The City Is Divided Into Many Neighborhoods, Many of Which Were Towns That Were Annexed by the Growing City

The city is divided into many neighborhoods, many of which were towns that were annexed by the growing city. There are also several independent cities in and around Los Angeles, but they are popularly grouped with the city of Los Angeles, either due to being completely engulfed as enclaves by Los Angeles, or lying within its immediate vicinity. Generally, the city is divided into the following areas: Downtown Los Angeles, Northeast - including Highland Park and Eagle Rock areas, the Eastside, South Los Angeles (still often colloquially referred to as South Central by locals), the Harbor Area, Hollywood, Wilshire, the Westside, and the San Fernando and Crescenta Valleys. Some well-known communities of Los Angeles include West Adams, Watts, Venice Beach, the Downtown Financial District, Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Hollywood, Hancock Park, Koreatown, Westwood and the more affluent areas of Bel Air, Benedict Canyon, Hollywood Hills, Pacific Palisades, and Brentwood. [edit] Landmarks Important landmarks in Los Angeles include Chinatown, Koreatown, Little Tokyo, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Kodak Theatre, Griffith Observatory, Getty Center, Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Hollywood Sign, Hollywood Boulevard, Capitol Records Tower, Los Angeles City Hall, Hollywood Bowl, Watts Towers, Staples Center, Dodger Stadium and La Placita Olvera/Olvera Street. Downtown Los Angeles Skyline of downtown Los Angeles Downtown Los Angeles is the central business district of Los Angeles, California, United States, located close to the geographic center of the metropolitan area. The area features many of the city's major arts institutions and sports facilities, a variety of skyscrapers and associated large multinational corporations and an array of public art, unique shopping opportunities and the hub of the city's freeway and public transportation networks. Downtown Los Angeles is generally thought to be bounded by the Los Angeles River on the east, the U.S. Route 101 to the north, the 10 Santa Monica Freeway on the south and the 110 Harbor Freeway on the west; however, some sources including the Los Angeles Downtown News and Los Angeles Times[1], extend the area past the traditional boundary to include the University Park (encompassing the University of Southern California (USC) and Exposition Park, just south of the 10 Freeway) and Central City West (just west of the 110 Freeway) neighborhoods as a part of the downtown map. Downtown Los Angeles is currently undergoing a transformation, with many historic buildings being converted into lofts, several retail businesses and restaurants opening, many new high-rise residential buildings being built and slated to be built, and with two star projects being built: L.A. Live and the Grand Avenue Project. Bunker Hill as seen from Los Angeles City Hall History U.S. Bank Tower in Downtown Los Angeles is the tallest building in the United States west of the Mississippi River. (1,018 ft/310 m) Downtown Los Angeles was a premier attraction of the county and city. In terms of glamour particular during the middle 20th century, it was second only to Hollywood. The streets were home to the prime movers and shakers of Southern California with ornate and decorative banks, corporate headquarters, intermingled with major high department stores, restaurants, and boutiques all interspaced with family neighborhoods and diners. Despite the common misconception that the city's sprawl is a product of the automobile and an immense freeway system, Los Angeles' famous "76 cities in search of a downtown" is due primarily to trains and iron rails, not cars and concrete. Long before the middle class could afford the luxury of private car ownership; long before the first shovel of dirt was turned for its first freeway, Los Angeles was a sprawling city.[citation needed] By 1920, the city's private - and later - municipal rail lines were among the most far-flung and most comprehensive in the world. By that year, helped along by building height limits, relatively flat terrain, a steady influx of residents, and some very aggressive land developers, the city's metropolitan area was immense. Rail lines connected 4 counties with well over 1000 miles of track.[citation needed] So, it was during the booming 1920s, when private automobiles moved from the play things of the rich to the work horses of the middle classes, the already sprawling Los Angeles was ripe for even further expansion. Prior to that time, most commuters, shoppers and theater-goers used streetcars and interurbans for transportation. With the automobile, those same (already far-flung) commuters, shoppers and theater-goers could hop in their cars and drive the growing network of streets and boulevards to their destinations. Witness the growth of department stores and specialty shops along the famous Wilshire Boulevard. By 1924, rail transit use had hit its peak. In the already-sprawling Los Angeles, the car was now king. The death of the city's rail system was not caused by some sinister collusion of car makers, tire makers and oil companies. The system was already dying - though there's probably some truth to the accusation that the movers and shakers in auto, tire and oil industries may have, in the late 1940s, added the final nails to rail's coffin.[citation needed] Downtown's corporate headquarters also slowly dispersed to outer areas or dissolved in the de-industrialization of the age. Banks and some financial institutions remained but as the population left the central core toward cheaper, newer housing in the suburbs, demographics also changed. Desegregation of the school districts proved the final end for the remaining white middle classes who soon fled to the suburbs. With crime, vagrancy, and gang activity increasing,[citation needed] the remaining major upscale department stores shuttered in the 1970s and 1980s, while a few moved into newer more modern office, hotel and shopping complexes in the Financial District. Macy's Plaza and Robinsons-May (now closed and operating as a second Macy's store) are just two examples. With the movement of the city's commercial center westward, downtown Los Angeles was devoid of much nightlife from the 1950s until the residential population increase of recent years. What little nightlife existed was concentrated in Little Tokyo. However, some corporations retained their headquarters in the downtown area while new service-oriented institutions replaced the industrial- and agricultural-oriented ones which preceded them, thereby keeping downtown Los Angeles from sinking into obscurity. In 1999, the Los Angeles City Council passed an adaptive reuse ordinance, making it easier for developers to convert vacant office and commercial buildings (many of which were the lavish headquarters buildings of banks and other financial institutions in the early part of the Twentieth Century) into renovated lofts and well-secured luxury apartment complexes. Ironically, among those moving into these buildings were workers fed up with the city's notorious traffic commuting to and from the suburbs which was the result of the planning of the '50s that precipitated urban flight in the first place. Another sign of the fledgling Downtown renaissance is that the Ralphs supermarket chain opened a new store in Downtown in late July 2007. Ralphs had its first store in Downtown in the late 1800s and closed its doors in Downtown in the 1950s as the suburbs grew. The residential population of Downtown LA has boomed since 2005, with a 20% jump in two years (2005-07) to 28,878 residents.[2] This number surpassed previous estimates and, with units under construction, pushes the estimated Downtown population to more than 40,000 by the end of 2008 instead of 2015, the previous target milestone. However, reflective of the growing outsourcing of service jobs and the continued dearth of retail shopping customers with disposable income sufficient to maintain merchants, at the same time, the number of jobs in the downtown area has dropped to 418,000 in 2005, down from a high of 605,000 in 1995. [2] On August 7, 2007, the Los Angeles City Council approved sweeping changes in zoning rules for the downtown area and including a corridor extending from Downtown south along Figueroa Street to Exposition Park and USC.[1] Strongly advocated by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the changes allow larger and more dense developments downtown; developers who reserve 15% of their units for low-income residents are now exempt from some open-space requirements and can make their buildings 35% larger than current zoning codes allow.[1] [edit] Subdistricts Union Station. Arts District Civic Center Gallery Row Fashion District Financial District Toy District Jewelry District Bunker Hill Chinatown South Park Old Bank District Historic Core Skid Row Central City West Little Tokyo [edit] Attractions Walt Disney Concert Hall, Bunker Hill Some of the buildings of the Downtown core date from the early 1900s, with the topmost floors of most of the office buildings at mostly 13 stories. Between 1917 and 1957, a city ordinance capped building heights at 150 feet, leading to an unusually homogenous skyline. This has been mistakenly said to be due to earthquakes, but it was done to keep a uniform height in the area and to prevent Manhattan style congestion. However, starting in the 1950's developers started either ignoring the ordinances, challenging them in court, or receiving exemptions of dubious legality from the city commissioners. Thus, while the Los Angeles City Hall was the tallest building for decades at 454 ft., that ended with the development of the 18 Story California Bank Building at 600 S. Spring. That building is now being converted into condos. The unique Bradbury building, built in 1893, has a courtyard with spectacular wrought iron staircases and railings, and a glass and iron ceiling over the spacious courtyard.

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