Currently showing: "The Historic Core" 

Photographs by Tom Zimmerman

Los Angeles has the most intact pre-World War II central city in the United States. Until Wilshire Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard started to expand in the 1920s and ‘30s, Downtown Los Angeles was the center of government, retail outlets, entertainment, business, law and religion for the City of Angels. Main Street was working class retail and entertainment. Spring Street was “the Wall Street of the West”. Broadway was the Women’s Street – home to the finest shops, restaurants and movie palaces. 

Downtown Art Walk October 12, 2006

After the war the city continued its centrifugal spread away from the historic core. The only thing that stayed downtown was city government. While the rest of the United States was happily tearing down their central cities in the 1960s and ‘70s, downtown Los Angeles remained intact because there was little reason to demolish anything. No one wanted to relocate their business or law firm downtown so why tear down buildings to erect new ones? Spring, Broadway and Hill Streets remained intact but largely empty. Main Street became a series of parking lots. 

Big changes in the 21^st century. Tom Gilmore used his Old Bank District to prove the if you bought a bunch of buildings, repaired the exterior and gutted the interiors to turn them into apartments, people would actually move into downtown Los Angeles. Lots of developers have followed his lead, turning scores of empty buildings into homes for thousands of people. 

“The Historic Core” is a work in progress. It is part of a quarter century project to record the historic structures of downtown and their transformation from abandoned, archaic office spaces to housing and from white elephant movie palaces to eye popping multi- use facilities. It is one of the great L.A. stories that through the simple fact that no one wanted the ground the historic buildings sat on, that they were there when the preservation pendulum swung back and they were seen as valuable properties. “The Historic Core” celebrates these buildings.