Why Cooper Design Space matters.
Cooper Design Space is a storied creative building where Fashion District's garment-industry heritage meets historic manufacturing architecture, contemporary showrooms and generations of Los Angeles fashion enterprise.
Set along South Los Angeles Street near East 9th Street and just steps from Santee Alley, the 11-story building occupies a prominent corner amid dense blocks of wholesale businesses, apparel production spaces and street-level commerce. Broad industrial windows, high ceilings and substantial concrete construction retain the physical proportions required by early twentieth-century clothing production across a structure exceeding 350,000 square feet. Moving through its interior brings freight-scale circulation, open floor plates and showroom suites into close succession, revealing how manufacturing architecture has been adapted to accommodate designers, sales representatives and creative firms. Tiled corridors, exposed structural surfaces and upper-floor views add a second physical dimension, preserving the building's industrial scale even where individual spaces have acquired highly individualized interiors. The result is a century-old garment building whose architecture still supports the design and wholesale activity that first concentrated around this section of Downtown.
What defines Cooper Design Space.
Cooper Design Space is best known for occupying the Cooper Building, constructed in 1924 for the Milton G. Cooper Dry Goods Company during the rapid expansion of Los Angeles apparel manufacturing. Milton G. Cooper had spent two decades in wholesale commerce before closing out his stock in 1928 and opening a department store inside the building, turning an industrial property into the district's first multilevel retail building. Fashion businesses subsequently pushed the property toward another role, and it developed into a leading address for industry showrooms during the 1940s and 1950s, decades before the surrounding district acquired its present name. Southern California sportswear expanded sharply during the late 1960s as casual clothing and swimsuit companies drew designers and manufacturers toward Los Angeles, reinforcing the building's connection to an apparel economy increasingly distinct from older East Coast fashion centers. Stanley and Anita Hirsh acquired the property during the 1970s and converted it into an outlet mall, placing the Cooper Building among the early American properties organized around concentrated discount retail. The Hirsh family later redirected the structure toward design, showroom and creative-office uses under the Cooper Design Space name, extending its commercial lineage without severing its original relationship to clothing production and sales. More than 500 premium fashion brands and creative professionals now maintain a presence within the property, giving a 1924 garment factory an active role in the industry a century after its construction.
Stanley Hirsh's work beyond the building connected the property to a consequential reorganization of the surrounding garment economy during the closing decades of the twentieth century. Los Angeles Street between Third and Eleventh Streets contained 2,000 garment manufacturers by 1972, yet the manufacturing concentration remained little known outside the trade and lacked the coordinated district structure that later shaped its public profile. Hirsh worked with Los Angeles City Council on creation of the city's first Business Improvement District, bringing property owners into a coordinated organization addressing the commercial environment around the apparel industry. The neighborhood was renamed the Fashion District in 1996, and Hirsh served for several years as chairman of the new BID. Cooper Design Space subsequently developed its own role in the district's buyer calendar, with showroom companies such as Place Showroom, Findings, Agency Showroom and Brand Assembly participating in seasonal market activity. A major lobby remodeling added the Cooper Video Wall in 2009, presenting moving-image work by artists and filmmakers including Shepard Fairey, Michel Gondry, Sage Vaughn and Koichiro Tsujikawa within the building's entrance hall. Its centennial in October 2024 coincided with the district's October Buyer Market, marking one hundred years during which a single property moved through manufacturing, department-store retail, wholesale showrooms, outlet retail and contemporary creative commerce.
How Cooper Design Space fits.
Cooper Design Space works as the anchor for a tightly focused exploration of Los Angeles fashion history through postwar manufacturing architecture, an early apparel high-rise and the wholesale complex that shifted the West Coast industry toward unprecedented scale.
Begin at Gerry Building, completed in 1947 as one of Downtown's first major commercial buildings constructed after World War II. Maurice H. Fleischman and Herbert O. Alden designed the nine-story structure for Gerry Realty Corporation in the Late Moderne style, using eight curved tiers of horizontal windows, rounded corners and similarly curved ground-floor display windows to give an industrial garment building an unusually expressive street façade. Apparel manufacturing and fashion showrooms have occupied the property continuously since completion, making its postwar architecture inseparable from the industry it was built to house. Architectural significance brought Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument designation and placement on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003, preserving an uncommon Downtown example of Late Moderne industrial design. Continue to The New Mart, completed in 1926 as the Harris Newmark Building and designed by Curlett & Beelman in memory of merchant and philanthropist Harris Newmark. The 12-story, 160-foot structure originally combined retail stores, offices and apparel manufacturing, and Manufacturers Bank operated there to serve businesses concentrated in the surrounding trade. Ben Eisenberg purchased the property in 1980 and began converting its manufacturing floors into wholesale apparel showrooms, renaming it The New Mart with Joyce Eisenberg in 1983. By 1987 the conversion was complete; later restoration exposed ornate ceiling moldings, applied gold-leaf accents and recreated the original bronze entrance canopy from surviving blueprints. More than 100 wholesale showrooms representing hundreds of brands now continue the commercial model Eisenberg developed. Conclude at California Market Center, created by the Morse family in 1963 as the first wholesale fashion marketplace west of the Mississippi and subsequently expanded into three towers occupying an entire city block. Its first 13-story tower opened that year, a second followed in 1966 and later construction expanded a complex that eventually contained more than 1.8 million square feet. At its peak, more than 1,000 active showrooms operated inside and 30 annual events drew fashion businesses and buyers from around the world. Brookfield Properties acquired the complex in 2017 and undertook a $250 million redevelopment before its 2021 relaunch, dividing the property between creative offices, studios, fashion showrooms and large-scale industry events. The progression moves from a postwar factory shaped around apparel production through an interwar high-rise converted entirely to wholesale commerce and culminates in the enormous marketplace that consolidated Los Angeles fashion trade at metropolitan scale.
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