Hope Street, Los Angeles

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

Hope Street is a storied corridor where Downtown's metropolitan character meets nineteenth-century expansion, Bunker Hill's changing topography and a north-south spine linking successive generations of civic, financial and residential growth.

Running through Downtown between the Civic Center and South Park, the southbound corridor follows the western edge of the central business district from Temple Street across 1st Street, 3rd Street, 5th Street, 7th Street, Olympic Boulevard and Pico Boulevard before continuing toward University Park. Near the Civic Center, Hope occupies elevated ground beneath Bunker Hill where broad institutional parcels, freeway infrastructure and steep cross streets create pronounced changes in elevation within only a few blocks. Between Third and Seventh streets, towers rise from large podiums and terraced plazas as the avenue descends from the hill toward the older commercial grid, producing abrupt shifts between elevated pedestrian spaces and the roadway below. South of 7th Street, the topography flattens and the street enters South Park, where increasingly continuous residential towers, surviving early commercial buildings and shorter blocks extend toward the convention district and the older neighborhoods beyond Pico. The result is a corridor whose changing elevation, parcel scale and built form expose the repeated expansion of Central Los Angeles from nineteenth-century street grid through Bunker Hill reconstruction and into the residential growth of South Park.

What you should know about Hope Street.

Hope Street is best known for appearing on Edward Otho Cresap Ord and William Rich Hutton's 1849 plan for Los Angeles before the roadway physically existed across most of its projected course. The Spanish form Calle de las Esperanzas accompanied the early name, although the precise reason for choosing Hope remains unresolved. One tradition connects Hope with nearby Charity Street, later Grand Avenue, as part of a group of virtue-derived names; another associates it with physician Alexander W. Hope, who arrived in Los Angeles in 1848, practiced medicine with John Strother Griffin and became the city's first chief of volunteer police in 1851. The street itself did not substantially materialize until the late 1860s, when Los Angeles began expanding beyond the compact settlement surrounding the Plaza. Hope subsequently climbed the western side of Bunker Hill, where Prudent Beaudry's development campaign during the 1870s helped turn previously marginal elevated land into one of the city's prestigious residential districts. Victorian houses, apartment buildings and hotels eventually lined the surrounding slopes as streetcars and incline railways made the hill increasingly accessible. By the early twentieth century, affluent households were moving west and former houses were being subdivided into inexpensive apartments and rooming houses. Hope remained threaded through that increasingly dense community until midcentury clearance removed much of Bunker Hill's residential fabric and reshaped portions of the terrain. The surviving street name consequently reaches from Los Angeles's first American-era city plan through the complete social and physical reconstruction of the hill beside it.

South of Bunker Hill, Hope developed through a separate urban arc tied to recreation, automobiles and the emergence of South Park. A block bounded by Hope, Grand Avenue, 12th Street and Pico Boulevard became Fiesta Park during the 1890s, placing a major entertainment ground directly beside the avenue. La Fiesta de Los Angeles used the property for large public celebrations, and athletic events brought USC, St. Vincent's College and other teams onto its field during the years surrounding 1900. President William McKinley attended festivities there during his 1901 western trip, demonstrating the civic scale the grounds had acquired. The site hosted the Los Angeles Auto Show beneath a vast tent in 1910, foreshadowing the automobile economy that subsequently transformed the surrounding district. By the 1910s, automobile showrooms, repair businesses and associated enterprises were concentrating through South Park, with nearby Figueroa and Flower streets forming the principal Auto Row. Flats, apartment houses and rooming houses remained interspersed among those businesses, giving the district a combination of residential and automotive uses that persisted before 1950. Hope later became central to another proposed reinvention during the 1980s, when plans envisioned a landscaped promenade linking Bunker Hill with a new residential district farther south. The avenue's southern history consequently moved through festival ground, athletic field, automobile-era district and late-twentieth-century residential reinvestment as Downtown repeatedly expanded beyond its historic commercial core.

How to fold Hope Street into your trip.

Hope Street works as the anchor for an outing connecting a Modernist municipal headquarters, a major American library shaped by Bertram Goodhue and a Lawrence Halprin landscape created during South Park's late-twentieth-century reinvention.

Begin at John Ferraro Building, completed in 1965 at 111 North Hope Street as the headquarters of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Albert C. Martin and Associates designed the 17-story Corporate International building to terminate the northwestern axis extending from City Hall across the Civic Center. Horizontal concrete floor slabs project twelve feet beyond the facade, functioning as sunshades and giving the structure its emphatic layered profile. A broad reflecting pool surrounds the building and plaza, making water an architectural component of the headquarters created for the municipal utility. More than 3,200 employees were consolidated there upon completion, bringing previously dispersed operations into a single complex. The building received the John Ferraro name in 2001, honoring the longtime Los Angeles City Council member. Continue to Los Angeles Central Library, where architect Bertram Goodhue originally conceived Hope Street as the principal entrance to his final major commission. The Municipal Art Commission approved his amended design in March 1924, only weeks before Goodhue died, leaving longtime associate Carleton Winslow to carry the work to completion. The library opened in 1926 with a Hope Street facade conceived as a grand portico rising above terraces and a lower street-level entrance reached through a long internal ramp. Goodhue adapted ideas developed for the Nebraska State Capitol into a highly individual composition combining a central tower, pyramid, sculpture and architectural references spanning ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern traditions. Two arson fires struck the building in 1986, forcing its closure during a period when Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates was already preparing a rehabilitation and expansion. The restored Goodhue building and new Tom Bradley Wing reopened in 1993, preserving the original Hope Street entrance as part of a much larger library complex. Conclude at Grand Hope Park, the 2.5-acre landscape designed by Lawrence Halprin as the southern anchor of the Los Angeles Open Space Network. Planning began during the 1980s as redevelopment officials pursued a substantial residential district across South Park, and construction followed on land bounded by Grand Avenue, Hope Street, 9th Street and Olympic Boulevard. Halprin worked with Jon Jerde & Partners on a composition organized as a sequence of outdoor rooms formed through pergolas, fountains, lawns, terraces and public art. A 53-foot musical clock tower marks the park, and installations by Lita Albuquerque, Adrian Saxe, Raul Guerrero, Gwynn Murrill, Tony Berlant and Ralph McIntosh distribute art throughout the landscape. The project represented Halprin's final Downtown landscape and completed a sequence that also included spaces farther north along the central business district. Grand Hope Park opened during the 1990s after years of development delays, giving South Park a substantial public landscape amid its emerging residential blocks. The progression moves from A.C.

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