Why Native Son matters.
Native Son is a craft-beer bar where South Park's expanding nightlife scene meets Jon Sanchez's Southern California beer obsession, the inherited character of Modern Times' Dankness Dojo and an on-site brewing program extending the company beyond curation into production.
Set along South Olive Street near West 9th Street and just steps from the Los Angeles Athletic Club, the bar occupies northern South Park between Broadway, the Fashion District and the residential and hospitality corridor extending south toward Olympic Boulevard and the Los Angeles Convention Center. Exposed brick and a long bar retain the substantial volume of the former brewpub, allowing beer service to unfold across a room already constructed for brewing and high-capacity drinking. Papel picado, bright graphics and covered outdoor seating temper the industrial shell with smaller decorative interventions. A separate rear bar creates a second drinking zone behind the more casual front room, changing the character of the property as service moves deeper into the building. The result is a large Downtown beer hall whose brickwork, dual bars, outdoor seating and inherited brewing infrastructure give Native Son considerably more physical range than its original rooftop operation in Santa Ana.
What defines Native Son.
Native Son is best known for turning Jon Sanchez's attachment to Southern California craft beer into a regional bar business and then using Modern Times' departure from Downtown to enter brewing itself. Sanchez grew up in Whittier, graduated from USC and spent five years traveling nationally for Nestlé, seeking beers from Stone, Green Flash, Lagunitas and other California producers as reminders of home. A subsequent period in San Francisco placed Lagunitas and Russian River within regular reach, deepening an interest that eventually led him to leave the corporate world and return to Southern California. He converted an unusual second-floor office property in Downtown Santa Ana into Native Son, opening the flagship in 2014 around independently produced craft beer. A second operation followed at Rancho Cucamonga's Haven City Market in 2019. Modern Times announced the closure of its Downtown Dankness Dojo in 2022, and Sanchez contacted chief executive Jennifer Briggs within an hour of hearing the news. He toured the property two days later and secured the keys by May after renegotiating its lease, preserving a brewing facility that Native Son's team already admired. The Los Angeles operation debuted that November with more than 35 draft beers and control of the ten-barrel brewhouse Modern Times had left behind, marking Native Son's first move from selecting other breweries' work into producing beer under its own name. The acquisition changed the company itself: a bar founded around Sanchez's search for Southern California beer became a producer operating inside one of Downtown's established brewing rooms.
Masahiro Kitano now pushes brewing at the Olive Street property in a markedly different direction through Ikasu Brewing, an on-site producer drawing ingredients and flavor combinations from Japan. Kitano holds a Ph.D. in Medical Science alongside Advanced Cicerone certification and National Beer Judge credentials, bringing two decades in academia into a brewing career that began with home production. His competition history accumulated 37 medals and three Best of Show awards before an Arts District Brewing collaboration scaled one winning recipe from five gallons to 465 gallons. LArigato uses Japanese sushi rice in a lager, linking grain selection directly with a lighter fermentation profile. Goma Me folds roasted black sesame into porter, carrying nuttiness into dark malt and roast. Matcha Tart moves powdered green tea into a tart, lightly saline sour, and Yuzuko Show combines yuzu kosho with saison fermentation for citrus, pepper and chile characteristics. Housing Ikasu inside Native Son gives the Downtown bar a production program whose Japanese rice, sesame, matcha and yuzu-kosho beers grow from Kitano's competition work and brewing training.
How Native Son fits.
Native Son works as the anchor for a Downtown outing connecting Los Angeles' oldest private athletic institution, the movie palace created for Hollywood stars who entered theater ownership and Julia Morgan's extraordinary newspaper headquarters for William Randolph Hearst.
Begin at Los Angeles Athletic Club, founded in 1880 when Los Angeles contained only 11,000 residents and forty Angelenos gathered in attorney Frank Gibson's office to create the city's first private club. Its present twelve-story Beaux-Arts clubhouse opened in 1912 from designs by John Parkinson and Edwin Bergstrom, placing an indoor swimming pool on an upper floor at a time when that engineering arrangement was unprecedented in Southern California. Charlie Chaplin lived there during his formative Hollywood years, and Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and swimmer Johnny Weissmuller joined a membership culture connecting early filmmaking with elite athletics. The club later produced institutions including Riviera Country Club and developed athletes whose Olympic histories became another substantial part of its legacy. Continue to United Artists Theatre, opened in 1927 as the Los Angeles flagship of the theater chain associated with the studio founded by Pickford, Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith. Mary Pickford selected the Broadway site, and C. Howard Crane designed the Spanish Gothic theater in association with Walker & Eisen, whose adjoining office tower housed Texaco's western regional headquarters. Pickford operated the steam shovel at the groundbreaking attended by Buster Keaton, John Barrymore and Norma Talmadge. The auditorium drew inspiration from a cathedral in Segovia and seated more than 2,100 people beneath an unusually vertical decorative scheme developed for prestige premieres. Conclude at Herald Examiner Building, commissioned after William Randolph Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner outgrew its earlier Downtown quarters. Julia Morgan designed the headquarters, completed in 1914-15, combining Mission Revival massing with Spanish Colonial, Gothic and Baroque elements across a concrete-and-steel structure crowned by tiled domes. Its interior contained carved marble friezes, exposed timber trusses and patterned tile beneath grand arches, making newspaper production the subject of unusually elaborate architecture. The building remained associated with Hearst publishing for decades before a later rehabilitation preserved steel windows, sawtooth skylights and surviving interior finishes. The progression moves from a private club that joined athletics with early Hollywood society through the stars of United Artists becoming theater proprietors and culminates in Morgan and Hearst turning newspaper production into grand architecture, tracing three institutions that helped concentrate sport, cinema and publishing in early twentieth-century Downtown.
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