EDA and The Arts District: A History
Hi, EDA friends!
It’s officially November, and we’re excited for a change in season here in LA -- who else is excited for cooler temps, a chill in the air, and patio weather that isn’t so oppressive?
We wanted to highlight a lesser known, but still interesting part of our history this week -- our building! 923 E 3rd Street, where EDA calls home, is one of many beautiful buildings with a cool history in our neighborhood. Catch up with us for this week’s behind-the-scenes glimpse of old Los Angeles! The next time you come visit us, grab a drink, get a coffee to-go, and take a walk though our neighborhood for a little architecture tour, and see how life used to be in our little neighborhood!
Walk down Memory Lane with us, keep reading below.
1900 - Looking west toward downtown Los Angeles. Photo from the USC Libraries - California Historical Society Collection.
Let’s go back to our city in its infancy, at the beginning of the 20th century. Los Angeles was a town with a population of just over 100,000, having recently experienced a boom thanks to increased effort to build a commercial city that rivaled San Francisco. Having grown from a village of 5,000 people in 1870, by 1900 the rapidly expanding city’s residents sought to make Los Angeles a prosperous city for a new century, and had the opportunity to shape their growing city to best suit commercial activity deeply centered around ports, railways, factories and the businesses that supported them. In planning infrastructure, city leaders and urban planners designated areas that could house workers, facilitate large scale factories, and built centers around railroads that brought settlers, investors and workers from the Eastern United States, promising prosperity, endless sunshine, and what became Los Angeles’ eternal allure: it was a city where you could make yourself into anything, no matter what your origin story was.
A postcard view of Downtown Los Angeles in 1913
The area we know as “downtown Los Angeles” was created in the 1880s around Main and Spring Streets, and by 1900 this area was heavily concentrated around banks and finance, while what we know today as our neighborhood was packed with factories. A rectangular section of the downtown area centered at 3rd Street and Traction Ave became our growing city’s epicenter of warehouses, factories, and production centers that fueled the rest of the expanding city. With the development of the railroad that connected Los Angeles to San Francisco, and the rest of the country via the Intercontinental Railroad, our neighborhood became synonymous with the storage and transportation facilities that helped fuel our local economy.
Citizens National Bank building in 1913, designed by John Parkinson
This is where our origins at 923 E 3rd Street begin. Enter architects George Bergstrom, a Wisconsiner who relocated to Los Angeles in 1901 that would one day go on to design the U.S. Pentagon, and John Parkinson, a British architect who, like many seeking opportunities in America, moved to the West Coast in the late 1800s as a stair builder and became a highly successful architect of major Los Angeles buildings. Both architects were successful in their own right, but a partnership from 1905-1915 launched both their careers to new heights, literally -- from designing the city’s first skyscraper, our beloved Grand Central Market, the Citizens National Bank building, and our warehouse building in the Arts District, these two shaped how Los Angeles grew and expanded in the new century.
Warehouses and train tracks in what is now known as the Arts District
Going back to our neighborhood: in 1905 our streets looked much different than today. Blocks after blocks of warehouses and industrial buildings were snaked around railyards, tracks (now covered over with roads), and were built with trains in mind. Buildings were meant to house the goods our city shipped elsewhere. Our raised first floor, for instance, was built at the height of a boxcar, so workers could move large inventory with ease. Our building, which is now our home, once was a warehouse for the Pacific Hardware and Steel Company, which was a major steel company that distributed hardware and important construction materials across the Pacific coast, with offices and warehouses in major cities up the coast: San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. In the early 1900s, this steel magnate for the West was responsible for providing the materials that much of our modern city was built on. You could say that our humble warehouse building is an essential part of our city’s history, as it contained the building blocks, beams, and hardware responsible for making the new engineering of skyscrapers possible.
The partnership of Bergstrom and Parkinson continued, building other buildings on our block, and around the city as demand for more warehouses and modern facilities for our growing infrastructure continued to demand more steel shipped across the country and up the coast. Our neighborhood at large continued manufacturing until after World War II, as factories switched to making ammunition and away from traditional building supplies until after 1945.
After World War II ended, the smaller tracts of land inherent in any city became a roadblock to property buyers looking to pick up where manufacturing left off pre-war. But rising costs, the rise of the automobile and large trucks began to take over the transportation landscape, and cities outside Los Angeles like Vernon and City of Commerce began to attract companies for its availability of land and accommodation of modern industries needing larger buildings than ever before. Unfortunately, warehouses like ours began to fall in disrepair as companies left for larger properties elsewhere, and our neighborhood fell into disrepair by the 1960s.
In the 1970s, as property prices were slashed downtown, many creatives found themselves looking for a lot of space with a small price tag — artists flocked to our neighborhood, drawn to the warehouses sitting empty. Priced out of other artist enclaves in Hollywood and Venice, the 1970s found a new group of occupants breathing new life into what became known as the “Arts District” and filled it with creative energy that has lasted for decades, encouraging visual arts, music, creative expression and ingenuity to transform an abandoned industrial center into a new identity.
The 1980s and 90s brought a surge of changes to our neighborhood, and as the new millennium brought about more changes to the Los Angeles urban landscape, the Arts District expanded, gained value and respect from other cultural centers around town, and brought the introduction of galleries and public spaces meant to showcase the creativity generated by its locals. Today, you might be more hard pressed to find warehouses for rock bottom prices, but creativity remains at the heart of where we live and work.
Artist Peter Greco in the midst of hand-drawing our floor-to-ceiling mural.
923 E. 3rd Street
EDA opened our doors and wanted to integrate some of the soul of our neighborhood while paying tribute to what came before us, so we worked with local artist and muralist Peter Greco, an Arts District native from the beginning, to create a totally original, one-of-a-kind work of art in our dining room. It depicts typesetting references to the building’s origins as manufacturers, steel and hardware producers, and the evolving nature of our city reflected in the handwritten script, block lettering, and calligraphic styling found in Greco’s work that draws inspiration from traditional and modern typefaces. Our city’s - and building’s - history can be found written on our walls, and once we can open our dining room we look forward to sharing it again with you.
Check back next week for more glimpses behind the scenes at EDA!
Til next week,
EDA team