Adaptation is essential to survival, whether you’re talking about animal species, cities, or buildings. For many decades, the area between Downtown Los Angeles and the city’s namesake river was filled with one- and two-story industrial buildings sprawling along Southern Pacific and Union Pacific railyards. With Skid Row on its western edge and the Latino communities of East L.A. across the river, this was a rugged and ragged part of town best navigated by truck or car, not by foot. As the railroads lost business and manufacturing moved farther from the urban core in the second half of the 20th century, artists began to claw out studio spaces in the cavernous shells of derelict structures. By the 1990s some realtors were calling this no-man’s-land the Arts District, based more on hope and hype than demographic fact. When the Southern California Institute of Architecture moved into an old freight depot on East 3rd Street and South Santa Fe Avenue in 2001, the area was still more war zone than gentrifying neighborhood. Today the vibe is completely different, with an outpost of Swiss contemporary art gallery Hauser & Wirth, an L.A. branch of Brooklyn’s Smorgasburg food market, Blue Bottle Coffee, a Soho House, offices of Spotify and Warner Music, and large residential developments, such as the quarter-mile-long One Santa Fe designed by Michael Maltzan, all generating once-rare foot traffic in the area.
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