Los Angeles Guide
Downtown LA
DOWNTOWN LA was once the social and cultural hub of the region, where the masses worked, dined, shopped, and came to be entertained. With the advent of the automobile, however, Angelenos moved away from the city center, and Downtown was given over to commercial activity. In the last decade Downtown has re-emerged as an enjoyable place to visit during the day, with a smattering of grand old movie palaces, modern museums, and a few interesting pieces of architecture – along with some of the city's best hotels and restaurants.
Although the gleaming modernity of Bunker Hill is immediately tempting, a trip Downtown is best experienced beginning at the Plaza, the original nineteenth-century town site and now the remodeled focus of "El Pueblo de Los Angeles," a state park that also holds the historic, if over-commercialized, Olvera Street. To the south, LA's Civic Center is a bland seat of local government, enlivened by the classic form of City Hall and the startling modern assertiveness of the new Caltrans building.
Further south stand the antique facades along Spring Street and Broadway. Since their heyday in the 1920s as the respective financial and cultural axes of the city, the two streets have changed considerably. Broadway is still a thriving commercial area (but now has a Hispanic flavor), with T-shirt stands and fast-food vendors lining its corridor. Spring Street, on the other hand, has been replaced as LA's financial axis by Bunker Hill and its rather limited charms – mainly museums and modernist architecture.
North and east of Downtown, Chinatown and Little Tokyo are interesting for their predictable wealth of ethnic restaurants, though neither is a vital cultural center – the city's Asian immigrants tend to migrate toward livelier places like Monterey Park and Alhambra. Central American newcomers, by contrast, often end up in Westlake or MacArthur Park, west of Downtown, while hipsters gravitate to funky, working-class Echo Park. To the northeast of Downtown, Angelino Heights and Heritage Square offer more sedate trips through local culture and history, with a smattering of worthwhile artist's studios and galleries open to the public.