Old Becomes New in the Changing Face of Downtown

Out on the eastern fringe of downtown Los Angeles, down by the Los Angeles River, Hagop Sargisian stands in the middle of one of the city’s most forbidding pieces of urban detritus, the long-abandoned Santa Fe railroad shipping center.

A quarter-mile long and maybe 10 yards wide, the poured-concrete building, dating to 1906, is covered in graffiti. Roll-up doors, made of corrugated metal, are ripped and battered, some creaking in the wind.

This is the future of Los Angeles, Sargisian says, standing on the concrete platform, looking out at a weed-strewn lot.

Long the butt of jokes and the bane of urban theorists, downtown Los Angeles is in the throes of a major transformation--one that few people could have predicted, and one that most Angelenos are probably unaware of. Even as it loses its traditional role as the site of corporate headquarters, downtown is alive with development and rippling with change.

But although the image of downtown centers on the gleaming skyline of Bunker Hill high-rises, much of the action these days is on downtown’s scruffier east side, long since written off as a victim of blight and neglect.

“I think what was considered the tail of the dog--the artistic, industrial, funkier side of it--is now wagging the dog,” said Will Fleissig, an urban planner and developer in Denver who formerly taught at UCLA and helped write Los Angeles’ downtown strategic plan.

There is a sense, expressed by Fleissig and others who have long fretted about downtown, that it may finally be maturing as a vibrant center in which to live, work and play.

For instance, the Santa Fe shipping yard is about to be transformed into the campus of SCI-Arc, the Southern California Institute of Architecture, which is abandoning its Marina del Rey warehouse for downtown.

As envisioned by Sargisian, a developer who played a part in the revival of Old Pasadena, it will soon include loft apartments, a bookshop and maybe even a supermarket. The long Santa Fe building will become studios and meeting space for the school, which will anchor one end of an emerging loft district around 3rd and Santa Fe streets.

“You have about 2,000 people living around here, and this is really going to rejuvenate the neighborhood,” Sargisian said.

It’s just one little corner, but Sargisian sees it as part of a downtown rebirth.

A few blocks away, from outside the Midnight Mission on 4th and Los Angeles streets, the familiar Bunker Hill skyline rises in the middle foreground, so close and yet--as its pinnacles nearly fade into the midsummer haze--so immeasurably far.

Up there, in towers of steel and glass, the haves work in a white-collar, air-conditioned, digitally enhanced world.

Down here, in the center of the nation’s largest skid row, are the have-nots, some scurrying to make a buck, some resigned to drink and destitution. English conversation mixes with Spanish, Mandarin and Cantonese. The smell of urine rises from the sidewalks where thousands sleep each night. Here are some of society’s hard-core losers, sprawled on the fetid sidewalk, drawing gulps from brown paper sacks and making drug deals.

But sharing the same streets is the downtown toy district, which has grown from a few small companies a decade ago to a nearly $1-billion-a-year industry.

To the south and east, in surroundings that Hollywood movie makers love for their hard urban edges, are the equally successful fashion, flower and produce districts. Together, they help make downtown Los Angeles the most industrialized big city downtown in the nation.

To the west, largely abandoned Beaux Arts buildings--survivors of the knock-’em-down school of urban renewal in the 1960s--are being turned into residential lofts and homes for high-tech businesses. Thanks largely to the efforts of a single developer, Tom Gilmore, the old historical core of downtown is considered ripe for a residential real estate boom.

And Bunker Hill? Widely viewed as a disaster of urban planning, the hilltop skyscraper district on the west side of downtown is no longer home to a single Fortune 500 company.

Although Bunker Hill is not exactly in decline--occupancy rates have bounced back from the recession of the early 1990s--it’s not the epicenter it once was.

The highest rents downtown aren’t in luxury Bunker Hill high-rises, where monthly rates are slightly more than $2 per square foot. Rather, they are in Santee Alley, the bustling, but hardly tony, heart of the fashion district, where landlords are raking in as much as $8 a square foot, according to David Zoraster, an appraiser with CB Richard Ellis.

That is part of the downtown that by the 1930s had evolved into “a very traditional city center,” said Donald Spivak, deputy administrator of the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles.

Seventh Street was the region’s commercial hub; Broadway its entertainment mecca; Spring Street was known (along with Montgomery Street in San Francisco) as the “Wall Street of the West.” Farther north, a civic center was emerging near the site of the old pueblo, and, to the west, Bunker Hill, once home to the city’s rich, was beginning a slow slide into poverty, its Victorian mansions subdivided into rooming houses.

How World War II Changed Everything

But there were signs that downtown would not remain traditional. Major cultural institutions--UCLA, the Pasadena Playhouse, the Hollywood Bowl--were built outside the city center. A major new industry--the movies--sprang up in Hollywood.

And then came World War II, which changed everything.

A massive defense industry sprang up overnight--again, outside of downtown. Defense workers moved close to jobs. At the end of the war, veterans flocked to Southern California, settling into new housing tracts that took advantage of the region’s greatest asset--open land. A network of roads and, eventually, freeways helped the city leapfrog across the map.

“With real estate companies fostering the centrifugal movement, Los Angeles became a city without a center,” wrote Carey McWilliams in “Southern California: An Island on the Land.”

By 1971, when the British architecture critic Reyner Banham wrote an influential study called “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies,” he could relegate downtown to a back-of-the-book chapter called “A Note on Downtown,” wryly adding, “because that is all it deserves.” Downtown, he wrote, “began to disintegrate long ago--out of sheer irrelevance as far as one can see.”

From her 10th floor corner office at 6th and Olive streets, Carol Schatz can see the once and future downtown.

Below her lies Pershing Square, one of the world’s least appealing urban parks, whose grand past suggests there is at least potential for its future. A little north sits the Subway Terminal Building, one of many older office buildings being converted into apartments.

To the west, the old Bank of California building is being transformed into a trendy hotel; other older office buildings are being rented as warehouses for telecommunications equipment.

To the north, the towers of Bunker Hill rise from the blocks where an entire Victorian residential district was leveled in the 1960s, in one of the most sweeping--some say tragic--urban renewal projects in the nation.

“Looking at where we have been and where we are going, this is now downtown’s opportunity to live up to the potential and the opportunity that we think exist,” said Schatz, who is the president and chief executive officer of the Central City Assn. of Los Angeles, a powerful group that represents downtown business interests.

It may be true, she said, that downtown is just one among many important regional centers in Southern California. But, she said, “I think that no matter how many centers you have, you have to have your cultural and historical center. In my opinion, the only way this city is going to see itself as a real city is to have a vibrant downtown.

“Up to now,” she added, “this city has been defined by a beach, two theme parks and the Hollywood sign.”

Schatz sees her bailiwick being transformed into a culturally charged, pedestrian-friendly, economically vital center where people of all races and social positions can live and work.

Staples Center has helped, she said, by bringing thousands of new people a day into downtown during basketball and hockey season.

The new Roman Catholic cathedral and the new Disney Concert Hall--the future home of the L.A. Philharmonic, scheduled to open in 2002--should have a huge impact as well.

Traditional corporate headquarters--Security Pacific, Arco, Times Mirror--are disappearing. But other businesses are moving in, including an old stranger, the film industry, which has established a beachhead at the new Los Angeles Center Studios, just west of the Harbor Freeway.

Already, Schatz said, downtown restaurants report sharply increased business since Staples Center opened. The many residential projects underway should ensure downtown’s transformation.

“It’s a community,” she said, “and I think it’s a more vibrant community than people give it credit for.”

Alice Callaghan also uses words such as “vibrant” and “community” to describe downtown Los Angeles. But her downtown and Schatz’s downtown might as well exist in parallel universes.

“We, in a sense, do have a vibrant downtown,” said Callaghan, founder and director of Las Familias del Pueblo, a day care center on East 7th Street in Skid Row for the children of poor, working parents. “It’s just that it’s for the poor.”

Callaghan, a former nun who is now an ordained Episcopal priest, has been working on behalf of the poor and homeless in downtown for nearly two decades. Thanks to her and others, Los Angeles boasts an extraordinary network of about 40 renovated single-room-occupancy hotels that offer clean, safe and attractive housing to the poorest of the poor. But she sees that as just the start, and bemoans the talk of turning the historic core of downtown, just west of skid row, into trendy, mixed-income housing.

“They keep insisting on coming into a neighborhood and renovating scarce and, I would say, irreplaceable housing in order to serve people who have no need and no interest in living downtown,” she said.

Poor people need downtown housing, she said. For one thing, many of them work downtown in garment sweatshops and other industrial jobs, and can’t afford cars. Middle class people have no reason to want to live downtown, she said, and if, for some reason they decided to, they wouldn’t be able to stand living amid poverty.

But real estate developers say that there is a large and rising demand for downtown housing, and that the kind of people who want to live downtown are precisely those who don’t mind living next to the poor.

“What we’re finding now is that the thirtysomethings and fortysomethings, people who want to experience the quality of urbanity--really want to have something of an edgy urban existence,” said Ira Yellin, a developer who is best known for renovating two downtown landmarks, the Bradbury Building and the Grand Central Market. “My own belief is that this whole area will become very, very residential.”

A Transportation Center Already

Los Angeles is growing. People are getting tired of driving hours from home to work. It seems to be inevitable that the city will have to start infilling, as the process is called, and where better to start than downtown?

Among other things, Yellin said, downtown fulfills one important role of a city center: It is a transportation hub, ringed by freeways and served by the subway and a light rail line. The new Red Line subway extension connects downtown with the San Fernando Valley, and a planned Blue Line train will run to Pasadena.

Yellin has no patience with Callaghan’s arguments. “You don’t want to ghettoize any group of people, including the poor,” he said.

One last point: Los Angeles is not New York. That may seem obvious, but it is worth noting in any discussion of downtown, which can never be the sort of urban center that, say, midtown Manhattan is.

Downtown Los Angeles has about 32 million square feet of office space; midtown Manhattan alone has nearly 300 million. About 250,000 people work in downtown Los Angeles; Manhattan counts its work force in the millions.

Its boosters talk about making downtown Los Angeles more like Manhattan--livelier, more vibrant, more cultured, more urban. But downtown Los Angeles can no more become Manhattan than Brooklyn can morph itself into Malibu.

Another reality check:

* A recent survey of people who live within an eight-mile radius of downtown found that nearly four in 10 had not set foot downtown once in the preceding year.

* A list of the 20 most popular tourist attractions in Los Angeles County included precisely zero downtown.

* When the Los Angeles Business Journal recently issued its annual list of L.A. County’s 100 largest public companies, only two--Guess Inc., the jeans maker, and Maxicare Health Plans--had headquarters downtown.

* More than 20% of downtown’s office space remains vacant.

* The most reliable growth industry downtown is government, hardly the best catalyst for an urban revival.

Still, to Charles Woo, downtown L.A. has advantages that other cities can only dream of. Woo is the man who built Toytown, as the toy district is sometimes called. The chief executive officer of Megatoys, a major importer and distributor, he was the first of many entrepreneurs to take advantage of downtown’s attributes as a trade triangle: Toys are imported from Asia to Los Angeles, then sold to buyers from not only the United States but Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.

Woo knows Hong Kong, his native city, and he knows New York. What’s different about downtown Los Angeles, he said, is that it is not just an office center, but an industrial and transportation hub.

“When you look at real estate, what’s the hottest real estate downtown? It’s industrial real estate,” he asked. “In a place like New York, you might make a deal, you shake someone’s hand, you sign papers. But in L.A., you make a deal and the trucks come in and move out.”