Building: Los Angeles’ New Skyline

Among urban cognoscenti, Los Angeles has long been an object of scorn. Many critics for years ridiculed the sprawling metropolis as a gaggle of suburbs “in search of a city.” They had a point. The core of the city not only failed to share in Southern California’s explosive postwar growth but developed ominous symptoms of decay. Though downtown Los Angeles remained a stronghold for banking, finance, oil and insurance, jobs in other fields followed people to the suburbs. Vacancy rates soared in dingy old office buildings. Sleazy stores and bad restaurants proliferated. Forsaken by many retailers, streets that once bustled with affluent shoppers became a depressing arena for bums and beggars, vice and crime.

Short-Lived Title. Lately, the ailing nucleus of the city has been making a remarkable recovery. A burst of new construction—gleaming office towers, bank headquarters and a handsome civic center for the arts—has rejuvenated much of the area. Over the past eight years, the city’s businessmen have committed $800 million for downtown building and remodeling. By 1970, that investment will yield 9,000,000 sq. ft. of new office space, almost twice as much as was built downtown in the first 60 years of the century. In the process of rejuvenation, the old heart of Los Angeles is sprouting a skyline to match its aspirations as a commercial and cultural center of the West.

Last month Crocker-Citizens National Bank opened a 42-story headquarters and office building that displaces nearby Union Bank headquarters, completed last year, as the city’s tallest structure. Crocker-Citizens’ skyscraping title, however, should be short lived. The Bank of America and Atlantic Richfield Co. have just announced plans for a $140 million office and shopping-center complex that will be 47 ft. higher. The project’s twin, 52-story towers will rise 667 ft. above a block-square landscaped mall. “We’ve needed a downtown since World War II,” says Louis B. Lundborg, the Los Angeles-based chairman of the Bank of America, “and now we’re getting it.”

Safe from Quakes. An odd combination of economic forces lies behind the downtown rebirth. Transit-shy Angelenos rely almost entirely on autos to move around their 464-sq.-mi. city, whose boundaries could encompass the combined areas of St. Louis, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Boston, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Manhattan. While the auto made it easy for Los Angeles to sprawl, earthquake fears made it difficult for the city to grow vertically. Until 1959, a local ordinance limited buildings to a height of 150 feet or 13 stories, whichever was lower. The results of improved structural-testing techniques finally persuaded the city engineers that skyscrapers would be safe. With the ceiling abolished, the city’s skyline slowly began to rise. The major impetus was supplied by the completion of a network of freeways during the ’60s. They not only converge on the core of the city but form an irregular loop around it, making driving downtown comparatively easy. Most of the new skyscrapers have sprung up along the sector of the freeway loop that is closest to the downtown core. As a result, the center of downtown Los Angeles has shifted several blocks west, while the eastern part of the area remains largely untouched by the renaissance.

Sixteen new office skyscrapers have one up so far, including the 26-story City National Bank building and Occidental Life Insurance’s elegant 32-story center, to which the company is currently adding an annex. The scramble for sites has lifted land prices from $20 per sq. ft. five years ago to as much as $100 today, but businessmen seem undeterred. “The more there is, the more will happen,” predicts Architect William L. Pereira. Honolulu’s Dillingham Corp. plans a 1,000-room hotel, and the Broadway-Hale department-store chain is snapping up a site for a huge retailing complex. There is even a reviving demand for walk-to-work living, and lofty apartments are rising to meet it. For a city whose shape has been dictated by the automobile, that may be the most surprising change of all.