Downtown

California (Los Angeles Area)

Downtown LA

Downtown LA embraces LA’s every social, economic and ethnic division. It’s not the highrise megalopolis you might expect; relatively few towering office blocks punctuate its low and level skyline. During the postwar boom, as businesses spread out across the basin, it seemed to be heading for dilapidation and decay, but the corporate revitalization of the Eighties has given it a new life, at least economically.

The whole area can easily be seen in a day on foot, aided by the odd 25¢ ride on a DASH bus (tel 213/808-2273). LA’s original settlement on the Northside is the obvious first stop, before crossing into the brasher and more modern Westside, and continuing through the chaos along Broadway.

Broadway

Though it’s hard to picture now, Broadway was once LA’s most fashionable shopping and entertainment district.

Today it’s largely taken over by the cash-rich hustle and bustle of Hispanic clothing and jewelry stores, all to a soundtrack of blaring salsa music. Its most vivid taste is to be had amid the pickled pigs’ trotters and sheep’s brains inside the Grand Central Market, on Broadway between Third and Fourth streets. Right alongside, the whimsical terra-cotta facade of the 1918 Million Dollar Theater, seen like its neighboring Bradbury Building in the film Blade Runner, mixes buffalo heads with bald eagles. The moviehouse has since become a church, though the Los Angeles Theater at 615 S Broadway is still in use, albeit for special events, and is even more extravagant, built in ninety days for the world premiere of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights in 1931.

Northside: Olvera Street

To see downtown LA, begin at the beginning. El Pueblo de Los Angeles, off Alameda Street and south of Chinatown, was the site of the initial late eighteenth-century Mexican settlement of Los Angeles, and a few evocative early buildings remain in situ. The plaza church, the city’s oldest, has served as a sanctuary for Central American refugees. Olvera Street, which runs north from the plaza, contrived in part as a pseudo-Mexican village market, is saved only by its cheery grouping of food and craft stalls and by the historic Avila Adobe (daily Mon–Sat 10am–5pm; free), the city’s oldest building.

The magnificent mission-style Union Station nearby is chiefly used as a Metrorail and Amtrak terminal. Across the Santa Ana Freeway at the Civic Center, plodding office buildings surround the lifeless plaza of the Music Center, home to LA’s high-art investments. The one exception is the Art Deco City Hall; the city’s tallest structure as late as 1960, it has a 360° view from its 28th-story observation deck (Mon–Fri 10am–4pm). On the south side of the plaza, free tours of the Los Angeles Times building (Mon–Fri 11.15am; tel 213/237-5757) show how the West Coast’s biggest newspaper is put together.

Westside: Bunker Hill

Until a century ago the area south of the Civic Center, Bunker Hill, was LA’s most elegant neighborhood, its elaborate Victorian mansions and houses connected by funicular railroad to the growing business district down below. Now it’s been subsumed into the amorphous Financial District, sprouting colossal new fifty-story towers. The largest and most ambitious of these, the billion-dollar California Plaza on Grand Avenue, is based around the playfully colorful Museum of Contemporary Art (or MOCA), designed by showman architect Arata Isozaki as a “small village in the valley of the skyscrapers” (Tues, Wed & Fri–Sun 11am–5pm, Thurs 11am–8pm; $6, free Thurs 5–8pm). MOCA opened at the end of 1986, funded by a one-percent tax on all new downtown construction. In addition to work by Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg, and the impressive multimedia memorials of Antoni Tapiès, it houses a compelling collection of paintings and sculpture by the rising stars you’re likely to come across in trendy city galleries. A ticket also entitles you to same-day entry into The Geffen Contemporary, 152 N Central Ave, adjacent to Little Tokyo, 55,000 square feet of a former police garage initially used to display MOCA overspill, now a more raw-edged exhibition space, designed by LA’s own Frank Gehry. Across from the Geffen, the Japanese Village Plaza is a pleasantly appealing collection of historic sites, restaurants and galleries.

If MOCA’s highbrow tone gets too demanding, there’s relief in the shallow but amusing Wells Fargo Museum (Mon–Fri 9am–5pm; free) at the base of the shiny red towers of the Wells Fargo Center, which tells the story of the bank of Gold Rush California. A block away rise the unmistakeable shining glass tubes of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel. Its lobby doubles as a shopping mall and office complex – a disorienting Escher-style labyrinth of spiraling ramps and balconies that can only be negotiated with frequent recourse to the color-coded map.

Sightseeing

Los Angeles began as a Spanish pueblo in the late 1700s in an unlikely location: a basin threatened by floods, droughts, and battles. The fledgling town was saved by a series of booms brought on by the arrival of the railroad in 1885, oil strikes, and the movie business. Today Los Angeles is California's largest city, its 3.5 million residents crammed into 465 square miles.

L.A. juxtaposes multiculturalism with dazzle: Small neighborhoods, ranging from Latino barrios to the chic Westside, share space with a trendy city of steel-and-glass skyscrapers, Hollywood sets, and sophisticated tastes. A good place to start your tour is in the heart of downtown at the L.A. Convention & Visitors Bureau (633 5th St. Suite 6000. 213-624-7300). Nearby, in the shadow of the ARCO building and the I. M. Pei-designed First Interstate Bank headquarters, shines the Museum of Contemporary Art (250 S. Grand Ave. 213-626-6222. Closed Mon.; adm. fee), an airy sandstone building devoted to works of art created since 1940. Nearby is the Children's Museum (310 N. Main St. 213-687-8800. Weekends only; adm. fee), geared to youthful curiosities.

Just 5 blocks away, the open-air Grand Central Public Market (317 S. Broadway. 213-624-2378) is a great place to see L.A.'s ethnic mixture. Here in this bustling 1917 landmark, Westside chefs, Valley socialites, and Mexican housewives search shoulder-to-shoulder for the ripest tomatillos and the plumpest grapes. A few blocks east lies trim Little Tokyo (1st and San Pedro Sts.), the center of one of the largest Japanese-American communities on the U. S. mainland. North on Broadway, more than 15,000 Chinese and Southeast Asians live in Chinatown (900 block of N. Broadway), brimming with red-and-gold herbal shops, fish markets, and Buddhist temples.

The city traces its beginnings to a small adobe enclave near the art deco City Hall (200 N. Spring St. 213-485-2121). In 1781, when Spain ruled Mexico and Mexico included Alta California, a Spanish expedition established a pueblo on this site near the Los Angeles River. Shady Olvera Street, in the heart of the old pueblo--now a historic park--evokes those early years with an artsy marketplace where Hispanic locals sell tacos, piatas, pottery, and blankets. The Sepulveda House (622 N. Main St. 213-628-1274. Closed Sun.), built in 1887, now serves as a museum of Mexican-American culture. Nearby, you can tour L.A.'s oldest building: the restored 1818 Avila Adobe (10 E. Olvera St. Closed Sun.-Mon.).

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LA (Downtown)