October 25, 2017
Los Angeles City Hall
(aka, the pointy building)
LA City Hall is, next to the Hollywood Sign, the most iconic structure in Los Angeles. It’s appeared in numerous movies and TV productions and is featured on the LAPD badge. Prior the construction of the current City Hall, City Hall was in rented rooms in hotels and an adobe house, the Old Courthouse on Market Street(which is a portion of the location of the current City Hall), a building that is now the location of the LA Times and a red brick City Hall that is now a parking structure(though the bricks are now part of a building on Beverly Blvd near CBS Television City). Until the late 1950’s, City Hall was the tallest building in Los Angeles due to a restriction in the City Charter that forbid construction of any building taller than 150′(towers and spires where allowed to be taller, for example the old Richfield Building). While the building was quite large for the city when it was constructed, city government has branched out into several other buildings in the Civic Center(City Hall East, City Hall South and LAPD headquarters) as well as a number of other buildings in Downtown LA(including the Bradbury building). This will be changing in the next few years as the city has a rather ambitious building project to remake the “City Hall campus”. Most of the primary city offices are on the 3rd floor(Mayor’s Office, City Council Chambers, and Public Works Chambers) and there is an observation deck on the 27th floor.
Read More(aka, the pointy building)
LA City Hall is, next to the Hollywood Sign, the most iconic structure in Los Angeles. It’s appeared in numerous movies and TV productions and is featured on the LAPD badge. Prior the construction of the current City Hall, City Hall was in rented rooms in hotels and an adobe house, the Old Courthouse on Market Street(which is a portion of the location of the current City Hall), a building that is now the location of the LA Times and a red brick City Hall that is now a parking structure(though the bricks are now part of a building on Beverly Blvd near CBS Television City). Until the late 1950’s, City Hall was the tallest building in Los Angeles due to a restriction in the City Charter that forbid construction of any building taller than 150′(towers and spires where allowed to be taller, for example the old Richfield Building). While the building was quite large for the city when it was constructed, city government has branched out into several other buildings in the Civic Center(City Hall East, City Hall South and LAPD headquarters) as well as a number of other buildings in Downtown LA(including the Bradbury building). This will be changing in the next few years as the city has a rather ambitious building project to remake the “City Hall campus”. Most of the primary city offices are on the 3rd floor(Mayor’s Office, City Council Chambers, and Public Works Chambers) and there is an observation deck on the 27th floor.
View from the observation deck, looking west(sort of).
This is the view of the LA Civic Center from the observation deck of City Hall. It’s not looking due west because downtown LA is laid out on tradition Spanish coordinates(IIRC it’s 37 degrees off true north). The park area is called Grand Park and building that are surround it in clockwise order: the Law Library, the Stanley Mosk Courthouse, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Department of Water and Power, the Ahmanson and the Mark Taper Forum, the County Administration Building, the Hall of Records, and the Criminal Courts Building.
