David Kennedy on January 12, 2007, at 09:26AM – #1

Here goes. Hopefully, I haven't missed any salient details.

Downtown is a diverse mix of various business, cultural and ethnic shopping districts. You get the whole gamut here from high to low in terms of business, culture and shopping. It is the hub of a growing regional mass transit system and the freeway system. It is also the largest concentration of government buildings in the western U.S. Downtown has it all.

Business districts - Financial, Jewelry, Toy, Industrial, Fashion (wholesale), and Civic Center.

Cultural districts - Grand Avenue (Music Center, MOCA, Colbourne School, Cathedral, Central Library), Staples (professional sports, big-time concerts), Gallery Row (small art galleries all over), and Arts (original artists who pioneered living the loft life).

Ethnic shopping districts - Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Latino Broadway, Fashion District/Santee Alley, Olvera Street.

Downtown is also home to Skid Row. A very large number of social service providers are concentrated in the Historic Core. Historically, the region sought to bury this problem in downtown. However, this strategy is under a lot of pressure with the massive influx of new residents.

Overlaid on top of all these districts is a residential boom. This started a few years ago when some developers gambled on converting abandoned office buildings. The area is an incredible treasure trove of old architecture. The success of these residential conversions has lead to the construction of brand-new high-end residential projects.

Two massive developments will transform the area. L.A. Live in South Park is centered the Staples Center arena. Another project is centered on the Grand Avenue corridor. Both projects seek to bring residential and retail to their immediate neighborhoods. Key to these developments is developing areas which are visitor and resident friendly with retail, restaurants and parks. Ideally, both areas will offer walkable paseos open into the evening hours. This is sorely lacking right now.

There is also a very large new park being developed adjacent to Chinatown.

Downtown is still very much a work-in-progress. There is plenty of grit to go with the fancy places. Some find this clash unnerving. Others, like myself, relish it. Downtown is arguably the most exciting and vibrant part of Los Angeles given the massive changes underway. Unlike most areas is the city where development is feared, new development is eagerly welcomed here. Those of us who live downtown find it a wonderful place to live.

Hope this helps.

David Kennedy on January 12, 2007, at 09:47AM – #3

Yeah, you're right. I got a tad carried away. I'll try to be pithy a little later.

Ed Fuentes on January 12, 2007, at 09:53AM – #4

I'm having a Hallmark moment.

Union Station is a Downtown Landmark where romantic dreamers made their entrance into the City of Angels to began new lives under a bright sun with blue skies.

pola on January 12, 2007, at 10:04AM – #5

Los Angeles's vibrant spirit, its culture and history come to an exciting crescendo at its center. Leading the city in arts and architecture, Downtown's hidden treasures are sometimes romantic, often breathtaking, and always exciting. It's the big city attitude you though LA was missing.

David Kennedy on January 12, 2007, at 10:21AM – #6

Hmm, looking at the pithy examples provided by my colleagues, maybe I'm not up to this. I always was a lousy copywriter.

LA City Nerd on January 12, 2007, at 10:56AM – #7

Downtown Los Angeles, the center of a sprawling metropolis, holds the key to the City: it's a concentration of the history, arts, media, and culture that define a truly international City. Downtown has treasures to behold around every corner and in the faces of its residents. Downtown is the heart of a City often seen as having none, and through exploration and open eyes, you can find that heart to be beating with the rythm of the world as well as your hometown, where ever that may be. Everyone has a connection to Downtown Los Angeles if they are open to it.

Dana Gabbard on January 12, 2007, at 11:21AM – #8

Downtown is a diverse and complex place. It is filled with wonderful things. It is filled with terrible things. It is a human landscape, with small bits of nature interspersed. Prepare to be astonished and amazed (and do a fair amount of walking or catch the DASH bus).

Tim Quinn on January 12, 2007, at 11:51AM – #9

A prodigy, an addict, emerging from decades of smoggy oblivion to re-discover an early genius for business with style and confidence. Now eager to catch-up and engage the 21st century as the scene of the invention of movies, jazz, iconic architecture and unparalleled diversity. Once believed to have no future and excited to discover the future is happening right here and determined not to make the mistakes of the past again. The first few steps are rocky but the glimpses of old talents found and now cherished make for a thrilling and vital place to spend a few hours or a life time.

Scott Mercer on January 12, 2007, at 12:25PM – #10

Here's my one day (or one really long afternoon) tour that I give to out-of-town visitors, so I would consider these the downtown must-see places:

Chinatown, Olvera Street, La Placita, Union Station, City Hall, Disney Hall, Grand Central Market (have a snack), Little Tokyo, Broadway Theatres, Jewelry District, Pershing Square, Subway Terminal Building, Central Library, Library Tower, and finally, dinner at The Pantry, or (if you're willing to spend more) The Palms, or Pacific Dining Car.

You can hoof it the whole way, but taking the Red Line for part of this (maybe back to Union Station at the end) gives you another tourist attraction along with a transit mode. I know a lot of the stories, so I can belt out tour guide stuff with the best of them. Enjoy.

Just Kidding on January 12, 2007, at 12:41PM – #11

Smell the history of Los Angeles... welcome to Urinetown.

Ted on January 12, 2007, at 01:35PM – #12

Downtown is the antidote for the negatives of the Los Angeles I love. It is visually satisfying, and often architecturally striking, while so much of LA ranges from bland to tacky. To walk out your door is to engage people and the community, rather being isolated behind a suburban lawn. And it is a place to walk—to shop, have dinner, or go to a concert—without having to get in a car and face the traffic.

Coleman on January 12, 2007, at 02:17PM – #13

People always ask me the same question: "What's downtown like?"

My answer is the same every time. "It's a work in progress. You have to see it for yourself".

John Crandell on January 12, 2007, at 03:20PM – #14

Within the fields of architectural history, urban studies and history per se, there has gradually emerged an expanding theoretical body, an ever widening focus upon the subject of memory, especially place and memory. As Helene Lipstadt of M.I.T. has written: "Now, memory is on everyone's lips." In a ground-breaking study published by The Warburg Institute in 1966, Frances Yates noted that the tradition of rhetoric as a mnemonic device among the ancients as well as savants of the dark ages, the imprinting of loci or places upon the common memory, began to vanish with the creation of printing, and of course we now reside within the disconnection between the drawn or painted images of history and the realism of the photographic image which so colors and dominates modern day communications.

With all of the heft of this theorizing (emanating very much in the East as well as in Europe), perhaps it may be well to ask how might this current mania be translated or applied to a disregarded place such as early Los Angeles? By what method could something so invisible, abstract and forgotten become palpable? I would posit that a quasi-archaeologic sensibility is in order, that a place-oriented cartographic sifting of key urban terrain tying history to place is required. That in such a place with so little identity, there must be a primary effort at examining the extrinsic context of the urban past, under a more perceptive awareness of quotidian habitation, a wonderment,  a sensibility once expressed by James Agee as a keening for those who "had ever breathed, had ever dreamed, had ever been."

Fred Camino on January 12, 2007, at 03:28PM – #15

To quote Huell Howser:

"You never know what you're going to find... Downtown!"

E.G. on January 12, 2007, at 05:30PM – #16

While Hollywood has lost its magic and the charm of the SoCal suburbs has wrinkled, Downtown Los Angeles is still fall-in-love able. And unless its lovers lose interest, cheat, or sell it short, this city's got years of mad, intoxicating soul-searching and passionate quarrels ahead of it.

Benjamin Pezzillo on January 12, 2007, at 09:32PM – #17

For this occassion, I would suggest taking a passage from Kerouac's "On the Road".

Kenarch on January 13, 2007, at 03:41AM – #18

Downtown is the diverse, edgy, artsy, gritty and surprisingly liveable Los Angeles. Making no pretense about being a beach resort, movie star hangout or hip suburban TV show, Downtown is all about historic buildings, dynamic commercial districts and an emerging, friendly restaurant and gallery scene. It is surprisingly pedestrian scaled and far safer than it gets credit for. Downtown is where Los Angeles joins with the real world. For a true urban experience, Downtown is the place to be.

kenarch on January 13, 2007, at 04:06AM – #19

Hello everyone - I know this is quite a digression, but I just had to...

With no disrespect to John Crandell...

Whew... that's some thick reading. I do take exception to several points... Los Angeles can hardly be considered a "place with so little identity" - actually, LA is widely regarded as the epicenter of current pop culture in the US, if not the world. Additionally, it is the place where a vast number of innovations in living (some good, some not good) took root and then spread worldwide. LA is known worldwide for things as diverse as the movie industry, climate, noir and the, umm, "other film industry".

A "cartographic sifting of key urban terrain tying history to place" is assuredly not required here, as in Downtown at least, that history exists right before our eyes in the shape of the older buildings along the streets east of Hill Street, and particularly in the Olvera Street and Broadway Theatre areas. Sure, the old mansion neighborhood of Bunker Hill was replaced by the current high-rise Financial District, but one only need walk three blocks east to be immersed in LA history from the Pueblo days to the present.

Take a good look at our art galleries Downtown. You will find an abundance of "drawn or painted images of history", and also such images representing a contemporary parception of LA history. There is hardly a disconnection between such images and current photograph and video documentation. Downtown LA is one place where these are brought together with positive results.

As for a "more perceptive awareness of quotidian habitation", well, such perception is clear to the eye if one should only deign to see the layers upon layers of human history in this area, from the cutting edge Luma-type developments, to the condos on Bunker Hill, the older buildings now reinvented as lofts like the one I am writing from, to the neighborhoods like Angelino Heights, to Olvera Street, to the relics of Luiseno and Gabrieleno habitation, and slightly farther afield, to the excavation of bones from La Brea. it is all right here, and I certainly don't understand why the increasingly focused ongoing efforts in Downtown to do just what your treatise called for are maybe unnoticed.

Deven on January 15, 2007, at 01:07PM – #20

Its a shithole and the only thing its home to is 20,000 crackwhores who shit and piss everywhere in sight - most of which who have HIV and are unfortuantely not dying fast enough lol

David Kennedy on January 15, 2007, at 01:53PM – #21

Downtown is L.A.'s bogeyman. It is fascinating how efforts to celebrate it, let alone present it in a positive light, provoke these hostile and scatological responses.

Tim Quinn on January 15, 2007, at 03:11PM – #22

Downtown is the Los Angeles of Los Angeles, meaning it is fashionable to hate it, especially to those who have already missed the boat.

Kenarch on January 15, 2007, at 06:01PM – #23

Hmmm... what's that smell??? It doesn't smell like the "usual Downtown aroma"... Oh - I know - it smells like... sour grapes! Thanks for the laugh, Deven, run along now...

David - I hear ya. I have several friends who thought I was cracked when I told them I'd moved Downtown, but since then,the ones who have been brave enough to come here and visit really like what's going on now. Whaddaya know - there have even been a few from Orange County who realized that the pretty, sanitized, artificially regulated neighborhood they are living in feels bland and boring next to what we have "up here". Even a blind man can supposedly see through a brick wall in time.

Hummina on April 07, 2007, at 12:18PM – #24

I live in downtown LA. Have so for 5 years. I am an artist. I am in my second loft here. Must say the bars experiences are quite festive and spontanous perhaps rivaling many of the hollywood spots. Just a few of the greats are Edison, Golden Gopher, Bar 107, Broadway Bar, etc. And they're are more on the way, they're opening them faster than I can type.

But as an environment, living or otherwise, it's disgusting. Guests unfamiliar with downtown (even living in LA) will be in for quite a shock.

The comments about the urine smell, all true. My good friends rarely visit from hollywood, because they are afraid of the crackheads and have an aversion to the smell. And I agree with them, having lived in other areas of LA. My sense of smell has dwindled since. It's the only way to stay sane. Unless you like piss.

The fringes, though just as rough, seem to have a more mellow crackhead crowd. Slightly less urine and crap smell too. That's right, you see when a crackhead tokes up, it stimulates their bowels like a cup of coffee. The go for it right there. I've stepped over rank smelling human feces on the sidewalk on the darker streets. I saw a guy the other day taking a piss in broad daylight. I could go on and on. This is real. Since there are those who want to be more 'real', there you have it.

David Kennedy on April 07, 2007, at 10:53PM – #25

Me thinks it is unfair of Humm to attribute his social failings on downtown. I'm a little incredulous that he takes at face-value his 'good friends' excuse not to visit him because of the pervasive smell of urine(!) near his home. Sounds like a variation on the old brush-off "I can't go out tonight because I have to wash my hair".

However, in fairness to his 'good friends', a little introspection on Humm's part is in order. I'd hate to be so bold to point it out, but personal hygiene in this day and age is a must. Incontinence is a serious and embarrassing condition. There is medication which can control it. Definitely consult your physician. There are also products which can provide immediate relief.

http://www.magicmedical.com/

http://www.oxytrol.com/

Hope these suggestions help you overcome your social isolation. Good luck. All of us here at blogdowntown are pulling for you.

kenarch on April 08, 2007, at 12:30AM – #26

Yeah, Humm... there are no crackheads in Hollywood after all... Thanks for being part of the solution, pal.

Kenarch on April 08, 2007, at 10:22PM – #27

David... you kill me, man...

Whitman Lam on April 09, 2007, at 10:29AM – #28

This city has made far too many mistakes in the past. We're spending billions, to fix problems that bureaucrats, long since gone, had spilled upon us. Oh those "good ol' days".

The demolition of historic Victorian Homes on Bunker Hill.

The complete dismantling of the Red Car rail transit system, at the hands of Standard Oil and Ford motors.

The concrete desecration of our beloved L.A. river.

The travesty of our so-called "park" at Pershing Square.

The suburban scatter of population, coinciding with the evolution of the Downtown slum, wasteland, homeless haven.

It's just one mistake after another...piled into one big urban screwup ... Now we gotta pay the piper...

Guest on March 06, 2010, at 04:30PM – #29

That is a really nice summary of what downtown is. You managed to catch all the essential aspects of it. Violet