Why Pershing Square matters.
Pershing Square is a foundational civic greenspace where Downtown's metropolitan character meets nineteenth-century public life, successive generations of urban design and more than a century of political and social gathering.
Set between Fifth and Sixth streets near Olive Street and just steps from the Hill Street commercial corridor, the square occupies a five-acre block at the foot of Bunker Hill, positioned where Downtown's elevated western terrain descends toward the Historic Core and the flatter basin extending east toward the Los Angeles River. 5th Street runs along its northern edge between the former financial district and the towers surrounding the Central Library, with Broadway's theater and retail corridor beginning one block farther east. The square sits above a subterranean parking structure that raises much of its interior above the surrounding sidewalks, giving its present ground plane a pronounced separation from the street grid. Towers from successive periods of Downtown construction enclose the block, creating a dense architectural perimeter around one of the central city's oldest pieces of open land. The result is a compact civic landscape whose position beneath Bunker Hill and between Downtown's financial, commercial and theatrical districts places five acres of public ground inside an exceptional concentration of Los Angeles urban history.
What defines Pershing Square.
Pershing Square is best known for occupying five acres of original pueblo land whose public history reaches to Los Angeles's earliest decades. Spain granted the property to the city in 1781, and the parcel remained unsold as residential and commercial development expanded south from the original plaza. The City Council formally reserved the tract for common public use in 1866 under Mayor Cristóbal Aguilar, when it became known as La Plaza Abaja. Residents financed improvements after the city renamed it Los Angeles Park in 1870, raising $600 before municipal funding supplied another $1,000 for fencing and trees. German immigrant George Lehman planted cypress, fruit trees and flowering shrubs and personally tended the vegetation until his death in 1882. City engineer Fred Eaton imposed the first formal design in 1886, adding a bandstand that helped turn the grounds into a setting for concerts and public oratory. Architect John Parkinson redesigned the park during the 1910 to 1911 real-estate boom with formal paths and a central fountain, replacing much of the earlier scenic arrangement with a more ordered civic composition. World War I brought militia receptions and public speakers to the grounds, and the city renamed the park for General John J. Pershing in November 1918 after the armistice. The square subsequently acquired military monuments including Humberton Pedretti's life-size World War I infantryman in 1924 and a cannon from USS Constitution in 1935, embedding successive layers of national commemoration within one of Los Angeles's oldest municipal spaces.
A separate chapter developed between the 1920s and 1960s when Pershing Square became one of the principal gathering grounds for gay and bisexual men in Los Angeles. The park occupied the center of “The Run,” a 5th Street corridor connecting gay-friendly establishments and meeting places across Downtown during decades of severe legal and social persecution. Its benches and shaded paths provided space for socializing, cruising and discussion, extending a network that included establishments around Bunker Hill and Main Street. World War II intensified this activity as large numbers of servicemen entered Los Angeles and military authorities attempted to restrict access to known gay gathering places. A decisive physical break arrived in 1951 and 1952 when the city excavated the park for a multilevel underground garage, removing its dense vegetation and introducing automobile ramps around the perimeter. The altered park subsequently lost much of its earlier social prominence as Downtown's gay community dispersed toward other parts of Los Angeles. Another reconstruction followed after the 1984 Olympics and an international design effort, with Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta, landscape architect Laurie Olin and artist Barbara McCarren developing the Postmodern composition rededicated on February 3, 1994. Its orange grove, stylized fault line, aqueduct-inspired fountain, colored walls and towers interpreted Los Angeles through an intentionally architectural landscape placed above the garage. Pershing Square Renew launched another international competition in 2015, drawing 80 design teams before Paris-based Agence Ter won unanimously in May 2016 with a scheme centered on lowering barriers between the square and surrounding sidewalks; Los Angeles subsequently divided implementation into multiple phases, carrying the city's oldest central square into another cycle of physical reinvention.
How Pershing Square fits.
Pershing Square works as the anchor for a Downtown outing tracing the architectural confidence of Los Angeles through a title company tower, a surviving vaudeville palace and one of the city's most audacious Art Deco commercial buildings.
Begin at Title Guarantee & Trust Building, completed in 1930 for a company whose business grew alongside Southern California's extraordinary real-estate expansion. John and Donald Parkinson designed the tower with more than 130,000 square feet of offices, drawing decorative inspiration from the Chicago Tribune Tower and commissioning sculptor Eugene Meyer-Kreig for exterior ornament. Hugo Ballin created six lobby murals presenting episodes in Los Angeles history from the precolonial landscape through Spanish and Mexican rule, American annexation, railroad expansion and the modern metropolis, joining the company's title business to an ambitious visual chronology of regional development. Continue to Orpheum Theatre, opened on February 15, 1926 as the fourth and final Los Angeles house operated by the Orpheum vaudeville circuit. G. Albert Lansburgh, an École des Beaux-Arts-trained architect who designed Orpheum theaters across the country, created the Broadway auditorium for a program combining vaudeville and motion pictures. Judy Garland appeared there as Francis Gumm, and later performers included Jack Benny, Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Little Richard, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder; a 1928 Mighty Wurlitzer remains associated with the auditorium. Conclude at Eastern Columbia Building, completed in only nine months and opened on September 12, 1930 as the headquarters and 39th store of the Eastern-Columbia retail enterprise. Claud Beelman wrapped its 13 stories in glossy turquoise terra cotta accented by deep blue and gold ornament, then crowned the structure with a four-faced clock tower rising beyond the city's prevailing 150-foot height restriction. Beelman and mechanical engineer R. M. Storms placed building systems inside that tower, turning a functional innovation into the composition's dominant architectural feature as white neon spelling “EASTERN” illuminated each clock face above Broadway. The progression moves from an office tower joining corporate expansion with grand historical imagery through a vaudeville house built for the national entertainment circuit and culminates in a turquoise commercial tower whose engineering and ornament announced the architectural ambitions of Depression-era Downtown.
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