Figueroa Street, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Figueroa Street in Los Angeles, California.

Figueroa Street is a storied corridor where Highland Park's Arroyo Seco character meets nineteenth-century subdivision, electric railway expansion and one of Northeast Los Angeles's most intact prewar commercial spines.

Running through Highland Park between Mount Washington and Garvanza, the north-south corridor follows the Arroyo Seco valley from the lower reaches near Avenue 43 across Avenue 50, Avenue 54, Avenue 57 and Avenue 60 before continuing toward South Pasadena. Along its southern approach, the roadway occupies a relatively narrow shelf between the Arroyo Seco and the rising slopes of Mount Washington, with long sightlines repeatedly compressed by hills, bridges and the curving valley. Near Avenue 50, the street enters a denser urban grain where early houses give way to attached storefronts, two-story business blocks and closely spaced cross streets that reveal the district's transition from residential suburb to neighborhood center. North of Avenue 54, continuous commercial frontage strengthens around Avenue 56 and Avenue 57 before the street begins opening toward Garvanza, where older residential parcels and foothill terrain again become more prominent. The result is a corridor whose shifting width, architectural scale and relationship with the Arroyo Seco make more than a century of Highland Park's physical growth visible within a remarkably concentrated distance.

What you should know about Figueroa Street.

Figueroa Street is best known for becoming Highland Park's principal commercial artery after electric transportation reorganized settlement through the Arroyo Seco. The roadway was originally Pasadena Avenue through this section, connecting communities developing between Los Angeles and Pasadena during the late nineteenth century. Highland Park itself emerged from subdivisions created during the 1880s, and two major rail connections arriving in 1886 accelerated its conversion into a residential suburb. Los Angeles annexed the community in 1895 as residents sought municipal water, police protection and other city services. Electric cars subsequently made Pasadena Avenue a major neighborhood transportation route, with rails occupying the commercial street by the opening years of the twentieth century. A 1906 image shows tracks, overhead wires, streetcars and low business buildings already defining the avenue. Single-story shops and two-story blocks multiplied beside the line, with professional offices commonly occupying upper floors above street-level businesses. Construction intensified during the 1920s as Highland Park's population and purchasing power expanded, producing much of the brick commercial fabric still concentrated between Avenues 55 and 60. The Highland Park Masonic Temple rose at Avenue 56 in 1923, and architect Elmore R. Jeffery combined ground-floor retail with lodge rooms and offices in an Italian Renaissance Revival building that demonstrated the growing value of the intersection. Pasadena Avenue eventually became North Figueroa Street, joining Highland Park's commercial spine to the much longer roadway extending through central and southern Los Angeles. Streetcar removal during the middle twentieth century weakened the transportation structure that had generated the business district, yet the surviving storefront scale preserves the close relationship between rail travel and neighborhood commerce that shaped the avenue's formative decades.

A radically different cultural chapter developed along the same blocks during the 1970s as Chicano artists established alternative institutions in Highland Park. Mechicano Art Center had been founded in 1969 by figures including Leonard Castellanos and Victor Franco to create exhibition and working opportunities for Chicano artists excluded from established galleries. After operating on Whittier Boulevard, the organization moved in 1975 to a 1922 Krempel and Erkes commercial building at Figueroa Street and Avenue 54. Director Joe Rodriguez organized exhibitions there, Sonya Fe led a silkscreen workshop beginning in 1976 and the center continued mural work at Ramona Gardens. Exhibitions included an Asco presentation and a Chicana exhibition featuring Judithe Hernández, Sonya Fe and Isabel Castro, followed by solo presentations involving artists such as Linda Vallejo and Roberto Chavez. A November 1977 Día de los Muertos exhibition included Carlos Almaraz, Leo Limón, Harry Gamboa and John Valadez before the center closed in 1978. Nearby, Centro de Arte Público occupied the second floor of another Figueroa building during the same period, with Carlos Almaraz, Guillermo Bejarano and Richard Duardo among the figures connected with its formation. The concentration placed painting, printmaking, exhibitions and community art activity directly inside Highland Park's older commercial buildings, giving the avenue a consequential role in Los Angeles Chicano art history decades after its streetcar economy had declined.

How to fold Figueroa Street into your trip.

Figueroa Street works as the anchor for an outing connecting Los Angeles's first museum, a Parkinson-designed bank from Highland Park's commercial expansion and the city's oldest operating bowling alley.

Begin at Southwest Museum, created through Charles Fletcher Lummis's campaign to build a major institution devoted to the Indigenous cultures and archaeology of the American Southwest. Lummis established the Southwest Society in 1903 and founded the museum in 1907 before a permanent hilltop home opened in 1914 above the Arroyo Seco. Sumner Hunt and Silas Burns designed the Mission Revival building, whose elevated site made the institution a commanding presence above the transportation corridor below. The museum developed one of the country's important collections of Native American cultural objects, archaeological holdings and related historical resources. Its institutional history expanded again in 2003 when it merged with the Autry, which assumed responsibility for the collections and campus. The property also includes the 1917 Casa de Adobe, constructed as a representation of an early California rancho dwelling. Continue to Security Trust and Savings Bank Building at 5601 North Figueroa Street, completed in 1922 as a Highland Park branch of the expanding financial institution. John and Donald B. Parkinson designed the Classical Revival building during the early years of their father-and-son partnership. The commission became an early example of their branch-banking approach, in which related architectural designs gave multiple locations a recognizable institutional presence. Security Trust later became Security First National Bank and subsequently Security Pacific National Bank before the branch closed following the latter institution's merger with Bank of America. Los Angeles designated the building a Historic-Cultural Monument in 1993, preserving an architectural marker of the period when banking, theaters, retail and professional offices were concentrating around Avenue 56. Conclude at Highland Park Bowl, established in 1927 inside a building that combined eight bowling lanes with a pharmacy, music store and upstairs doctors' offices during Prohibition. Patrons obtained prescriptions for medicinal whiskey upstairs and filled them at the pharmacy below, tying the recreational business to one of the period's unusual legal routes to alcohol. A live-music permit followed in 1933. Italian immigrant Joseph Teresa acquired the property in 1966 and renamed it Mr. T's Bowl, eventually developing the building into a music venue as bowling receded from its central role. The 1933 Group took control decades later, uncovered original architectural features concealed by successive alterations, refurbished the eight lanes and reopened Highland Park Bowl in 2016. The progression moves from Lummis's hilltop institution through the Parkinsons' architecture for branch banking and culminates in a Prohibition-era bowling complex recovered after decades of alteration, connecting museum building, metropolitan finance and popular recreation along Figueroa Street.

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