Los Angeles’ eponymous roadway has been an almost exclusively industrial thoroughfare for most of its history. Prior to large-scale urban renewal in the late 20th century, Los Angeles Street’s warehouses and workshops formed a continuous manufacturing district that stretched as far as north as its terminus at Los Angeles Plaza. The buildings in the foreground of the original photograph appear to have been completed around the turn of the century. The Klein-Norton Company, a wholesale menswear distributor at 253 South Los Angeles Street, became one of the country’s largest menswear distributors by the time it moved its headquarters to the Harris Newmark Building in 1926.
The emergence of the Civic Center and redevelopment in Little Tokyo eventually destroyed most of the city’s oldest industrial areas. The buildings in the original photograph that have survived to this day are the last pre-war structures to be found on Los Angeles Street between Third Street and the Hollywood Freeway.
1. Insurance maps of Los Angeles, California;Volume 2. New York: Sanborn Map Company, 1906.
2. “Plan new downtown structure.” Los Angeles Times. 25 Jun. 1925. A1.
Original photo: “View of Los Angeles Street north from Third Street in downtown Los Angeles, ca.1918 – chs-m577.” Title Insurance and Trust/C. C. Pierce Photography Collection. USC Digital Library. USC Libraries Special Collections. http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/assetserver/controller/view/CHS-14086.