It’s hard to believe that over 10 years have passed since
I moved my family from the calm suburbs of the San
Fernando Valley to the hustle and bustle of the Historic Core. Being a New York City transplant, the noise,
the close proximity of my neighbors, the mess, and the
lack of coordinated services were not completely foreign to me but rather an adventure of sorts. Spring
Street—now a vibrant center of music, food, art and
fantastically diverse cultures—was still quite deserted
and, yes, a bit scary at night. But with hard work and
the dedication of a myriad of residents, business owners, artists, stakeholders, and increasing community
services, over the last 10 years this great city center
has been “re-growing” by leaps and bounds.
Originally, Spring Street was the “Wall Street of the
West,” the center of the working capital of Los Angeles and the surrounding farmlands and located next to
downtown’s Main Street that offered food, drinks and
lodging, while being flanked on the other side by the
large, intricate theatre district of Broadway. The area
was bustling and moving forward with the times as
electricity became the norm and horse-drawn carriages were replaced with a fantastic streetcar system navigating past the tallest building west of the Mississippi
on the corner of 4th and Spring Streets (The Continental Building).
As decades flew by, it was out with the old and in with
the new. The era of the skyscraper was born. Bunker
Hill’s crumbling Victorians were razed and most business owners wanting to be relevant moved “up the
hill.” Businesses deserted the city center (now known
as the Historic Core) to move into the flashy, modern
new towers being built on Bunker Hill. For the city,
it was deemed as necessary growth, and left behind
were the old towers (cheaper to leave standing, thank
goodness, than tear down) that became “reused”
by squatters, homeless people and starving artists.
These ghost towers combined with the lack of a residential voting community unfortunately created a vast
no-man’s land where the city’s most unfortunate began
to gather and call home. The old Downtown became
known as a “cultural wasteland” and for decades has
been the dark center of the greater city of Los Angeles.
However, times have changed! Now, amid the glittering towers and older Art Deco facades, a youthful-spirited pioneering resurgence has taken hold. A new generation of adventurous chefs, bartenders, loft dwellers,
artists, and developers are creating a neighborhood as
electrifying and cutting edge as the New York I remember. The culturally most attractive area of Los Angeles
is now downtown—a complete reversal of what suburb-living California (and the greater urban U.S.) had