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(More customer reviews)A sense of loss and fallen grandeur pervades this book. It chronicles the core neighbourhood of downtown Los Angeles. This area, centred on Main Street, saw its glory before World War 2. Very upscale, with ornately carved stoneworks on many buildings. Fancy hotels clustered together. All this revolved around the rail networks and the proximity to Union Station, which was completed in the 1930s. The many detailed photos attest to the vibrancy and upscale nature of that time and place. You might wistfully peer into these photos, looking for a vanished milieu.
Alas, the book goes on to tell what happened after the war. As autos became far more common and convenient than trains, Los Angeles grew immensely outwards, into far flung suburbs. New fancy shopping centres and hotels arose elsewhere, no longer needing to be close to railway lines. We see a 60 year decline in the core. Once posh hotels for the wealthy degenerated into single resident only (SRO) flophouses. The core became Skid Row. Littered with junkies and homeless. Exacerbated by the drug epidemics of the 1980s and 90s.
The one benefit, if it may be called that, is that the sheer depression of the area has acted to scare away developers tempted to tear down the buildings. If you go today to some of the streets shown in the book's photos, and look upward, the skyline is largely how it was in the 1930s.
The authors suggest that now, in the early Naughties, the core might be turning around. Maybe.
Click Here to see more reviews about: The Historic Core of Los Angeles (Images of America: California)
In the early 20th century, there was no better example of a classic American downtown than Los Angeles. Since World War II, Los Angeles's Historic Core has been passively preserved with most of its historic buildings left intact. Recent renovations of the area for residential use and the construction of Disney Hall and the Staples Center are shining a new spotlight on its many pre-1930s Beaux Arts, Art Deco, and Spanish Baroque buildings.
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