This past June all L.A. Times staff and personnel moved from the historic L.A. Times building in downtown Los Angeles to a new headquarters in El Segundo after the Times’s lease expired with the building’s owners at the end of the month. The building was sold by Tribune Media, the former owners of the L.A. Times, to the Canadian real estate Onni Group in 2016.
Now The L.A. Times building as it stands on 1st and Spring street is slated for a seismic redevelopment if the Onni group has its way, as the firm looks to convert the 1973 Pereira installment of the building into a high-rise residential and retail space.
Preservationists have called on the L.A. City Council to grant a landmark status to the structure, the cornerstones of which were erected in 1937, but even if approved, the specter of demolition of at least some of the structure will still loom large. The city council can ‘encourage’ or incentivize the Onni group about how to move forward with its redevelopment plans, but the firm is not known for its preservation records. What a show of the power of ownership in the face of the public interest.
When I visited Chicago in the summer of 2016 it was an eerie sight to observe an absolutely empty Tribune building in the middle of the city’s highly developed downtown area. Now, as our very own media company here on the West coast meets the same fate, the swiftness with which modernization undermines the foundations of our institutions dawns once again. And yet, Los Angeles does not have to go the way of Chicago. If the city’s leadership can consider the long-term benefits of preserving this piece of our local history, future generations just may get to experience the magnitude of the structure for themselves.
Indeed, when much of the leadership in California likes to tout the state as a beacon of forward-mindedness, the act of preserving our history should be a no-brainer. And if L.A. Times reporting and storytelling has shown me anything over the years, it’s that someone is always paying attention to the movements swirling through our society, and that the more we can place the parcels such movements leave behind into perspective, the more fully we can grasp just where we come from and thus know ourselves better.
Moreover, this same forward-mindedness, or respect for both present and future, is what many of the movements against gentrification in cities like Los Angeles are also centered around: to resist displacement for the sake of chic new markets is not just to be facetious, it is to herald what is already here, what is already provided by what’s (t)here, and what might still be borne from its preservation when measured not by market values, but human values.
J.T.
