Why ROW DTLA matters.
ROW DTLA is an expansive industrial marketplace where the Arts District's creative character meets freight-rail infrastructure, century-old produce commerce and the adaptive reuse of one of Downtown's largest industrial complexes.
Set along South Alameda Street near East 7th Street and just steps from the Los Angeles Wholesale Produce Market, the complex occupies 32 acres on the southeastern edge of Downtown between the Arts District and the Fashion District, where the central business district gives way to the broad industrial plain extending toward the Los Angeles River and the Boyle Heights escarpment, with the San Gabriel Mountains rising beyond the eastern basin. Six immense reinforced-concrete buildings create parallel corridors across a property whose internal geometry developed around freight movement and wholesale distribution. Long elevations, repetitive structural bays and former loading zones preserve the industrial scale required to move agricultural goods through a rapidly expanding twentieth-century metropolis. The low horizontal mass of the complex contrasts with Downtown's towers to the northwest, making the transition from the commercial core toward the river's warehouse districts particularly legible across the property. The result is an industrial landscape whose enormous buildings, internal lanes, rail-oriented geometry and position between Downtown and the Los Angeles River preserve the physical scale of the distribution infrastructure that once connected Southern California agriculture with metropolitan and national markets.
What defines ROW DTLA.
ROW DTLA is best known for occupying the former Los Angeles Union Terminal Market, an immense wholesale produce complex constructed during the period when agriculture ranked among Southern California's most consequential industries. Los Angeles growers had spent the late nineteenth century selling through informal street markets and commission merchants before population growth, railroad expansion and increasing agricultural output created demand for consolidated wholesale facilities. The Los Angeles City Market Company opened an early centralized produce market at Central Avenue and 3rd Street in 1903, organizing vendors within long buildings separated by internal market corridors. Continued expansion fractured the company's shareholders and produced competing wholesale markets during the following decade. The Union Terminal project emerged on a far greater scale in 1917, when its developers committed $10 million to a 32-acre produce terminal intended to concentrate storage, sales and transportation beside the Southern Pacific Railroad. Construction proceeded between 1917 and 1923, creating long reinforced-concrete buildings with vendor stalls facing internal lanes and direct access to freight infrastructure. The terminal incorporated its own cold-storage facilities, and contemporary descriptions identified it as the nation's largest produce market upon completion. Los Angeles City Planning places the principal Union Terminal Market building at Central Avenue and 7th Street in 1918 and attributes its design to John Parkinson, the architect whose Downtown work also included the Homer Laughlin Building, Braly Block and later projects undertaken with his son Donald. Its western facade alone extended one-quarter mile, giving the wholesale operation an architectural scale commensurate with the agricultural economy passing through it. The terminal subsequently became known as the LA Terminal Market, and produce distribution has continued on part of the property for more than a century through the 7th Street Produce Market.
A radically different industrial chapter followed as apparel manufacturing occupied the enormous buildings during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. American Apparel consolidated major portions of its Los Angeles operation at the complex, placing design, cutting, sewing, dyeing, distribution and corporate functions inside a vertically integrated manufacturing enterprise that employed thousands of workers at its peak. Atlas Capital Group and Square Mile Capital later acquired the property and began repositioning the former industrial campus during the broader expansion of creative businesses into eastern Downtown. RIOS, led on the project by design principal Sebastian Salvado, developed the architectural strategy for the conversion, retaining the massive concrete buildings and internal circulation inherited from the wholesale complex as the organizing structure for a new district. Existing loading corridors became pedestrian passages and plazas, and interventions across the buildings emphasized the repetitive concrete frames, expansive windows and unusually large floor plates created for industrial production. The redeveloped property opened as ROW DTLA in 2016, combining two million square feet across a 32-acre campus with creative offices, independent commercial spaces and cultural programming. Smorgasburg Los Angeles began operating there the same year as the West Coast edition of the Brooklyn-founded market, drawing thousands of people into a property historically devoted to wholesale food distribution. The redevelopment carried the site through three distinct economic eras, from agricultural logistics through large-scale apparel manufacturing into creative-industry reuse, with the original industrial buildings remaining the physical infrastructure linking those successive periods.
How ROW DTLA fits.
ROW DTLA works as the anchor for a daytime outing connecting the multicultural agricultural economy that preceded its terminal complex, an experimental architecture school occupying another surviving piece of freight infrastructure and a contemporary art institution whose move eastward followed the Arts District's emergence as a cultural center.
Begin at City Market and Market Chinatown District, whose origins reach to 1909 when Chinese, Japanese and Anglo farmers organized a wholesale produce cooperative around Ninth and San Pedro streets. Chinese businessman and grower Louis Quan raised 41 percent of the initial capital from 373 Chinese stockholders, with Chinese investors contributing $81,850 toward the $200,000 enterprise, giving immigrant growers an unusually substantial ownership position within Los Angeles's expanding agricultural economy. Morgan & Walls designed the original complex in Mission Revival and industrial forms across more than six acres, arranging brick and reinforced-concrete buildings around central loading docks reached by electric-rail spur tracks. The surrounding district developed into Market Chinatown as Chinese farmers increasingly moved from direct peddling into wholesale distribution, creating a commercial community distinct from the older Chinatown farther north. Although major portions were demolished beginning in 2013, surviving structures retain physical evidence of the cooperative produce economy that preceded the much larger terminal system nearby. Continue to Southern California Institute of Architecture, whose institutional history began far from Downtown when Ray Kappe and faculty including Thom Mayne, Glen Small, Ahde Lahti, Jim Stafford, Bill Simonian and Shelly Kappe broke from Cal Poly Pomona in 1972. Seventy students joined seven instructors at an alternative Santa Monica school initially called the New School, organized around Kappe's concept of a “college without walls” and an experimental approach that placed the institution outside conventional university structures. SCI-Arc moved Downtown in 2000 into a restored former Santa Fe Railway freight depot extending one-quarter mile through the Arts District, converting another immense piece of Los Angeles transportation infrastructure into a center for architectural production. Kappe helped secure the building, whose extraordinary linear form places studios along the geometry once required for rail freight. The relocation joined industrial preservation with an architecture school whose faculty and alumni became deeply connected with Los Angeles experimental design, turning a surviving transportation building into part of the cultural transformation of the former warehouse district. Conclude at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, whose institutional lineage began as the Santa Monica Museum of Art before its departure from Bergamot Station in May 2015 initiated a fundamental reinvention. Executive Director Elsa Longhauser and the museum's trustees renamed the organization in 2016 and launched a $5 million capital campaign for a Downtown home, shifting an institution with three decades of exhibition history into the industrial landscape surrounding East 7th Street. Kulapat Yantrasast and wHY converted a former warehouse into 13,000 square feet of galleries and public space, and artist Mark Bradford created the institution's new graphic mark during the transition. ICA LA opened there in September 2017, carrying the former Santa Monica institution into a district increasingly occupied by galleries, studios and creative organizations. Artists including John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Charles Gaines, Simone Leigh, Ed Ruscha, Sterling Ruby and Henry Taylor contributed works supporting the campaign, tying the relocation to several generations of contemporary practice in Los Angeles. The progression moves from immigrant growers creating a cooperative wholesale economy through SCI-Arc's conversion of railroad infrastructure into an experimental architecture school and culminates in ICA LA's transformation of an industrial warehouse into a contemporary art institution, tracing how production, transportation and cultural institutions successively reshaped the industrial territory surrounding ROW DTLA.
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