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Downtown Los Angeles
Back in college I lived in Oakland waaaay down near the Greyhound Station. Walking distance to the station, in fact. So one time I took the bus to Los Angeles. That was my first experience of downtown L.A. - arriving at the Greyhound Station - and at the time I thought to myself, "Jeez. What kind of a place is this?" Oaktown was not nearly this far gone.
Fast forward a couple years to the first E3, a yearly videogame convention, held in downtown L.A. Crystal Dynamics sent down the whole company and we all stayed at the Hyatt Regency in downtown L.A. "Don't go too far. Stay within a block!" we were told when we left the hotel to scavenge for food. After all, downtown L.A. was "dangerous".
Well, times change or maybe attitudes do, and walking around downtown L.A. today is fairly pleasant. It's got the tall buildings and the wide streets of New York, without the smell of piss, the mess on the sidewalks and the people. It's 12:30PM on a weekday and it's not busy.
One block east of Pershing Square and it's the Historic Core District of Los Angeles and the buildings are made of brick and mortar, facades and detailing everywhere. This is where I've found the Spring Towers, live/work lofts created from the gutted shell of an old abandoned E shaped office building. (Evan was right when I described it as M shaped. "Or is a W, or a 3, or an E?") Each "leg" of the E is a loft, so there are only three big units per floor.
Finally, a developer gets it right.
San Francisco went through a SOMA (South of Market) renaissance about five years ago when every developer started developing "lofts" which were actually condos, brand new buildings with lots of teeny apartments. Wrong. But that didn't stop property prices from shooting to the moon during the Internet boom.
Look around downtown L.A. at all the great abandoned buildings in the Historic Core... This is the beginning of something good.
Caveat: unless it becomes something bad.
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