Why Temple Street matters.
Temple Street is a storied corridor where Downtown's civic character meets one of the city's earliest American-era streets, Bunker Hill's erased topography and a westward route shaped by successive waves of transportation and migration.
Running through Downtown between the Civic Center and Historic Filipinotown, the urban corridor follows a westward line from the convergence of Main and Spring streets across Broadway, Hill Street, Grand Avenue, Glendale Boulevard and Alvarado Street before continuing toward the residential districts west of downtown. Eastern stretches pass through an unusually concentrated governmental landscape, where broad institutional buildings, plazas and substantial setbacks occupy terrain extensively regraded during the twentieth century. Traveling west brings the roadway against the elevated edge of Bunker Hill before freeway infrastructure, steeper slopes and smaller residential parcels progressively tighten its proportions. Beyond Glendale Boulevard, apartment buildings, neighborhood storefronts and hillside streets replace the grand scale of the Civic Center as the corridor enters the denser fabric surrounding the Temple-Beverly area. The result is a corridor whose changing elevations, civic architecture, hillside geometry and transition into compact residential districts reveal an unusually complete physical cross-section of Central Los Angeles.
What defines Temple Street.
Temple Street is best known for beginning as a short lane created by Jonathan Temple and expanding into a major westward route during Los Angeles's transformation from Mexican pueblo to American city. Temple, a Massachusetts-born merchant who reached Los Angeles in 1828, built a two-story adobe near the point where Main and Spring streets converged and acquired property extending west toward the hills. Several years after Los Angeles received its American municipal charter in 1850, he petitioned the Common Council for permission to open a short street from that junction up the lower slope, creating the modest beginning of the road that took his surname. The lane extended west as development climbed beyond the early commercial center, and Temple Street had received its name by 1859. Transportation investment accelerated that expansion when the Temple Street Cable Railway opened July 14, 1886, carrying passengers 8,725 feet between Spring Street and Belmont Avenue. Prudent Beaudry, whose real-estate interests included development on Bunker Hill, backed the enterprise, and the railway helped stimulate residential growth around Angelino Heights before reaching Hoover Street. Financial difficulties sent the company through foreclosure in 1898; Henry E. Huntington acquired the property in 1902, incorporated it into Pacific Electric after electrification and transferred the line to Los Angeles Railway in 1910. A street created to climb away from Jonathan Temple's property had become both a transportation artery and an instrument of westward urban expansion.
Twentieth-century government construction remade the corridor's eastern end on a scale that erased much of the nineteenth-century city around it. The Hall of Justice rose at Broadway and Temple in 1925 as a 14-story, 550,000-square-foot Beaux Arts complex combining 17 courtrooms, more than 750 jail cells and offices for county departments within what became the nation's first consolidated judicial facility. City Hall followed in 1928 as public authorities pursued a Civic Center first proposed in 1911, and subsequent government construction progressively replaced older blocks surrounding Temple Street. Poundcake Hill, once prominent immediately west of Main Street and occupied by the nineteenth-century red sandstone courthouse, was progressively cut down until the former elevation disappeared beneath the reorganized government district. Postwar construction shifted the Civic Center onto a southeast-northwest axis, adding county administrative, judicial and cultural buildings between the 1950s and early 1970s as the Hollywood Freeway created a powerful new northern edge. Farther west, another demographic transformation was underway as Filipino Americans displaced by downtown government expansion increasingly settled along the Temple-Beverly corridor during the 1950s and 1960s. The Filipino American Cultural Center opened at 1740 West Temple Street in 1965, and continued migration through the 1970s strengthened a community formally designated Historic Filipinotown in 2002. Temple Street consequently became a line connecting two profound remakings of Central Los Angeles: the construction of an immense governmental center at its eastern end and the growth of a Filipino American community along its western reaches.
How Temple Street fits.
Temple Street works as the anchor for a Central Los Angeles sequence connecting a modern cathedral created after an earthquake and preservation battle with a pioneering funicular from the first Bunker Hill and a performance complex born from Dorothy Buffum Chandler's campaign for a permanent cultural center.
Begin at Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, whose origins lie in the fate of St. Vibiana's Cathedral after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. The old cathedral closed in 1995, and a preservation conflict over its proposed demolition led the Archdiocese to seek another site. In September 1996 an advisory board accompanied Spanish architect José Rafael Moneo through eight possibilities before selecting 5.6 acres bounded by Temple Street, Grand Avenue, Hill Street and the Hollywood Freeway; Los Angeles County sold the property to the Archdiocese for $10.85 million that December. Construction began in 1998, excavation for the cathedral foundations followed in May 1999 and dedication took place in September 2002. Moneo, recipient of the 1996 Pritzker Architecture Prize, designed the building with virtually no right angles, 33,500 square feet of alabaster windows and a structural system resting on 198 base isolators. Robert Graham created the grand bronze entrance doors, and the separate campanile rises 156 feet beneath a 25-foot cross. Continue to Angels Flight Railway, created in 1901 to connect the commercial city below with the residential neighborhood rising across Bunker Hill. The original incline climbed the steep grade between Hill Street and Olive Street with two counterbalanced cars, Sinai and Olivet, turning a difficult pedestrian ascent into a brief rail trip and becoming inseparable from the hill's dense apartment houses, hotels and Victorian residences. Bunker Hill redevelopment approved in 1959 eventually dismantled that environment; the Community Redevelopment Agency acquired and demolished properties through the 1960s, and Angels Flight itself was removed as the old neighborhood disappeared. By 1968 virtually every structure atop the redevelopment area had been cleared apart from two protected Victorian residences awaiting relocation. The railway remained in storage until its reconstruction farther south during the 1990s, preserving a mechanical survivor of the topography and residential district erased by modern Bunker Hill. Conclude at The Music Center, the institutional culmination of Dorothy Buffum Chandler's effort to secure a permanent home for major performing arts in Los Angeles. Chandler led the campaign that produced the complex, beginning with the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in 1964 and extending through the Mark Taper Forum and Ahmanson Theatre in 1967. The development occupied the western end of the expanding Civic Center and became part of the postwar axis extending northwest from City Hall toward the Department of Water and Power Building. Its arrival also marked a major change in Bunker Hill's purpose as government offices, cultural institutions and large public spaces replaced the former residential neighborhood. The three original venues formed one of the central cultural investments in the district's twentieth-century reconstruction and helped shift Los Angeles performance institutions from dispersed facilities into a concentrated downtown campus. The progression moves from Moneo's response to the loss of Los Angeles's historic cathedral through a surviving railway from residential Bunker Hill and culminates in Chandler's campaign for a permanent performing-arts center, tracing religious, transportation and cultural institutions created across successive reconstructions of Central Los Angeles.
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