Why Pan Pacific Park matters.
Pan Pacific Park is a storied urban greenspace where Fairfax's entertainment character meets broad recreation lawns, the footprint of a vanished Streamline Moderne auditorium and surviving architectural references to one of prewar Los Angeles's great public venues.
Set along Beverly Boulevard near South Gardner Street and just steps from the eastern edge of the Fairfax commercial district, the park occupies more than 28 acres on the level Los Angeles Basin between the higher ground of Hollywood to the north and the low Ballona watershed extending south toward Baldwin Hills. Broad lawns spread across a long east-west site bordered by dense residential blocks, with Beverly Boulevard carrying the northern edge toward the commercial corridors of La Brea Avenue and Fairfax Avenue. Athletic fields, mature trees and paved paths divide the grounds into large recreation zones across terrain once dominated by exhibition buildings and extensive surface parking. The recreation center rises near the eastern side with an upswept entrance tower recalling the fins that once defined the Pan-Pacific Auditorium facade. The result is a substantial Central Los Angeles park whose open ground and architectural references preserve the physical memory of a vanished entertainment complex amid the dense neighborhoods of the Mid-City basin.
What defines Pan Pacific Park.
Pan Pacific Park is best known for occupying land associated with the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, the Streamline Moderne exhibition hall that served as Los Angeles's principal indoor event venue for more than three decades. Brothers Phillip and Cliff Henderson developed the auditorium, and architects Walter Wurdeman and Welton Becket created its famous western facade with four upswept towers resembling aircraft fins. Construction took only 60 days before the building opened on May 18, 1935 with a 16-day housing exhibition. Behind the theatrical green-and-white facade stood a comparatively straightforward wooden hall encompassing 100,000 square feet and seating 6,000 people. A vast ice surface installed in 1938 strengthened its role in indoor sports, and the Ice Capades began appearing there in 1943. The Los Angeles Monarchs played hockey in the building, college basketball occupied its floor and the Harlem Globetrotters became another recurring attraction. Leopold Stokowski conducted there, Elvis Presley performed there in 1957 and national political events brought major public figures into the hall. The opening of the much larger Los Angeles Convention Center in 1971 ended its dominance, and the auditorium closed in 1972 after 37 years of exhibitions, athletics, concerts and public gatherings.
The abandoned auditorium became entwined with Los Angeles preservation history as government agencies debated the future of the property through the 1970s and 1980s. Preservation advocates secured Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument status in March 1978 and placement on the National Register of Historic Places that June. State, county and city governments purchased the auditorium and surrounding 28 acres for $10.45 million in 1979, bringing a long period of private ownership to an end. Portions of the property entered public park use as proposals circulated for rehabilitation of the deteriorating hall, including a 1985 plan combining an American Cinematheque film center with commercial development. Fire destroyed the wooden auditorium on May 24, 1989, eliminating the centerpiece around which those preservation efforts had revolved. California subsequently blocked commercial development on the former auditorium property, reinforcing its public recreational future. The park gained a new recreation center in 2002, with its entrance architecture deliberately recalling one of Wurdeman and Becket's aerodynamic towers. The vanished auditorium survives through the public landscape that replaced it and through an architectural form recreated within the park itself.
How Pan Pacific Park fits.
Pan Pacific Park works as the anchor for a Central Los Angeles outing connecting a preserved petroleum-era market, an encyclopedic art museum assembled across several predecessor institutions and a prehistoric excavation site created around naturally occurring asphalt.
Begin at Original Farmers Market, whose land entered the Gilmore family holdings after Arthur Fremont Gilmore purchased part of Rancho La Brea and struck oil there during water drilling in 1903. His son Earl later joined Roger Dahlhjelm and Fred Beck in opening a farmers market on the property in July 1934, beginning with local growers selling produce directly from trucks. Permanent stalls followed as food merchants and specialty businesses expanded the operation, leaving the market as the surviving commercial center of the former Gilmore holdings after nearby petroleum, athletic and entertainment uses disappeared. Continue to Los Angeles County Museum of Art, formed as an independent institution in 1961 after separating from the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art. William Pereira designed its original Wilshire Boulevard campus, which opened in 1965 with three principal buildings arranged around reflecting pools. Subsequent acquisitions and institutional growth expanded a collection spanning antiquity through contemporary art, and later architectural campaigns by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates and Renzo Piano repeatedly altered the campus as Los Angeles County Museum of Art became the largest art museum in the western United States. Conclude at La Brea Tar Pits, where asphalt seeps preserved an immense assemblage of Pleistocene plants and animals beneath Hancock Park. Systematic excavation accelerated after the Los Angeles County Museum received exclusive digging rights between 1913 and 1915, producing fossils from mammoths, dire wolves, saber-toothed cats and numerous smaller species. George C. Page funded the museum that opened beside the excavation grounds in 1977, placing active paleontological work beside public displays of specimens recovered from the same asphalt deposits. The progression moves from a market rooted in the petroleum history of Rancho La Brea through a major art institution built from Los Angeles County collections and culminates at an active paleontological site where the basin's asphalt deposits preserve tens of thousands of years of natural history.
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