Historic Core, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Historic Core in Los Angeles, California.

Historic Core is a foundational enclave where Downtown's metropolitan character meets the city's first vertical commercial expansion, dense prewar streetscapes and an extraordinary concentration of early twentieth-century architecture.

Positioned between Civic Center, Bunker Hill, and the Fashion District, the neighborhood occupies the central spine of Downtown, where closely spaced north-south corridors extend through a compact grid between the governmental center and the commercial districts farther south. Masonry office blocks, narrow storefronts, ornate upper stories and closely aligned cornices create continuous street walls whose scale remains strikingly consistent despite dramatic stylistic changes from one building to the next. Broadway supplies the primary encounter through long blocks where dense retail frontage and elaborate façades preserve the physical intensity of Downtown's early commercial expansion. Main Street creates a secondary passage through narrower blocks of hotels, loft buildings and former commercial properties, giving the eastern side a more compressed relationship between architecture and street. The result is a neighborhood whose extraordinary continuity of prewar buildings makes the rise of metropolitan Los Angeles physically legible across a few intensely built streets.

What you should know about Historic Core.

Historic Core is best known for preserving the commercial architecture created as Los Angeles's business center shifted south from the old pueblo and developed into the dominant retail and entertainment district of the rapidly expanding city. Southern Pacific's arrival in 1876 connected Southern California with the transcontinental rail network, accelerating population growth and real-estate investment across the following decades. Los Angeles doubled its population between 1880 and 1890 and again between 1890 and 1900, pushing commercial development south from the older concentration around Main, Spring and Temple streets. John Parkinson arrived in Los Angeles in 1894 and opened his architectural practice on Spring Street, subsequently designing the 1897 Homer Laughlin Building, the city's first Class A steel-frame commercial building. His 1902 Braly Block carried vertical construction farther and became an early Los Angeles skyscraper as rising land values encouraged increasingly substantial downtown buildings. Broadway emerged as the principal shopping corridor after Hamburger's opened its immense department store at 8th Street in 1905, drawing additional retailers, hotels and commercial construction southward. Nickelodeons and vaudeville houses arrived 1910, followed by Sid Grauman's 2,345-seat Million Dollar Theatre in 1918 and a succession of increasingly elaborate entertainment buildings during the 1920s. Spring Street simultaneously concentrated banks and financial institutions inside imposing Beaux-Arts office buildings, creating a second major architectural corridor only one block east. The Broadway Theatre and Commercial District and Spring Street Financial District preserve these parallel histories within the Historic Core, binding retailing, entertainment, finance and early skyscraper construction into the surviving fabric of metropolitan Los Angeles.

Financial migration toward Bunker Hill after World War II initiated a radically different chapter for the older commercial center as major institutions left Spring Street for new corporate towers. Repeal of Los Angeles's 150-foot building-height restriction in 1957 accelerated high-rise construction elsewhere Downtown, and Union Bank Plaza became the first new tower to surpass City Hall in 1966. Successive financial institutions followed the movement west, leaving numerous older Historic Core buildings substantially empty above their ground floors by the 1970s. Vacancies and demolition weakened sections of the district, yet the surviving concentration of commercial buildings eventually supplied the physical basis for another residential era. Developer Tom Gilmore acquired four abandoned buildings in the Old Bank District during the closing 1990s and converted them into loft residences, placing previously dormant commercial structures back into sustained use. The Continental Building, San Fernando Building, Hellman Building and Farmers and Merchants Bank formed the nucleus of that undertaking, and by 2005 the four-building cluster had moved from near vacancy to full occupancy. Similar conversions spread through Downtown during the opening twenty-first century, turning former banks, offices and commercial properties into housing without erasing the dense architectural scale inherited from the prewar business center. The Historic Core consequently survived the movement of corporate Los Angeles away from its streets and entered the twenty-first century through the reuse of the same building stock created during its first metropolitan ascent.

How to fold Historic Core into your trip.

Historic Core works as the anchor for an outing connecting the library whose preservation galvanized a citywide architectural movement, a contemporary museum built around one of America's major postwar art collections and a Japanese American institution occupying a former Buddhist temple in Little Tokyo.

Begin at Los Angeles Central Library, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue's final major work, completed in 1926 with a pyramidal tower and architectural references extending across Egyptian, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic and Spanish Colonial traditions. Threats to demolish or severely alter the building beginning in the late 1960s helped spur the creation of the Los Angeles Conservancy in 1978, whose campaign to protect the library became the organization's first major victory. Renovation reopened the complex in 1989 with an expanded East Wing and restored West Lawn, preserving the historic building as Downtown's surrounding high-rise district continued changing dramatically. Continue to The Broad, founded by Eli and Edythe Broad and opened on Grand Avenue in September 2015 inside a 120,000-square-foot building by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler. The architects organized the museum around a “veil and vault” concept, wrapping the collection-storage core inside a porous exterior envelope and placing two floors of galleries around it. More than 2,000 postwar and contemporary works belong to the Broad collection, including substantial holdings connected with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jasper Johns, Barbara Kruger, Kerry James Marshall, Takashi Murakami, Cindy Sherman and Kara Walker, extending Downtown's cultural geography through an institution created specifically around art from the second half of the twentieth century onward. Conclude at Japanese American National Museum, incorporated in 1985 through the efforts of Japanese American World War II veterans and Little Tokyo business leaders before opening in 1992 inside the former Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple. The 1925 building had occupied a consequential position in Little Tokyo community life before the temple moved during the late 1960s, and its later structural reinforcement helped the brick walls withstand the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Gyo Obata of HOK designed the adjacent Pavilion, opened in 1999 as an 85,000-square-foot expansion that greatly enlarged exhibition and collection capacity. JANM received the National Medal for Museum and Library Service in 2010, extending an institution created by local community leaders into a nationally recognized center for Japanese American history. The progression moves from the preservation campaign surrounding Goodhue's civic architecture through a twenty-first-century contemporary art museum and culminates at an institution joining Japanese American community history with the physical fabric of Little Tokyo, connecting three distinct forms of cultural stewardship around the Historic Core.

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