Historic Core Los Angeles: Downtown Revival and Adaptive Reuse

The Historic Core of downtown Los Angeles encompasses the densest concentration of architecturally significant buildings in Southern California — a dozen blocks of Beaux-Arts, Art Deco and Spanish Colonial Revival structures built during the 1920s and 1930s that were largely abandoned during the decades of suburban flight before their systematic rediscovery and adaptive reuse by a new generation of developers and residents from the 1990s onwards. The Bradbury Building, completed in 1893 and featuring a five-story sky-lit atrium of ornate cast-iron railings and open cage elevators, is among the most beautiful interior spaces in American architecture and appears in Blade Runner and dozens of subsequent films that use its timeless atmosphere as shorthand for a certain kind of urban romanticism.

The Spring Street financial corridor — once known as the "Wall Street of the West" for its concentration of banks and financial institutions — now houses some of downtown's most successful residential and retail conversions, including the Spring Street Bar and a cluster of restaurants and bars that have animated the street's ground floors with a social energy absent for decades. The Grand Central Market at Broadway and 3rd Street is the most important civic institution in the Historic Core's revival, a 1917 public market hall that has been home to continuously operating food stalls through every cycle of the neighbourhood's fortunes and now presents an extraordinary selection of Los Angeles food cultures — Guatemalan tamales, Korean short-rib sandwiches, Japanese ramen, Taiwanese scallion pancakes — in a setting of original terrazzo floors and neon signage.

The Broadway corridor's collection of historic movie palaces — the Orpheum, Los Angeles Theatre, Palace Theatre, Ace Hotel's Theatre at Ace Hotel — represents the most complete surviving example of a 1920s entertainment district in the United States, a dozen ornate theatres whose lobbies, auditoriums and marquees have been restored to varying degrees of their original grandeur. The neighbourhood's position at the intersection of the Metro B, D and E lines makes it accessible from across the Los Angeles basin, and the weekend farmers market in the Pershing Square plaza and the restaurant activity along 6th Street's restaurant row together sustain a downtown social life that Los Angeles has been attempting to create for generations.