L.A. hasn’t yet built the 100-story skyscraper, but its skyline is growing again

The last time Los Angeles celebrated the completion of its tallest building, one politician christened the moment with a joke about the city’s skyward ambitions at the time.

It was 1989, and the skeleton of the 73-story Library Tower — later the First Interstate World Center, now the US Bank Tower — was completed.

“I thought I told them to build a 100-story building. What happened?” Gilbert Lindsay, then the city councilman for downtown, quipped to The Times.

Back then, the Library Tower capped a skyscraper building boom in downtown Los Angeles that included a crop of new towers on Bunker Hill and in the flats. The rapid development radically altered Los Angeles’ skyline and reflected the roaring economy of those years (around that time, Donald Trump tried and failed to build 125-story tower at the site of the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard).

But the Library Tower also came as Southern California’s economic fortunes were about to change. The aerospace collapse and corporate consolidation would slow and then finally halt the downtown’s vertical growth for years. Downtown’s skyline remained fairly unchanged through the 1990s and early 2000s, before another boom began.

Now the 73-story Wilshire Grand has replaced the Library Tower as Los Angeles’ tallest, at at 1,100 feet. This was made official Saturday with the final installation of a 58-foot, hollow cylinder spire, weighing 20,000 pounds, atop the building.

The Wilshire Grand is still under construction, so the reviews are still to come.

But the Library Tower, for its size and long shadow, arrived with mixed reviews. Civic boosters and many residents loved the tapered tower, designed by I. M. Pei & Partners. But as The Times reported back then, architecture critics had a harsher verdict:

From there the city’s skyline, recently crowned by the tallest building on the West Coast, looked good enough to a group of visiting architecture critics who gathered here Saturday to survey the city’s latest attempts to beautify its downtown.

Up close, however, it was the same old story. Downtown Los Angeles, long a target of disdain by Eastern critics, took it in the chops once again.

“Ordinary,” said Michael Sorkin of the Village Voice. “We’re living in a fairly exciting time. There are some exciting propositions out there,” he said, referring to buildings in other cities. “How come none of them are appearing here?”

Robert Campbell of the Boston Globe replied that certain extraordinary cities, such as Paris, are full of ordinary buildings, but he seemed to find little about this city’s latest face-lift to get excited about.

Campbell said that the downtown’s newest and proudest achievement, the 73-story First Interstate World Center, made for “a pretty eloquent form on the skyline” but from street level was another matter. “I don’t like what I see so far,” Campbell said of the building’s unfinished base.

Back in 1989, Lindsay remained bullish that Los Angeles skyline would reach farther into the skies.

“Before I leave the council, we’re not only going to have a hundred-story building downtown,” he said. “We’re going to have one with a restaurant on top. That will be my restaurant.”

Lindsay died in 1990, just as the Library Tower was beginning to fill with tenants.

shelby.grad@latimes.com

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