Why you should experience The Bloc in Los Angeles, California.
The Bloc is an open-air commercial complex where Financial District's corporate character meets adaptive retail architecture, landscaped public space and direct rail access created from the shell of a 1970s megastructure.
Set along South Flower Street near West 7th Street and just steps from the Financial District's principal office towers, the full-block complex occupies a major Downtown junction where dense commercial development converges with one of Los Angeles' busiest transit nodes. Office, hotel and retail structures frame a multilevel central court opened directly to the sky, replacing the inward-facing enclosure that once isolated the property from surrounding streets. Moving through the complex carries pedestrians between elevated walkways, terraces and broad exterior passages, with multiple openings drawing surrounding sidewalks visually and physically into the interior. Mature planting, outdoor seating and exposed structural elements add a second physical dimension, softening the original development's immense mass without concealing the large-scale construction inherited from its predecessor. The result is a commercial complex whose open center and porous edges reveal how a sealed twentieth-century shopping center was physically recut around contemporary Downtown pedestrian movement.
What you should know about The Bloc.
The Bloc is best known for the dramatic reconstruction of Broadway Plaza, the enormous Charles Luckman-designed commercial development completed in 1973 at 7th and Flower streets. Developer Ogden Development assembled the project around a new flagship for The Broadway department-store chain, pairing retail space with a high-rise hotel and 32-story office tower in a single city-block complex. Its original architecture followed the enclosed urban-mall model then reshaping American retail, turning commercial activity toward an internal atrium and presenting heavy brick elevations to the surrounding Downtown streets. The development opened in November 1973 as Los Angeles was losing established retailers and corporate offices to suburban districts, making its scale a major attempt to retain commercial gravity within the central business district. The Broadway flagship became Macy's after Federated Department Stores acquired Broadway Stores in 1996, and the property consequently became known as Macy's Plaza. Jamison Properties purchased the office tower, retail center and 3,000-space parking structure in 2005 as Downtown residential growth began changing the market surrounding the aging complex. The Ratkovich Company acquired Macy's Plaza with National Real Estate Advisors and Blue Vista Capital Partners in 2013 and committed to a reconstruction conceived around reversing the property's introverted design. Work ultimately developed into an investment reported at $180 million, converting one of Downtown's largest surviving enclosed retail developments into a fundamentally different urban form without erasing its underlying office, hotel and commercial structure.
The reconstruction's decisive architectural act came in May 2015, when crews began dismantling the immense steel-and-glass roof over the central atrium and exposed the former interior court to open sky. Johnson Fain led the architectural redesign, cutting new openings through the existing perimeter, adding balconies and terraces and reorganizing circulation so the complex engaged Flower, 7th and Hope streets across multiple points. The project also created a direct pedestrian connection with 7th Street/Metro Center, exploiting infrastructure anticipated when subway construction passed beneath Flower Street decades earlier and giving the property an entrance directly into the rail station. That connection opened in February 2017 and linked the commercial complex to a transit interchange serving multiple Metro rail lines beneath Downtown. The former hotel component underwent its own renovation as the Sheraton Grand Los Angeles, retaining the mixed commercial program embedded in the original development as the surrounding architecture changed. Alamo Drafthouse selected the property for its first Los Angeles cinema, occupying a multiauditorium complex that opened in 2019 after years of planning and construction. Macy's continued operating through the reconstruction before closing its store in 2025, ending more than half a century of department-store operation on the site. The roof removal, street openings and underground transit connection collectively reversed the planning logic of Broadway Plaza, converting architecture designed to contain pedestrian activity into a block structured around movement between Downtown streets, rail infrastructure and exterior public space.
How to fold The Bloc into your trip.
The Bloc works as the anchor for a 7th Street sequence tracing how specialized artistic space, private athletic culture and luxury retail architecture accompanied Downtown's emergence as a major metropolitan commercial center.
Begin at Fine Arts Building, the twelve-story Romanesque Revival structure Albert R. Walker and Percy A. Eisen designed during the extraordinary Downtown construction boom of the 1920s. Completed in 1926, the building was conceived specifically for artists, galleries and arts-related businesses, an unusual program within a district overwhelmingly devoted to commerce and finance. Its stone façade draws from medieval Italian architecture through an arched entrance, twisting columns, carved figures and sculptural ornament associated with Burt Johnson, and the interior extends that artistic program through Ernest A. Batchelder tile and work by theater muralist Anthony Heinsbergen. 27,000 people entered during its opening celebration, demonstrating the public interest generated by a purpose-built artistic institution amid 7th Street's commercial expansion. Los Angeles designated the property Historic-Cultural Monument 125 in 1974, preserving one of the corridor's most concentrated collaborations among architecture, sculpture and decorative art. Continue to Los Angeles Athletic Club, founded in 1880 when Los Angeles contained only 11,000 residents and developed into the city's first private athletic club. After occupying several earlier locations, the organization commissioned John Parkinson and Edwin Bergstrom to design its permanent twelve-story Beaux-Arts clubhouse at 7th and Olive, completed in 1912. The building contained one of Southern California's earliest elevated indoor swimming pools, integrating extensive athletic facilities into a vertical urban clubhouse at a time when the surrounding corridor was becoming a prestigious commercial address. Charlie Chaplin lived there for several years, and figures including Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller passed through its social and athletic world. Club athletes accumulated a substantial Olympic legacy, with the 1932 Los Angeles Games placing its training culture inside one of the defining international events of the city's early metropolitan era. Conclude at St. Vincent Jewelry Center, housed within the former Bullock's department-store complex and developed into a vast jewelry marketplace during the early 1980s. The center opened in 1983 and grew to encompass more than 700,000 square feet with over 500 independent merchants dealing in diamonds, gemstones, precious metals, watches and custom jewelry, concentrating a specialized trade within buildings inherited from Downtown's department-store era. Its adjoining St. Vincent Court carries an earlier layer of commercial reinvention: the alley was remodeled in 1957 with brick paving, café fronts and European-inspired architectural details after the passage developed into a cluster of restaurants and small businesses. That intimate pedestrian corridor now sits beside one of the world's largest concentrations of independent jewelry merchants, joining small-scale storefront commerce to an immense specialist marketplace. The progression moves from a 1920s building created specifically for artists through the institutional world of Los Angeles' oldest private athletic club and culminates in the conversion of former department-store architecture into a dense jewelry-trading center, tracing the specialized commercial and cultural institutions that repeatedly remade 7th Street.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Experience premium editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
