Why Grand Avenue matters.
Grand Avenue is a storied corridor where Bunker Hill's cultural character meets Victorian-era residential ambition, midcentury metropolitan reinvention and an elevated spine whose architecture charts successive visions for Downtown.
Running through Bunker Hill between the Civic Center and the Financial District, the southbound corridor follows the crest of Downtown from Temple Street across 1st Street, 2nd Street, 3rd Street, 5th Street and 7th Street before descending through South Park toward Washington Boulevard. At its northern approach, Grand occupies one of Downtown's highest terraces, where the freeway trench and Civic Center open broad views eastward before large cultural buildings begin defining the avenue with freestanding forms, deep setbacks and expansive plazas. Between First and Fourth streets, the historic hill has been recut into immense development parcels whose towers, podiums, elevated walkways and abrupt grade changes replace the fine residential blocks that once climbed its slopes, leaving Grand suspended above parallel streets to the east and west. South of 5th Street, the avenue descends into the Financial District and progressively flatter terrain, where corporate towers yield to older commercial buildings, converted industrial properties and the tighter street walls of South Park. The result is a corridor whose elevation, changing parcel scale and succession of architectural eras make the repeated reconstruction of Central Los Angeles physically legible across a single north-south line.
What defines Grand Avenue.
Grand Avenue is best known for carrying an 1887 name across a street whose social character changed almost beyond recognition during the following century. Edward Otho Cresap Ord and William Rich Hutton placed the route on their 1849 Los Angeles map as Charity Street, although the roadway existed only on paper until a block between Fifth and Sixth streets opened in 1869. Development accelerated after Prudent Beaudry acquired substantial Bunker Hill acreage during the 1860s and 1870s and promoted the elevated district for affluent residential construction. Large Victorian houses and hotels subsequently climbed the hill, including the residence at 130 South Grand that became the Melrose Hotel and later expanded with a four-story annex. Residents petitioned for a less awkward street name as the neighborhood gained prestige, and the City Council voted in May 1886 to replace Charity Street with Grand Avenue, with the change finalized in 1887. Bunker Hill's wealthy population began moving west during the opening decades of the twentieth century, and many former mansions became apartments, rooming houses and inexpensive hotels. By the 1920s and 1930s, Grand passed through a densely inhabited working-class district populated by Angelenos arriving from Mexico, Europe, the Midwest and other regions. The Melrose itself became home during the 1920s to labor lawyer and former Socialist mayoral candidate Job Harriman and his wife, illustrating the altered life of buildings originally created for nineteenth-century elites. Grand Avenue consequently survived as the geographic spine of Bunker Hill even as the hill shifted from an exclusive residential quarter into one of Central Los Angeles's densest communities.
The physical destruction of that neighborhood produced a second Grand Avenue whose scale and architectural ambitions bore little resemblance to the street that preceded it. Bunker Hill became the focus of a 136-acre redevelopment campaign adopted in 1959, initiating clearance that removed thousands of residential units and substantially altered the hill itself. Earthmoving lowered and reshaped portions of the terrain, erased smaller streets and consolidated the former residential blocks into superblocks suited to towers and institutional buildings. Union Bank Square, completed in 1968, placed a 42-story tower by Albert C. Martin and Associates above a plaza designed by Garrett Eckbo, establishing an early architectural model for the reconstructed hill. Wells Fargo Center followed during the 1980s with two towers designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, extending the corporate skyline northward along Grand. California Plaza introduced another immense complex beginning in the 1980s, with Arthur Erickson designing One California Plaza and Two California Plaza as part of a development that combined office towers with terraced public spaces across the steep hillside. Two California Plaza reached 750 feet when completed in 1992, giving the reconstructed district one of its dominant vertical forms. Across three decades, the former residential avenue became a landscape of corporate towers, grand plazas and engineered terraces, preserving Grand's position on Bunker Hill even as nearly every physical condition surrounding the street was replaced.
How Grand Avenue fits.
Grand Avenue works as the anchor for an outing connecting a Spanish architect's twenty-first-century cathedral, a performing-arts institution transformed by Richard D. Colburn's philanthropy and a medical center whose roots reach into nineteenth-century Los Angeles.
Begin at Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, conceived after the 1994 Northridge earthquake damaged St. Vibiana's Cathedral and intensified the search for a new home for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Cardinal Roger Mahony selected Spanish architect Rafael Moneo after a design process involving several internationally prominent architects. The Archdiocese purchased the 5.6-acre Grand Avenue and Temple Street property from Los Angeles County for $10.85 million in 1996, giving Moneo an elevated site overlooking the freeway and Civic Center. His completed cathedral uses massive concrete walls, an unconventional circulation sequence and translucent Spanish alabaster windows to reinterpret historic cathedral architecture through contemporary construction. The 63,000-square-foot building seats 3,000 people, with a nave extending one foot beyond the length of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan. Dedication followed on September 2, 2002, completing the first major American cathedral built in three decades. Continue to Colburn School, whose origins reach to a preparatory division established by the USC Thornton School of Music in 1950. Richard D. Colburn's support helped the institution become independent during the 1980s, and its expanding programs soon exceeded the capacity of its earlier USC-area home. The organization secured its Grand Avenue property in 1994 after considering a broad architectural field, selecting Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates with Norman Pfeiffer leading the design. Groundbreaking followed in 1996, and the school moved to 200 South Grand Avenue on June 30, 1998. The $28 million complex included a chamber-music hall and incorporated Jascha Heifetz's historic studio, which had been dismantled from the violinist's Beverly Hills property and reconstructed within the new building. Richard Colburn subsequently pledged $165 million toward a conservatory, and its first official class entered in 2003. Conclude at California Hospital Medical Center, founded in 1887 by physician Walter Lindley when Los Angeles contained 80,000 residents. Lindley gathered 21 physicians who each contributed $1,000 toward a new institution, producing a physician-owned hospital that moved to South Hope Street in 1898. The 30-bed complex occupied a four-story, wood-framed building with gables, corner cupolas and landscaped grounds, then expanded as the institution's medical work grew. Architect John C. Austin contributed subsequent buildings to the developing campus, connecting the hospital with a practitioner who later shaped major civic architecture throughout Los Angeles. The institution passed to the Sisters of Mercy in 1921, beginning a long new phase of stewardship at the site near Grand Avenue and Venice Boulevard. The progression moves from Moneo's contemporary cathedral through Colburn's philanthropic investment in advanced musical training and culminates in Lindley's physician-founded medical institution, connecting religious architecture, performing-arts education and nineteenth-century medicine along Grand Avenue.
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