Downtown Los Angeles was once not only the center of the city, it was the entirety of it.
Before the city atomized itself and marched — first along the trails blazed by trolley lines and excursion trains, and later along a vast network of freeways — westward toward the sea, Victorian L.A. crouched in the lee of Bunker Hill, the acropolis where the wealthy lived.
The palaces of commerce that the early Angelenos built, and those that arose in successive waves of redevelopment through the 1920s and ’30s, formed the basis of the loft-conversion movement that brought residents back to downtown in this century.
What made that possible, ironically, was the postwar destruction of the Bunker Hill neighborhood to make way for new corporate towers that drew many of the remaining businesses out of the historic core and up the hill.
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