching 37 feet. Six curved digital screens measuring 13 by 23 feet occupy the taller structures, with RELM Studio responsible for landscape architecture and engineering contributions from KPFF and John A. Martin & Associates. Los Angeles continued formalizing the property arrangement in 2026 through a proposed ground lease carrying annual rent of $185,000 with 2.5 percent yearly increases through the arena lease expiration in 2053. The conversion turned a commemoratively renamed fragment of the Downtown street grid into a purpose-built public precinct, giving Hearn's name a permanent spatial presence within the sports district his broadcasting career helped define.
How Chick Hearn Court fits.
Chick Hearn Court works as the anchor for an outing connecting five decades of convention architecture, a purpose-built theater created during South Park's twenty-first-century redevelopment and a museum devoted to the craft and history of recorded music.
Begin at Los Angeles Convention Center, whose original Charles Luckman-designed complex opened on July 11, 1971 after construction began across 35 cleared acres in 1969. The first building contained a 210,000-square-foot exhibition hall and 21,000-square-foot special-events hall, followed by a 99,500-square-foot North Hall addition in 1981. A tornado tore away one-third of the West Hall roof in March 1983, yet repairs proceeded with no event cancellations. James Ingo Freed of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners and Gruen Associates subsequently designed the immense 1993 expansion, carrying the complex across Pico Boulevard with 347,000 additional square feet of exhibition space. The $301.5 million project increased net exhibition and meeting space from 273,000 to 706,000 square feet and incorporated works by Alexis Smith and Matt Mullican through an architectural art program. Continue to Peacock Theater, completed in 2007 as a 235,000-square-foot performance venue designed by ELS Architecture with structural engineering by John A. Martin & Associates and construction by Clark Construction. The 7,100-seat auditorium opened that October with six sold-out performances by the Eagles and The Chicks, beginning an entertainment history spanning concerts, televised productions and major award ceremonies. Its stage and seating configuration place the farthest seat 220 feet from the performance area, creating a mid-sized house capable of accommodating productions far larger than conventional theaters. Pollstar recognized the building as Theatre of the Year in 2008. The venue began as Nokia Theatre, became Microsoft Theater in 2015 and adopted the Peacock Theater name in 2023, preserving the same auditorium through successive naming partnerships. Conclude at GRAMMY Museum, which opened on December 6, 2008 at the end of GRAMMY nominations week as a 30,000-square-foot institution devoted to recorded music and the history of the GRAMMY Awards. Four floors were developed around the creative and technical processes behind recording, with the Recording Academy's Producers & Engineers Wing contributing expertise to installations examining production, engineering and changing recording technologies. Early components included The Other Side of the Glass, Revolutions of Recorded Sound and From Mono to Surround, linking musical history with the technical work behind recorded performance. The Los Angeles institution subsequently became the foundation for an expanded museum network, with a Mississippi location and Nashville gallery following during the next decade. The progression moves from Luckman and Freed's successive generations of convention architecture through ELS Architecture's large performance hall and culminates in an institution devoted to the people, technologies and creative work behind recorded music, compressing civic assembly, live performance and music history into the blocks surrounding Chick Hearn Court.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Enjoy editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
Foresyte may earn a commission when you book.
