Walking guide · Architecture

Spring Street & the Historic Core

Before the coffee bars, Spring Street was where Los Angeles kept its money. The blocks from roughly 4th to 7th Street are known as the Spring Street Financial District — the “Wall Street of the West” — and they frame every café on this site. This is a short, sourced guide to what you’re looking at.

A financial district, then a loft district

In the first half of the 20th century, the district was the financial centre of Los Angeles. Its bank and office buildings survived in such numbers that the district was added to the National Register of Historic Places on August 10, 1979. Wikipedia describes the street as lined with Beaux Arts buildings, with the district’s styles listed as Chicago, Classical Revival and Moderne.

The second life began in 1998, when developer Tom Gilmore proposed converting the empty office buildings to housing. A 1999 city adaptive reuse ordinance made that easier, and the first building opened in fall 2000. Gilmore called the cluster the Old Bank District — officially bounded in 2004 by 3rd and 6th streets, Los Angeles Street and Spring Street. PBS SoCal’s Hadley Meares notes Gilmore Associates first approached the Community Redevelopment Agency around 1997.

Buildings to look up at

From Wikipedia’s Spring Street article. Other Old Bank District buildings include the Isaias W. Hellman Building, San Fernando Building and Farmers and Merchants Bank Building.

John Parkinson’s street

Parkinson, alone or with partners, designed at least ten buildings in the district, from the 1902 Continental Building to Moderne towers of the late 1920s. He also designed Los Angeles City Hall, just north of the district; blocks near Spring and Temple were cleared in 1925–27 to build it. Other architects whose work lines the street include Morgan, Walls & Morgan, Alfred Rosenheim, Samuel Lunden and Claud Beelman.

A short walk: the 600 block

1. Start at 6th and Spring. The 1961 bank at 600 S. Spring is the outlier among its neighbours — the address once home to CoffeeBar.
2. Look across at the Hotel Hayward (601), then walk south past the Moderne Stock Exchange (618) and E.F. Hutton (623) buildings.
3. Continue to the Banks & Huntley (632) and Barclays Bank (639) buildings.
4. Head back north to 5th Street and the Alexandria Hotel, then up Spring to the Continental Building at 408.

Food and drink, then and now

Meares’ 2014 piece links the district’s restaurant revival — Josef Centeno’s Baco Mercat (2011), Bar Ama and Orsa & Winston — to a much older dining scene of grottos, hotel dining rooms and nearby theatres such as the Orpheum and the Belasco. The coffee bars of 2011, covered in the timeline, were part of the same return.