Literally overnight, a hefty percentage of the approximately 500,000 people who work downtown and live elsewhere stopped their daily commutes. Four days later, the Safer at Home directive landed, and Los Angeles was effectively locked down. Spectacular growth in residential, cultural, culinary, retail, hospitality, and nightlife sectors followed, boosting downtown’s residential population from about 18,000 to 85,000.īut all of it came to a screeching halt on March 15, 2020, when Mayor Eric Garcetti issued the executive order shuttering restaurants, bars, theaters, and many other businesses integral to downtown’s renaissance. For the past two decades, it experienced an urban metamorphosis driven by building what was essentially a private-sector-financed satellite downtown around Staples Center and L.A. No part of Los Angeles has been impacted more by COVID than downtown. “We need to find a way to encourage those people to return, or new people to come and take their place.” “What was great about this neighborhood was that we had people who lived here long enough to fall in love with it, and then decided to start their dream business here,” Besten says. The randomness of the devastation is jarring over in the Spring Arcade, Le Macaron and Downtown Donuts have closed while RiceBox and Garçons de Café carry on. On 5th Street, Besten points to a pair of husks that, pre-pandemic, held the Mexican restaurant Coronados and the New Orleans-flavored nightspot Little Easy. We stop in at the Bohemian House of Espresso & Chai, where the menu includes a camel milk cortado, and discuss Big Man Bakes, the cupcake spot Chip Brown opened nearby at 4th and Main in 2009 its six-foot-five proprietor and namesake parked himself in front all night during the spring Black Lives Matter protests to deter opportunistic looters. Now the economic wreckage unleashed by COVID is inescapable, if also oddly random, the blocks a patchwork of closed businesses and those that persevere. The quiet feels alien I spent the better part of two decades as editor of the Los Angeles Downtown News and grew habituated to clogged sidewalks, near-constant construction, and an unending stream of store and restaurant openings. “We get that all the time,” Besten says as the truck passes, alluding to the staggering toll from the winter coronavirus surge.īesten is executive director of the Historic Core Business Improvement District, representing the 56-block downtown neighborhood filled with early-twentieth-century buildings like the Eastern Columbia, a turquoise Art Deco edifice on Broadway that underwent a $30 million transformation and reopened as lofts in 2007, part of a decades-long wave of reinvestment and development that utterly transformed downtown L.A.-at least until COVID-19 came to town.įor an hour on a crisp January morning, Besten and I traverse sidewalks that feel about 30 percent as crowded as they did a year ago. 9, based in Skid Row, comes barreling down the street, siren blaring. She’s about to tell a story about it when suddenly a bright-red engine from Station No. Once upon a time, before the pandemic, it was a vintage-clothing shop. Blair Besten halts her stride down 7th Street, stopping in front of an empty storefront.
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