A Peek Inside the Park Fifth Sales Center

Excellent photos, guys. I'm impressed with the scale of that model. It really gives an idea of how the structure will fit in with the block. Let's hope it really does get underway soon.

One thing I'm a little baffled about, though, is the big white box on top. It's probably necessary to house equipment and stuff, but it looks out of place.

By the way, in the sales center model unit, are those floors carpet tiles? Solair Wilshire used the same lightboxed image effect for their model unit next door at the Wilshire Collonade.

Cool model. Two things I can see right off the bat;

1) What Rico A mentioned at the crown of the building, it has not articulation in it what so ever and it just doesn't fit the context of the other high rises immediately to the west of Park Fifth.

2) Thatt "urban pathway" because of the street grades may not create the retail that's needed for Metro 417 (Subway Terminal Bldg) And if the treatment of the surfaces are too hard and blank concrete, it simply becomes a glorified urinal.

Overall from looking at the model, the design reminds me of one of my favorite buildngs in LA, the DWP (John Ferraro Building) with it's window facades, scaling, horizontal shades playing off of the vertical mass the only difference is here they're using the horizontalals for balconies and the balconies handrails define the facades.

Did anyone representing Park Fifth have anything to say regards how many units have been reserved to date?

hello out there - i worked on the schematic design package for two years on the teo towers project. I also worked on the sales center that the pictures depict. the sales center is exactly that, just a depiction of what the potential is for the higher up units. Look closely and you can see the brace frames for the Gas Tower building. The light boxes were a nightmare, but they turned out ok. It will be a great project, as it had great people behind it, but now the owners cheaped out and went with some no name architects to finish it up. Good luck, that site is a nightmare with the subway below, exiting a residential high rise is really rough, and the costs will escalate into a billion $$$$$ if they arent careful. Oh yeah, do you whink you would hear the bad music a pershing square if you lived there?

"that site is a nightmare with the subway below"

I recall saying this when the project was first announced. Glad to see someone else agrees.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to see such a tower (and such a pool!) but believe the engineering of the pit alone for the proposed structure at that site will make it cost prohibitive.

Guess we'll all know when the digging starts.

If it goes forward, it'll be interesting to see how close they excavate to Parkinson's building. I doubt that the subway lobby level occupies the full width of Hill St. Perhaps they could extend their basement out beneath the public right of way, to the wall of the subway station. Looking at their website, one gets the impression that the lower tower (against Olive) will be part hotel and part condo.

If this doesn't get underway soon, I imagine that it will be abandoned in light of the declining real estate market. Which would be a shame, because it looks like a great residence.

I so don't see this project going away. That corner needs this building. I think I'll take a second job to start saving up for the down payment.

The neat part is that Alex and I could get a unit, and then every time my parent comes to town...Dad can stay in a room at the hotel in the same building.

The Auditorium Theater on this site had the best acoustic quality of any venue in southern California previous to the construction of the Ambassador in Pasadena. Interesting that the winner of the design competition for the theater/office building had been in competition with his former boss (a distant relative as well), Louis Sullivan. At the time of construction, the complex was the world's largest reinforeced concrete project; the Hayward Hotel was built concurrently at Sixth and Spring, also designed in reinforced concrete by the same architect who a few years earlier had abandoned his family in New Mexico, moved to California and set up an office down the hall from Edward Doheny in the Douglas Building. Photos of the office building show skylights on the original shed roof. Would skylights have been used for lighting storage space in the daytime? If not, the top floor office space must have been something to behold, with light pouring down through (carverd?) beams and rafters. The facade was a fantasy which you'd have thought that only Sullivan and Julia Morgan could dream up. One of D.W. Griffith's great films, either 'Intolerance' or 'Birth of a Nation' had it's world premiere in the theater. Other than sending financial support, Charles Whittlesey had totally cut himself off from his children in New Mexico.

When is the ground-breaking and, better yet, why hasn't it already begun?

I'm not a big fan of that design. A modern glass condo tower just dwarfing the historic Gas Company lofts. Talk about anachronistic. I wish there was some more space between the two residential buildings. The model looks like they almost touch, and the contrast of historic and hi-tech seems very drab.

that's not the gas co. lofts, it's the title guarantee building.

Hello, I've been involved with Park Fifth.

1) The funding has already been secured for this project, the design is complete, the general contractor has been secured for 2 years, and the sales office is already operational.

2) The project breaks ground in the Spring of 2008.

3) The big white box on the top of the tall tower encloses three mechanical levels and there is a helicopter platform on top of that.

4) Responce to Benjamin Puzzilo & insider - They are excavating 6 floors into the ground for parking where they will excavate and demolish the historic trolley subway line station AND the remains from the original LA Philharmonic Building that was demolished and buried at the site. This is figured into the construction cost. Yes it will be a MAJOR part of the project, but that is why we have engineers and planners.

5) In responce to TIm - THe declining real estate market is over the housing market as a whole. Howeverm Downtown LA is one of the fastest growing high demant areas for real estate in the country right now. If you look around, you see people moving into downtown in hoards. They can't building buildings fast enough for the demand.

Downtown Resident: Although I'm excited about this project, I am also of the opinion that it could easily vanish due to the effects of the current subprime crash. This is what folks meant when they said 'Just wait til that bubble bursts' and 'what goes up must come down' with regard to the housing boom. Yes, LA is seeing a new boom downtown and on the entire east side in general (east LA is the next Silverlake/Echo Park, mark my words) but I predict that within 2 years downtown lofts will be selling for about 20% cheaper than today. The downtown boom was made possible by subprime lending- how else do you think these hipsters and newly minted architects/young professionals got in downtown? That same demographic won't be getting any loans beyond the current period and you'll see a drop in the number of people moving downtown. DTLA will likely be slightly more middle class than we thought last year.