Victorian Downtown Los Angeles
The rest were demolished to make way for the Civic Center district with City Hall, numerous courthouses, and other municipal, county, state and federal buildings, and Times Mirror Square.
By 1910, it was referred to as the "North End" of the business district which by then had expanded south to what is today called the Historic Core, along Broadway, Spring and Main roughly from 3rd to 9th streets.
[3] By the mid-1890s, First and Spring was the center of the business district, and the Bradbury Building, opened in 1893 at Third and Broadway and still standing today,[4] By 1910, the area north of Fourth Street was considered the "North End" of the business district and there were already concerns about its deterioration, as the center of commerce moved to what is now known as the Historic Core, from Third to Ninth streets.
Further south on the west side of Broadway, was 207–211, location of the: The YMCA Building was demolished to make way for the: The adjacent Potomac Block and Bicknell Block originally housed prominent retailers of the day, then were joined together in 1906 by Coulter's department store to form a complex, opening it as a new, 157,000 sq ft (14,600 m2) store in June, 1905.
Lettering covered the face of the building from top to bottom through the end of the 1950s: "THE LARGEST SHOE DEPT.
[36] After a fire at the Irvine Byrne Building destroyed its store on February 16, 1911, Myer Siegel moved further south on Broadway.
At the northwest corner of Franklin and Spring stood two buildings in succession, the Rocha Adobe, then the Phillips Block.
It housed many law offices, including those of Stephen M. White, Will D. Gould and Glassell, Chapman and Smith.
[65] It was also home to the Odd Fellows, the Fashion Saloon, the Temple and Workman Bank, Slotterbeck's gun shop, the Wells Fargo office.
[66][67] In 1925-7 this block and other surrounding areas were demolished to make way for the current Los Angeles City Hall.
An electric streetcar heads to Griffin Avenue in Montecito Heights, on what would become Line 2 of the Los Angeles Railway.
It was replaced by the 1948 Crawford Addition building, part of the Times Mirror Square complex, currently vacant.
When the Woods Opera House opened nearby in 1876, the Merced ceased being the city's leading theatre.
[116] Eventually, it gained an "unenviable reputation" because of "the disreputable dances staged there, and was finally closed by the authorities.
South of the Baker Block stood buildings that are now the site of the northwestern-most part of the Los Angeles Mall:
It features Joseph Young's sculpture Triforium, with 1,500 blown-glass prisms synchronized to an electronic glass bell carillon.
Here, the Coronel Adobe blocked the path north one block to the Plaza, but just slightly to the right (east) of the path of Los Angeles Street was Calle de los Negros (Spanish-language name; marked on post-1847 maps as Negro Alley or Nigger Alley), a narrow, one-block north–south street likely named after darker-skinned Mexican afromestizo and/or mulatto residents during the Spanish colonial era.[158][159].
At the north end of Calle de los Negros stood the Del Valle adobe (also known as the Matthias or Matteo Sabichi house),[160][161] at the southern edge of which one could turn left and enter the plaza at its southeast corner.
[162][163] The neglected dirt alley was already associated with vice by the early 1850s, when a bordello and its owner both known as La Prietita (the dark-skinned lady) were active here.
Its other businesses included malodorous livery stables, a pawn shop, a saloon, a theater and a connected restaurant.
Historian James Miller Guinn wrote in 1896, "in the flush days of gold mining, from 1850 to 1856, it was the wickedest street on earth...In length it did not exceed 500 feet, but in wickedness, it was unlimited.
Here the ignoble red man, crazed with aguardiente, fought his battles, the swarthy Sonorian plied his stealthy dagger, and the click of the revolver mingled with the clink of gold at the gaming table when some chivalric American felt that his word of “honah” had been impugned.
"[158] By 1871, the alley was notorious as a "racially, spatially, and morally disorderly place", according to historian César López.
There, William Estrada notes, the "Chinese of Los Angeles came to fill an important sector of the economy as entrepreneurs.
Some became proprietors and employees of small hand laundries and restaurants; some were farmers and wholesale produce peddlers; others ran gambling establishments; and some occupied other areas left vacant by the absence of workers in the gold rush migration to California."
[153][164] The site of Calle de los Negros is now the Pueblo parking lot and a cloverleaf-style entrance to the US 101 freeway.
Around 1849, they sold the house to a "sporting fraternity", which operated a popular 24-hour gambling establishment with games including monte, faro, and poker; up to $200,000 in gold could be seen on the tables at a time.
After that, still in the 1850s, it became a grocery and dry goods store (Corbett & Barker), then a storage house for iron and hard lumber for Harris Newmark Co.
The Adobe was torn down in 1888 in order to extend Los Angeles Street north past the Plaza.
Now LAPD HQ2009, entire block #138 Hellman Bldg.1897-1959now parking garage Bryson-BonebrakeBlock 1888 now Times Mirror Sq.
