It won’t come as a shock to anybody with eyeballs, but Downtown Los Angeles has gone through massive changes in the last few decades. What is pretty crazy is when you think of the rate and scale at which all those skyscrapers have shot up into the air, culminating most recently with the opening of the Wilshire Grand Center, now the tallest building in California.
To help you visualize how all those buildings compare to one another in scale and age, commercial real estate blog Commercial Café compiled it all into a single video. Give it a watch and see DTLA spring up like a city built out of blocks.
They also break down the big eras in skyscraper development that have swept across Downtown’s core. It all started with City Hall, which, at 453 feet tall, was considered a groundbreaking skyscraper back in 1928. Due to building height restrictions in place at the time, it wouldn’t be until 1967 that the next tower came along. That was the Union Bank Plaza on Bunker Hill, followed soon after by One Wilshire and 611 Place.
Once the '70s and '80s arrived, DTLA became skyscraper central. The city was booming and developers were buying land and building towers as quickly as possible. This era gave us City National Plaza, Aon Center, Bank of America Plaza, the Wells Fargo Center and other notable buildings that continue to define Downtown today.
The trend for extra-tall buildings continued through the 1990s with the arrival of the U.S. Bank Tower and Figueroa at Wilshire, but by that time commercial real estate occupancy had slumped and many of the offices in new towers sat empty. When the 52-story Two California Plaza opened, just 30 percent of the spaces were able to be leased.
Fast forward to 2010 when the Ritz Carlton and J.W. Marriott hotel tower opened at L.A. Live, marking the first new addition to DTLA’s skyline in 20 years, and now Wilshire Grand, a 1,100-foot stunner and the highest point west of the Mississippi river—at least for now.
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