Ugly Broadway Facades

i thought the conservancy's broadway initiative was working on facade improvement.

it's looked to me like the building on corner of 5th and broadway (diagonal from rite aid) has been taking down the signs on the facade, and uncovering some ironwork.

i'm no expert but many buildings downtown have had facade replacement because the owners have thought the original facade looks old and dated. that screen thing on cliftons, while ugly and uninspiring, does give the building a more "modern" feel than what is underneath. go look at the building on the NE corner of 6th and olive. same thing. maybe i'll do a short posting about that so you can see before and after shots.

of course, the mother of all facade replacements downtown is the pacific center.

that one might be a little hard to undo, though.

E,

nice work.

My theory on the uuugly modernist facades is that it was the last gasp of the dying downtown of pre-freeway days. The merchants were struggling hard to get people to stick around and buy. They looked at the modern buildings sprouting up along Wilshire and tried to re-make their fronts to look like that.

It got more and more absurd, with building owners covering nice average red brick buildings with shingles or just corrugated steel. Sad, really, because that wasn't going to change anything and it really uglified nice old buildings.

The upside is that alot of detail is still under there waiting to be uncovered. I love to see these facades coming back.

My (least) favorite example is the one diagonally across from Bert Green's place. It is a porn palace and junky infested fast food joint that looks like a huge semi-trailer sitting there. I am certain that there is a nice looking building under there, not a classic, probably, but a serviceable red brick structure that would do much more for the area than what is there now. Not to mention the junkies.

i believe tim is talking about this building. given the development happening along main street (including lots of action at the canadian building recently), it seems inevitable that the fast-food-and-porn building will change.

Well, since I'm in charge of the facade grants, let me address this very issue... We gave 7 grants: Chester Williams (NE corner, 5th and Bway), Jewelry Trades (SE corner, 5th & Bway), Roxie Theatre, Bway Spring Arcade Building, Orpheum, Eastern Columbia, and Ninth and Broadway bldg. (NE corner, 9th and Bway).

I personally TRIED to get Clifton's to apply for a grant to take off the metal grille and restore the original facade, some of which is still under there and visible from the inside of the cafeteria on the upper floors. The problem is that Clifton's doesn't own the building - and the owners are not in LA.

In any case, the grants address a variety of things happening to the facades of these buildings, including washing them - which perhaps show most clearly right now if you look at the Chester Williams, which is currently 2-tone since they have not yet finished. Who knew the building was white under all that grime? Other things include paint, facade lighting, neon repair, and new signage and storefronts. Again, watch the Chester Williams as the beautiful historic metal grillwork is exposed and rehabbed over the next month.

Also, we gave a grant to both the Globe Theatre (Morosco) and the Tower to fix their marquees and signage, so keep your eye peeled for that work to happen as well.

In any case - we are always in search of more grant money to be able to give these folks to fix up their buildings. I am hoping that as more and more facade rehabs happen, the owners will start to do this on their own, simply because it looks great and enhances the value of their building and the district as a whole... but I'm an optimist by nature! :)

Keep up the great work, Trudi! Do you have any insight as to what is going on with the old Blackstone department store?

Downtown will be a lot better off with people like Trudi and their efforts.

One reason things plummeted in the first place, such as the storefronts on Broadway, was because of tons of apathy and not enough nitpicking and fussing by people in the community. Therefore, downtown LA became the official example of Armpit USA, and merely confirmed people's suspicion that the city deserved to be graded well below the traditionally celebrated towns and cities of this country or elsewhere.

I'd noticed a lot of this kind of activity over the past few months and the results so far are excellent. I hadn't realized the efforts were due to the Conservancy. Great work. I noticed where I live the lobby of the building was restored to its original look.

As for Clifton's and the lack of response from the owners, why not contact the mayor's office? Get them send out a letter requesting the owner's participate. Then have Villaraigosa (sic?) place a call to the owner. Might take him five minutes. The letterhead of the mayor of Los Angeles might get a response.

Just a thought.

The reason there was "not enough nitpicking and fussing by people in the community" was that until recently, there WAS NO COMMUNITY. That is, nobody lived downtown. That is, nobody with any political power. Now that people other than poverty-stricken homeless people (and let me be clear, I'd like to see them helped out, not pushed out) are living here, i.e., people that pay taxes, maybe we can leverage some of that political and monetary power to make downtown a little bit nicer for everyone's sake. Then maybe we can throw all those stupid cliches about L.A. (there's no city there, just a large collection of suburbs) on the dung heap.

Trudi wrote: "Well, since I'm in charge of the facade grants, let me address this very issue... We gave 7 grants: Chester Williams (NE corner, 5th and Bway), Jewelry Trades (SE corner, 5th & Bway), Roxie Theatre, Bway Spring Arcade Building, Orpheum, Eastern Columbia, and Ninth and Broadway bldg. (NE corner, 9th and Bway).

I personally TRIED to get Clifton's to apply for a grant to take off the metal grille and restore the original facade, some of which is still under there and visible from the inside of the cafeteria on the upper floors. The problem is that Clifton's doesn't own the building - and the owners are not in LA."

Well, the news this week was that Clifton's bought the building. So now that they own it, maybe they will be in a better position to renovate the structure, or at least its facade. I've got to imagine that unless there is major interior damage (which there may be), it might be possible to even pull off a residential conversion of the upper floors.

Much of the cool old log facade is still under the building and could easily be uncovered.