Flower Street, Los Angeles

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

Flower Street is a consequential corridor where the Financial District's vertical character meets nineteenth-century citymaking, the erased slopes of Bunker Hill and a transportation axis that has repeatedly changed with Downtown itself.

Running through the Financial District between Bunker Hill and South Park, the southbound corridor follows a long central-city line from the reconfigured streets below 1st Street across 3rd Street, 5th Street, Wilshire Boulevard, 7th Street and Olympic Boulevard before continuing toward the southern edge of Downtown. Along its northern reaches, Flower bends through the lower face of Bunker Hill, where retaining walls, elevated connections and abrupt grade changes preserve the physical consequences of a hillside substantially reshaped during the twentieth century. Between Fourth and Seventh streets, the corridor enters a deep metropolitan canyon of office towers whose broad podiums and plazas occupy parcels far larger than the residential lots that once climbed the hill, creating sharp transitions between street level and the skyline above. South of 7th Street, the blocks lengthen and the architectural grain changes again as towers, older commercial buildings and transportation infrastructure carry Flower toward the flatter basin surrounding South Park. The result is a corridor whose curves, grades, tower walls and changing block scale compress the physical transformation of Downtown into a remarkably legible north-south passage.

What you should know about Flower Street.

Flower Street is best known for preserving one of the oldest street names in Los Angeles despite the near-total reconstruction of its northern geography. The Flower name appeared on the 1849 map prepared by Edward Otho Cresap Ord and William Rich Hutton, placing it within the street system laid out as the former Mexican pueblo entered the American period. The roadway itself remained largely undeveloped for another two decades, and its name became associated with the flower-covered hills rising west of the early town. Those hills subsequently became Bunker Hill, where affluent Angelenos erected elaborate houses during the late nineteenth century as the residential city expanded beyond the older plaza and commercial core. By the middle twentieth century, many of the large houses along and above Flower had been divided into apartments and rooming houses, leaving the street threaded through a dense residential hillside of Victorian-era buildings. The physical order began disappearing during the 1960s as blocks were cleared and the hill was cut into larger development parcels. Cinnabar Street, which had descended between Hope and Flower near 2nd Street, vanished during that reconstruction. Flower itself lost its continuous historic alignment through the northern hill, eventually curving at 3rd Street and joining Hope Street near 2nd Street. Bunker Hill Towers, completed between 1966 and 1968 for $60 million, became one of the earliest major residential complexes of the replacement district, placing three modern towers on ground formerly divided among much smaller hillside properties. The altered roadway consequently preserves an 1849 name across terrain whose original street pattern, elevation and building fabric were almost entirely rewritten during the following century.

Rail transportation created a second reinvention farther south when Los Angeles returned passenger trains to its central streets after a 27-year absence. The Metro Blue Line began service between Los Angeles and Long Beach on July 14, 1990, restoring urban rail to the region for the first time since 1963. Its Downtown approach placed tracks directly along Flower before sending trains into a short tunnel beneath the Financial District. The northern terminus reached 7th Street/Metro Center in February 1991, completing the original 22-mile line and placing an underground station beneath the blocks surrounding Seventh and Flower. A second lower level had already been incorporated for the heavy-rail subway, which arrived when the Red Line began operating in 1993. Another transportation layer appeared in 2012 when the Expo Line began carrying passengers from the same Downtown terminus toward Culver City, eventually reaching Santa Monica in 2016 and sharing the Flower Street tracks with Blue Line trains. The Regional Connector opened in 2023 and eliminated the former Downtown terminus by linking these light-rail routes through new tunnels to the north and east. Flower Street moved from the western edge of the nineteenth-century city to a surface and subterranean rail spine carrying multiple generations of Los Angeles metropolitan transportation.

How to fold Flower Street into your trip.

Flower Street works as the anchor for an outing connecting John Portman's futuristic hotel architecture, Robert D. Farquhar's grand clubhouse and an arts building shaped by several major Los Angeles designers and craftsmen.

Begin at Westin Bonaventure Hotel and Suites, completed in 1976 as John Portman brought the atrium-hotel concept that had made his Atlanta projects internationally influential to Downtown. Four mirrored cylindrical towers surround a taller central tower above a six-story concrete base, creating one of the most recognizable compositions of the city's Late Modern period. Exterior glass elevators climb the building from a seven-story atrium whose circular concrete forms and elevated walkways extend Portman's architecture vertically through the interior. Pedestrian bridges connected the hotel directly with surrounding buildings, making the complex a particularly ambitious expression of the era's separation of pedestrians from street traffic. Its immense scale quickly carried the Bonaventure beyond hospitality into popular culture, where the building became a recurring film and television location. Continue to The California Club, which moved to Flower Street after purchasing its new site during the late 1920s. Robert D. Farquhar designed the Italian Renaissance Revival clubhouse, formally completed on August 25, 1930 after a construction campaign costing about $3.3 million. The new building was five times larger than the club's previous Fifth and Hill home and presented 108 feet of frontage on both Flower and Hope streets. Farquhar organized the building with setbacks, a tower and a secluded forecourt that distinguished it from the increasingly vertical business district surrounding the property. American landscape paintings became another important component of the clubhouse, with works associated with J. Bond Francisco, Elmer Wachtel, Franz A. Bischoff, William Wendt and Paul Lauritz. The building became one of Farquhar's principal Los Angeles commissions and received an American Institute of Architects Distinguished Honor Award. Conclude at Fine Arts Building, opened near Seventh and Flower on December 8, 1926 before more than 27,000 people. Albert R. Walker and Percy A. Eisen designed the 12-story Romanesque Revival building specifically around artists, workshops and galleries during the extraordinary commercial expansion of 7th Street. Sculptor Burt Johnson created grand figures representing Architecture and Sculpture for the facade despite severe heart problems that required him to work from a wheelchair; assistants hoisted him up the exterior so he could continue the commission. Ernest Batchelder supplied the richly patterned tilework inside, and Anthony Heinsbergen contributed a mural to an interior conceived with the same artistic ambition as the exterior. The original artists' building concept proved short-lived, yet the structure survived and underwent restoration during the 1980s. The progression moves from Portman's Late Modern experiment through Farquhar's interwar clubhouse and culminates in Walker and Eisen's purpose-built center for artists, connecting three radically different architectural ambitions along Flower Street.

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