Why you should experience Financial District in Los Angeles, California.
Financial District is a vertical enclave where Downtown's commercial intensity meets early twentieth-century retail blocks, corporate skyscrapers and a concentrated office landscape that shifted the city's business center west from its historic core.
Positioned between Bunker Hill, Historic Core, and South Park, the neighborhood occupies the western side of Downtown's central grid, where comparatively level blocks around 7th Street rise toward the elevated terrain adjoining Grand Avenue and the former Bunker Hill escarpment. Beaux Arts commercial buildings, interwar office towers and reflective postwar skyscrapers create pronounced changes in scale, with masonry street walls repeatedly giving way to towers elevated above plazas and broad podiums. 7th Street supplies the primary encounter through a dense east-west corridor whose closely spaced storefronts and substantial upper floors preserve the proportions of the commercial center that developed there during the opening decades of the twentieth century. Figueroa Street creates a secondary passage through the western edge, where broad blocks, corporate towers and elevated pedestrian connections reveal the larger building footprints introduced during Downtown's postwar high-rise expansion. The result is a neighborhood whose compressed architectural sequence makes the westward movement of Los Angeles commerce legible across successive generations of retail buildings, office blocks and corporate towers.
What you should know about Financial District.
Financial District is best known for emerging from 7th Street's transformation into Downtown's premier early twentieth-century shopping corridor before corporate finance redirected the area toward high-rise offices. Agricultural ground and detached houses occupied much of the territory during the nineteenth century, with substantial commercial construction reaching 7th Street only after Downtown began expanding south and west from the Plaza. The eight-story Lankershim Hotel opened at Seventh and Broadway in 1905, followed by John Bullock's department store across the intersection in 1906, establishing major commercial anchors at what had recently been the edge of central development. J. W. Robinson pushed the retail district farther west in 1915 by opening a seven-story flagship between Grand and Hope streets, occupying 392,000 square feet on ground previously regarded as remote from the established shopping center. Ville de Paris, Coulter Dry Goods Company, Brock and Company and numerous specialty merchants followed the westward movement, converting Seventh into an upscale commercial corridor. Developer John C. Brockman reinforced the shift with the twelve-story Brockman Building, whose elaborate multicolored terra cotta and copper cornice marked Seventh and Grand with one of the street's most ambitious commercial structures. Thirteen large office buildings opened along Seventh between 1920 and 1928, and development occupied e parcel between Figueroa and Los Angeles streets by 1929. Department stores subsequently expanded into Hollywood, Mid-Wilshire, Westwood and Pasadena, dispersing the exclusive retail concentration that had defined Seventh during its formative decades. The Financial District's underlying street wall consequently predates its corporate skyline, preserving the commercial architecture of the westward migration that first pulled Downtown's center of gravity toward Figueroa Street.
Union Bank Square opened a separate architectural era in 1967, becoming the first high-rise completed through the Bunker Hill redevelopment project and the first building taller than Los Angeles City Hall after repeal of the city's 150-foot height restriction. Harrison & Abramovitz and A. C. Martin and Associates designed the office tower, which rose 40 stories and 516 feet above Figueroa Street, briefly making it the tallest building in Los Angeles. Landscape architect Garrett Eckbo created its three-acre plaza atop a parking structure, arranging trees, lawn islands and pools across an elevated plane that separated much of the complex from the conventional sidewalk street wall. Atlantic Richfield Company pushed the corporate concentration farther south with ARCO Plaza, completed in 1972 as twin 52-story towers housing its world headquarters and Bank of America's Southern California headquarters. The 2.4-million-square-foot complex cost $140 million and placed two immense office towers across the blocks bounded by Fifth, Sixth, Figueroa and Flower streets. Security Pacific National Bank added its 55-story headquarters at 333 South Hope Street during the same generation of construction, concentrating banking and corporate offices west of the older Spring Street banking center. Financial institutions and law firms migrated toward this new cluster during the 1960s and 1970s, transferring the geographic center of Downtown finance into the high-rise corridor surrounding Figueroa, Flower and Hope. The district that had begun as 7th Street's retail expansion consequently became the southern extension of a new corporate skyline, with postwar towers physically marking Los Angeles finance's movement away from the masonry banking blocks of the historic core.
How to fold Financial District into your trip.
Financial District works as the anchor for an outing connecting Bertram Goodhue's final civic commission, an extraordinary repository of French Art Deco craftsmanship and John Portman's immense experiment in vertically organized hotel architecture.
Begin at Richard J. Riordan Central Library, whose Goodhue Building emerged after Los Angeles secured the former State Normal School property and voters approved a $2.5 million bond measure in 1921, with $1.5 million directed toward a new central library. Bertram Goodhue developed a composition of blunt geometric masses around a central tower during the final phase of his career, moving beyond the Spanish Colonial Revival work that had brought him prominence at San Diego's Panama-California Exposition. Goodhue died in April 1924 before construction was complete, leaving longtime associate Carleton Winslow to supervise the project through its 1926 completion. Sculptor Lee Lawrie contributed major decorative work, Julian Garnsey executed painted ceilings and Dean Cornwell's California History murals entered the rotunda in 1933, extending the artistic program beyond the building's opening. Continue to Oviatt Building, completed in 1928 as the headquarters of Alexander & Oviatt, the prestigious menswear business established by James Oviatt and Frank Alexander. Walker & Eisen designed the thirteen-story structure, then Oviatt turned extensively to French decorative arts for interiors that distinguished the building from the Beaux Arts commercial architecture surrounding it. René Lalique supplied molded-glass elevator panels, doors, chandeliers and a large panel clock, Gaëtan Jeannin contributed architectural glass, Napoleon marble arrived from France and an immense illuminated glass cornice transformed the entrance arcade. Oviatt placed his own penthouse above the commercial floors, extending the same commitment to French craftsmanship into a private residence high above Olive Street. Conclude at Westin Bonaventure Hotel and Suites, John Portman & Associates' 1976 Late Modern complex of four mirrored cylinders surrounding a taller central tower. Portman brought the atrium-hotel concept he had developed elsewhere into Downtown through a six-story concrete base supporting the cylindrical towers, a seven-story interior atrium organized around curving walkways and exposed glass elevators that rise through the roof before ascending the exterior. Elevated skybridges linked the hotel with surrounding buildings, extending Portman's vertically organized interior circulation outward across adjoining streets. The building opened during the broader effort to revive the western side of Downtown and became one of the defining architectural products of that redevelopment period. The progression moves from Goodhue's grand civic modernism through Oviatt's imported French decorative craftsmanship and culminates inside Portman's radically vertical hotel, tracing fifty years in which Downtown architecture moved from masonry monumentality toward increasingly autonomous interior worlds.
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