The New Old: or, Urban Renewal and the Architecture of Appropriation

On the edge of the country in “edgy” downtown Los Angeles, the AIA boldly proclaimed the theme of the 2006 convention: Architecture on the Edge. Thousands of architects descended from all corners of the country to the Los Angeles Convention Center for a weekend to gaze off the edge into the abyss of the future.
But the abyss was really a lake, and what they were seeing was the tortured reflection of a forgotten city.
To be on the edge of something means that it has been traversed. It implies an accumulation of memory. It means experience. It means history. A future without history is a dream. A future with history is politics. And a future with counterfeit history is architecture. For the architect, the past is only as good as it fits an agenda for the future. The architect rationalizes the dream (the future without history) with history to justify it and distort the lens through which we gaze. We call it “Vision” and charge a premium.
It was this history that was told over the weekend.

Urban Next
So what is the future of LA? Moderated by Chris Hawthorne, writer for the Los Angeles Times, a panel made up of Eric Moss, Architect, Jan Perry, Councilwoman, Tom Gilmore, Developer, and Stephanos Polyzoides, Architect and Urbanist, sought to set the record straight. As a proclaimed New Urbanist, Polyzoides sees Los Angeles as a failure. For him, urban sprawl and the freeway system destroyed the city, creating an homogenous ooze without center or boundary, character or direction. By looking to history for urban ideas and architectural forms, Polyzoides believes that we can re-plan our cities and fix the problems that we have created through our disorganization.
On the other side of the literal and metaphorical table sat Eric Moss, who, while acknowledging failures of the city, sees LA as a great experiment in city planning, or perhaps a city without planning. LA, he states, is an exporter, not an importer, of ideas, culture, architecture, and urbanity. LA, he believes, has very unique needs, and therefore designs that may have proven successful in other places and times, however one may judge success, cannot work in LA. Our history, our geography, our economy, our culture is not in line with New York or Boston or Paris or London or Berlin. Therefore, we should not design our city as such. Instead, we should acknowledge our failures and use them to generate new solutions. Massive transportation infrastructure, while in some ways detrimental for the city and environment, could be seen as foundations for new development. The LA River, for example, could be a place of new development for housing, retail, and recreation. For him, history is relevant in as much as it can be rewritten to suit our current use.
As an import from New York, Tom Gilmore provided another historical perspective and vision for the future for Los Angeles. Gilmore has made his business in LA in urban redevelopment, buying old, empty buildings and remodeling them into housing, restaurant, and retail spaces. Though his presentation was filled with historical photographs of downtown, history, or rather, an historical context of architecture, is meaningless to him. Architecture as he sees it, is nothing more than infrastructure. It may be re-appropriated for different uses, regardless of original intent. Form is divorced from program, and refill becomes the language through which architecture is expressed.



Downtown
It is easy to see the draw of downtown for its new residents and the cause for celebration among politicians, planners, and developers. For many, a downtown revitalization is the culmination of years of dreams and disappointments, since the first city-dweller packed up and left for the comforts of the suburb. Today, Downtown, with its history, romance, and diversity, seems the idyllic place for a renewed expression of urbanity and culture. But it is not enough to get people to visit downtown; the real success comes only in keeping people downtown—to make it their neighborhood and a worthwhile investment. It is the ‘artist’s loft’ that is the mechanism for this transformation: rooted in history, grungy and provocative, it presents an ‘anti-suburb’, a place for the expression of a new generation of white-collar workers raised on the streets of suburbia.
The interest in the loft began in 1999, with the passing of Los Angeles’ “adaptive reuse ordinance,” responsible for relaxed parking, zoning, and seismic-safety rules to allow historic buildings to be converted into residential spaces . This was a substantial opportunity for developers, who had long had their eyes on the cheap commercial high-rises of historic downtown, as places to create new ‘lofts,’ billed in the Los Angeles Times as “apartments with the high ceilings and big windows favored by the young and the restless.” Tom Gilmore, a landscape architect-turned-developer, opened the first of these projects in the Old Bank District in 2000 with three building conversions—the Continental, the Hellman, and the San Fernando—along 4th Street at Main and Spring Streets, bordering skid row . These buildings total 240 lofts with retail space at street level, including shops and restaurants, and cost a total of $37 million—monies acquired through city loans and a federally guaranteed mortgage . Despite setbacks and cost overruns, the project was a huge success, selling out all units and generating a substantial waiting list.
Other developers were quick to jump on the loft boom. Of a potential fifty historic buildings qualified for loft conversions, forty-four are at or near completion . Candidates are former offices, factories, and hotels, stripped down of their numerous refinishes and scraped clean of years of neglect, revealing an “innate charm of these old buildings designed in beaux-arts, renaissance revival, and 15th-century Florentine palazzo-inspired architectural styles” . So successful were the initial building sales and conversions that the city once again expanded conversion codes to include post-1974 construction . This change in code paved the way for unlikely conversions—Modernist curtain-wall office blocks devoid of much of the charm and history of the older Historic Core structures. All in all, 4,487 units are being built, with permits granted for another 1,383 .
But the loft boom is not confined to existing-building conversions, and a clear ‘loft typology’ has emerged. Many ground-up developments are happening along Grand Avenue and Figueroa, a short distance from the Staples Center, modeled after the historic conversions taking place to the north. These new structures are described by Dan Mies of the Urban Land Institute as:
‘vertical lofts,’ preferred by young, creative urban dwellers, who are looking for flexibility, volume, and durable design. In response to that market, high-rise loft buildings with raw concrete frame structures and floor-to-ceiling glass are being developed. The units are flexible, with few interior partitions, and have industrial finishes and fixtures, and higher-than-average ceilings. The advantage of this more Spartan approach to finishes is that the money once spent on fake Mediterranean detailing can now go to upgraded, professional-quality kitchens and higher-quality interior materials. Architecturally, these buildings fit in well with the context of downtown.

Quoted in the Los Angeles Times, Andrew Meieran, owner of a 1910 high-rise-cum-loft said “I’ve seen people building some [new developments] from scratch that are actually more industrial-looking than the ones we’re building, which is always weird.” .
Only in its ability to create an image and generate hype has the urban loft been a success, much in the same way that the suburbs attracted people out of Downtown in the forties and fifties. Suburbs were the victory of private industry—developers buying massive tracts of land for pennies, subdividing them and selling them—houses, yards, and the American Dream. It was up to the family to ‘accessorize,’ to fill up the empty house with all of the goods required by a successful and ambitious American family.
It is not difficult to see the parallels to the current situation. Ultimately, the renewal of downtown is the privatization of public space and policy—gentrification accomplished under the guise of the public good. Through an examination of its history, I will demonstrate how the privatization and branding of downtown is both responsible for and symptomatic of the corporate urbanism that has shaped Los Angeles. Corporate urbanism is the city as an extension of private equity, market forces, and corporate image, manifest in public policy and built form. Corporate urbanism, therefore, is a language and a truth, a codified and enforceable mechanism for self-perpetuation and the generation of wealth.
Ultimately, this brand of planning is anti-historical. It corrupts and rewrites an history to make itself more relevant, more accepted. It is a marketing tool, manipulating images of the past and of the present, with the aim of creating both nostalgia and excitement. In doing so, it masks the real issues of the place, telling a selective history to a select audience, destroying the diversity of the place and its constituents.

Homogenization
In the 1920s, downtown was the burgeoning financial center of the Western United States, home to some of the largest corporations of the day, companies like Union Oil, Pacific Mutual Life Insurance, Southern California Edison, Security-First National Bank, and the Pacific Electric Railway . Spring Street was the “Wall Street of the West,” home to the biggest banks that were responsible for financing the city’s future in film, manufacturing, and construction. By 1930, one-fourth of Los Angeles’ male workforce, over 100,000 men, held white-collar jobs in the crowded high-rises of the city . Clark Davis describes this environment and the people who created it in an essay, The View from Spring Street: “In a society which held economic autonomy and occupational independence as the very measures by which one became a man,” the white-collar office job was seen as “an appropriate starting point in a young man’s career…” . But the people between the walls of the Old Bank District were not just anyone, according to Davis:
Rather than seeing a massive population from which to recruit employees, [employers] looked down from their offices onto a community that they divided into explicit categories of desirable and undesirable applicants. Leaders had a distinct vision of the kinds of men they wanted to hire for white-collar “career” positions, and in their considerations, experience, training, and skills were not the only important items. Officials began with fundamental conceptions about what kind of people would best suit corporate interests, and, more often than not, these reflected dominant constructions of gender, race, and ethnicity.

Employers looked to establish a corporate culture that reinforced an image of stability and success, and the selection, training, and environment of the worker were the means by which this was executed. In many cases, this resulted in simple racism.
In the chapter “Docile Bodies” of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, this idea of selection and training as an assertion of power is explained in what Foucault describes as ‘docility’: “A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved.” Central to the creation of ‘docility’ is discipline:
Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience). In short, it dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into an ‘aptitude,’ a ‘capacity’, which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of energy, the power that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection. If economic exploitation separates the force and the product of labour, let us say that disciplinary coercion establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased domination.

Through discrimination in the selection of employees and the subsequent codification of attire and behavior in the white-collar environment, employers were able to subjugate their employees, making them ‘docile.’ The very phrase, “white-collar,” as well as the associations of its wearer and environment, is a direct result of this assertion of corporate power over culture, manifesting itself in the very dress of its constituency. Furthermore, the distinction of “white-collar” from “blue-collar” creates an hierarchy, defining white-collar workers by what they are not. Played out in the offices of Spring Street, this was an assertion of power and the establishment of the corporation as the dominant force in city life in Los Angeles. But at the root of this was a desire to homogenize the corporation to make it more regular, more efficient, and less controversial. By controlling the race, behavior, and attire of the worker, these corporations were able to extend their control past the workspace and into the home.
But the notion of docility extends beyond the individual and the disciplinary entity beyond the corporation. In this manner, corporate architecture was able to reach beyond the local building and into the universal planning of the city. Foucault describes architecture as an agent in the disciplining of the body in four terms:
1. Discipline sometimes requires an enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself. It is the protected place of disciplinary monotony…
2. But the principle of ‘enclosure’ is neither constant, nor indispensable, nor sufficient in disciplinary machinery. This machinery works space in a much more flexible and detailed way. It does this first of all on the principle of elementary location of partitioning. Each individual has his own place, and each place its individual…Disciplinary space tends to be divided into as many sections as there are bodies or elements to be distributed…
3. The rule of functional sites would gradually, in the disciplinary institutions, code a space that architecture generally left at the disposal of several different uses…
4. In discipline, the elements are interchangeable, since each is defined by the place it occupies in a series, and by the gap that separates it from the others. The unit is, therefore, neither the territory (unit of domination), nor the place (unit of residence), but the rank: the place one occupies in a classification…

This provides ample description of the offices of the 1920s, homogenous spaces akin to factory floors with desks describing personal enclosures and the placement of these desks an indication of rank. Regardless of program or branding, the office buildings of the twenties were essentially the same—reinforced concrete-frame or steel-frame structures with large, operable windows to provide natural light and ventilation. Differentiation occurred on the exterior as façade as ornament. Tom Gilmore, owner and developer of three historic buildings, says of them, “they were conceived within a traditional Beaux-Arts template that was very predictable in their time. No matter how unique they seem today, they actually belong to a stamped-out architectural custom.”
The ghosts of 1920s Spring Street still inhabit the buildings, as do Foucault’s disciplines of individuals in space. Ideas of enclosure, partitioning, functional sites, and rank are all prevalent in the current loft typology. Buildings, after they are stripped down to their most essential elements, are re-partitioned along Foucauldian ideas, “an old architectural and religious method: the monastic cell. Even if the compartments it assigns become purely ideal, the disciplinary space is always, basically, cellular.” Describing cubicles of lofts, this description holds true. With the loft, the inside is left empty except for essential infrastructure—a kitchen and a bathroom—lacking interior partitions or conventional (suburban) finishes with the idea that the user appropriates it to his/her different needs. It is meant to be a place for freedom and expression with the flexibility required by an artist. But homogeneity is re-enforced through the construction of the ideal loft—oftentimes a real ‘model’ that is kept maintained but unoccupied at all times within the building—a marketing and imaging strategy.
Furthermore, an image is created and marketed by the romanticizing of these loft spaces as being different from the typical Los Angeles dwelling and more like the lofts of the New York art scene of the 1970s and ‘80s. One only needs to look at the marketing materials and websites of Downtown lofts to see this. On the website for the Higgins Building, a 1910 office block on 2nd Street and Main Street, an animation describes the spaces as “New York Lofts,” with “LA Style.” An advertisement for the Pacific Electric Lofts on 6th Street and Main Street tout an “urban haven of culture and attitude…the history of your making” . The website for the Roosevelt Lofts on 7th Street and Flower go one step further, describing the building as providing “urban living, resort lifestyle” . Whatever the advertisement, the idea is to romanticize the city and sell a lifestyle, historical context aside.
Originally, the architecture of these spaces was an attempt to subjugate employees, done in conjunction with discipline enforced by the discrimination and codification of individuals, resulting in a homogenous army of white-collar workers and consumers. Today, as these spaces are refilled, a similar attempt at corporate discipline is occurring, the mechanism no longer the profession but the lifestyle. In the twenties, the bait was what Clark Davis described as “ ‘rags to respectability and riches’ ideal of American culture” . Today, it is the downtown described in the LA Times as a “vibrant center in which to live, work, and play.” The commercialized loft typology is an assertion of discipline. It is an idealization and branding of a respected and mysterious cultural figurehead—the artist—the seeming antithesis of industry, marketing, and suburban comforts. It is thus a perfect guise under which to re-privatize downtown, giving credence to a new housing boom that is filling the coffers of developers.

Discrimination
The grips of corporate urbanism extend beyond the enclosure and into the street. Essential to any downtown revitalization, according to many of the developers responsible for it, is the creation of an active and vibrant streetscape where pedestrians can wander and shop and eat and play. Ultimately, the goal is the creation of the ‘24-hour downtown’ {read ‘Manhattan’}. But LA is not Manhattan—it doesn’t have its geography, history, or society. Rather, LA makes its own history, recycling images of itself through a vast Hollywood image factory that imports ideas and culture, reprocesses it, and distributes it until the translation is more real than the input. It is therefore not surprising that the model for ‘Manhattanizing’ downtown is appropriated from the suburbs. In an article in the Los Angeles Times about Mark Weinstein, the developer responsible for the megadevelopment ‘Santee Court,’ a collection of lofts, condominiums, and retail spaces, such an urban strategy is discussed:
Standing atop one of his buildings, at 746 Los Angeles, Weinstein looks down on the alley that connects the structures (he owns it, too). Where I see loading docks, small parking lots and windblown litter, he sees a cobblestone way lined with hip cafes, bars and shops that open all the way through to Los Angeles Street. He sees a courtyard area with landscaping and a fountain. “Like the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica,” he says. “Like Old Town Pasadena.” Santee Court will succeed because it provides its own critical mass, while adding to the slowly accreting mass destined to explode in a blaze of resident-friendly redevelopment throughout downtown.

Weinstein, who has developed 3 million square feet worth of residential and commercial property (including in Old Town Pasadena), describes himself as an “accountant-type developer” who doesn’t take undue chances.

Downtown is not being revitalized—rather, it is being reinvented in the image of the rest of LA to lure people back to Downtown under the guise of familiarity. The goal is not urban renewal and public good but the creation of private space and wealth. Can we not see the same thing in the ubiquitous gated communities, the homogenized communities without place, familiar across all geographies and locales? In Downtown, without the space of the suburb, this strategy is changed in its scale. The foyer and doormen are the new gates, courtyard and alleyway the new big-box retail centers.
Tom Gilmore says of his strategy in the development of urban alleyways, “I really believe in the power of urban alleys…We want to install lighting, landscaping and generally make the alley livable.” But livable for whom? How many homeless already call the alleys home? Will they be allowed to bathe in the new fountains, to sleep in the new gardens? Where does the stale stench of urine and vomit fit into this idealized vision for Downtown? Ultimately, these desires of developers aim to soften the hard edges of downtown, to make it more attractive, more comfortable, more familiar. It is to make downtown more suburban, more marketable to the suburban dweller with his middle-income dollar. The grass is not greener on the other side, but it is definitely more hip. But it comes at the expense of displacing a large constituency of people who already call downtown home. It is discrimination, but a discrimination far more subversive than the racism of the 1920s.
After the collapse of Downtown in the 1950s and before the rebirth of 2000, it was essentially two downtowns: the sparkling office towers of Bunker Hill and the derelict Latino shopping district centered on Broadway. In the past, these shops, with their colorful signs and imposing steel shutters, generated enough income for the landlords to keep the buildings at least standing, even if the upper floors lay vacant and derelict . The other undesirable aspect of downtown is slightly to the east, its constituency described in the LA Times: “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…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.”
Today, the primary means for keeping out the ‘undesirables’ is money. Condominiums are currently being sold with price tags from $350,000 to $1.1 million , with rents ranging from $1,000 to $6,000 per month , effectively keeping out the former Latino and low-income population, and forcing many of the artists out to surrounding neighborhoods. But it is not just high rent that is causing the demographic displacement. The shift of public money to private enterprise has effectively removed one of the primary sources of low-cost public housing, partly with the desire to discourage new homeless facilities from being built that have the potential of lowering neighboring property values . Again, it has fallen upon private money to address the homeless situation. With a government disinterested in providing for the 8,000 transients living in and around the skid row area, the Midnight Mission, a ninety-year-old institution devoted to feeding and assisting downtown homeless, has turned solely to private donations in constructing its new $17 million facility at Sixth Street and San Pedro .
But the loft is not the only avenue of corporate urbanism—it also extends into the seemingly public realm of cultural institutions and the creation of public space. Since its demise as a civic center, a downtown cultural renaissance has been the dream of Los Angeles planners, politicians, and businesses. Initial civic improvement was aimed at establishing cultural institutions in the downtown area. Redevelopment and preservation overtook the slash-and-burn mentality of urban renewal in the early 1980s with the public-private partnerships fostered by LA’s Community Redevelopment Agency, the CRA. The CRA, working with developer Cadillac Fairview and architect Arthur Erikson, conceived the California Plaza , a “megadevelopment,” “11.2 acres” that “features three office-towers, three residential high-rise buildings, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) a luxury hotel, a dance gallery, and parking facilities, all of which are linked through a series of open spaces, courts, and landscaped plazas.” Two high-rises financed by Maguire/Thomas Partners developers were built in conjunction with the CRA, and through density transfers, tax benefits, land sales, and tax increment funds, the CRA was able to raise $110 million in private funds to renovate and expand Bertram Goodhues’s 1926 Los Angeles Public Library . These projects would become the models on which later developments would be based, establishing the market and private investment as the primary drivers for urban planning and redevelopment.
But which ‘public’ is served in these ‘public’ spaces? In their book Urban Design Downtown: Poetics and Politics of Form, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Tridib Banerjee discuss the creation of such ‘public’ spaces as California Plaza and Citicorp Plaza and the discrimination created by them. Banerjee and Loukaitou-Sideris describe the desire of California Plaza:
The current site of California Plaza was the last piece of undeveloped land in Bunker Hill. These five unified blocks were seen by the CRA as a unique opportunity to give Bunker Hill an active “heart,” an environment that could combine commercial and cultural activities, and act as a regional magnet tourists, residents, and office workers.

The CRA, a public agency, was clearly targeting a white-collar constituency at the expense of creating a truly ‘public’ space. The other people that call Downtown home—low-to-no-income dwellers and transients are deliberately excluded through the use of, what Loukaitou-Sideris and Banerjee describe as “ ‘hard’ control…using vigilant private security officers, surveillance cameras, and regulations…” and “ ‘soft’ control” described as “symbolic restrictions: for example, the lack of facilities that could appeal to certain people or encourage functions deemed undesirable (public restrooms, food vendors, sand boxes)…The corporate edifice, thus, becomes intimidating to certain segments of the public.” Discrimination, though, extends beyond public space and into so-called ‘public’ institutions.
More recently, Downtown has reestablished itself as a cultural destination, with new Bunker Hill venues such as Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall and Rafael Moneo’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. South Park has seen the construction of the Staples Center, an 18,000-seat sports and concert venue home to the Kings, Clippers, Lakers, and Avengers, as well as the sprawling Los Angeles Convention Center. And to the east in Little Tokyo is the Frank Gehry-designed Geffen Contemporary Museum, a warehouse renovation completed in 1983 to house the MOCA’s contemporary art collection. (Ouroussoff, F4). Also in Little Tokyo is the Japanese-American Museum and Noguchi Plaza, an outdoor space home to concerts and cultural events. But who are these institutions for? The cost and security of these museums and venues prohibit large segments of the public from reaping their cultural and financial benefits, reinforcing the dominance of middle-income dwellers in the revitalized downtown.

An History Without a Future, A Future Without an History
Looking into the future, one inevitably finds him/herself looking to the past, with the idea that where we have come from can give us clues to where we will go. The architect’s “Vision” is only as relevant as the history upon which it is based. Thus, the vision of the future is projected upon the past, forcing its relevance and perpetuating its perpetrator. Looking at the AIA Convention, what does it mean to be “On the Edge?” The edge of what? Of whose history?
Some might say that this distortion, this forgetfulness, this disregard for history is LA’s greatest strength. Its history is one of forgetting. The city is therefore a fad that is always relevant. Through its ability to forget, LA is always able to make itself new. The city is always on the edge. It has no stability or character or direction other than that of the moment. Preservation is its antithesis. It is thus a great irony that the biggest change in architecture and urbanity in Los Angeles is coming from one of the oldest, most forgotten parts of the city—its Downtown—and that the model for this revitalization is coming from the very thing that destroyed it, the suburb.

Bibliography

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Jones, Robert, “COVER STORY; Once More, with Enthusiasm; Tom Gilmore May Be Nothing More Than the Latest Visionary to Crash on the Mean Streets of ‘Urban Renaissance,’ L.A.’s Never-Realized Romance. Then Again, He May Be the First Developer to see the Big Picture.” Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: 3 Oct. 1999, Home ed.: Los Angeles Times Magazine 10.

Mozingo, Joe. “Ceremony Marks a Vision of Hope for St. Vibiana’s; Development: Both preservationists and city officials say buyer’s plan will rehabilitate the old cathedral’s legacy and surroundings.” Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: 3 Nov. 1999, Home ed.: B1.

Sanchez, Jesus. “COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE; ‘50s-Era Downtown High-Rise Slated to be Turned Into Hotel; The plan comes as central city inns are enjoying a resurgence of business. Several other projects are under study.” Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: 25 Jan. 2000, Home ed.: C1.

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Krikorian, Greg.; Hong, Peter. “Builder Got Break on Safety Rules; Housing: City program relaxed some code requirements, but some inspectors say hazards existed. Top officials, developer deny risks.” Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: 7 Jul. 2002, Home ed.: B1.

Mithers, Carol Lynn. “ESSAY; Ghosts of Downtown; How You Get From $1.75 Lunches to $2,000-a-Month Lofts Depends on Many Things, Such as the Death of Urban Self-Loathing.” Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: 22 Sep. 2002, Home ed.: I14.

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Bernstein, Sharon. “Give Up the Suburb? Yes. Give Up the Car? No Way.” Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: 27 Dec. 2004, Home ed.: A1.

McGreevy, Patrick.; Krikorian, Greg. “Loan History May Be Issue in Project; Developer selected to take over L.A. Theatre Center has had trouble repaying money owed to the city, a nonprofit group and a contractor.” Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: 5 Jan. 2004, Home ed.: B1.

DiMassa, Cara Mia. “Crossroads Nears in Downtown Loft Boom; As L.A.’s converted units fill, the city is working to expand the revival. But growth faces obstacles.” Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: 20 Jun. 2005, Home ed.: A1.

Vincent, Robert. “L.A.’s Reticent Relics; Downtown housing developers are uncovering treasures and problems from the past as they race to restore and convert dilapidated buildings.” Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: 27 Nov. 2005, Home ed.: C1.

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Sanchez, Jesus. “COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE; SCI-Arc Breaking Ground on Downtown L.A. Campus.” Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: 27 Mar. 201, Home ed.: C8.

Johnson, Reed. “DOWNTOWN LIKE NEVER BEFORE; INNER LIFE; Reinventing itself; The waiting is over. The center of the city is bursting with new lofts and luxury apartments, drawing new residents who are bringing it alive with promise.” Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: 16 Oct. 2003, Home ed.: F11.

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