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43-612: The Potomac Block was a commercial building with a historical role in the retail history of Los Angeles , at 213–223 S. Broadway in Downtown Los Angeles , on the west side of Broadway between 2nd and 3rd streets. It was developed by lumberyard and mill owner J. M. Griffith, designed in 1888 by Block, Curlett and Eisen in Romanesque architectural style and opened on July 17, 1890. Tenants included Ville de Paris (department store) , and City of London Dry Goods Co. It

86-538: A 157,000 sq ft (14,600 m) new store in June 1905. The building was demolished in 1953 and is still the site of a parking lot. 34°3′7.5″N 118°14′51″W  /  34.052083°N 118.24750°W  / 34.052083; -118.24750 History of retail in Southern California Branches in what were then the suburbs like Hollywood and Mid-Wilshire were built in

129-467: A breach of contract suit filed by Bette Davis against Warner Brothers . The House Un-American Activities Committee met in the building in 1947 to gather information on Hollywood personalities suspected of Communist involvement. In 1973 the federal government case against Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the "Pentagon Papers" was heard in the courthouse. In 2016, the Central District moved to

172-580: A federal court. Other portions of the U.S. Court House remain in use by certain federal agencies, including the U.S. Attorney's office, and Probation and Pretrial Services . Located on a landscaped one-acre site bounded by Spring, Main, Temple and Aliso Streets in the Los Angeles Civic Center , the courthouse is a major example of Art Moderne architecture, characterized by its stepped rectangular massing and restrained use of exterior ornamentation. Dark gray granite with pink swirls

215-399: A key role in the retail history of Los Angeles , as it was the first home to several upscale retailers who would become big names in the city: Desmond's (1870–1882) and Jacoby Bros. (1879–1891). By the 1880s, most upscale retailers would have migrated southwestward, clustering around First and Spring in what had become the new center of the 1880s-1890s central business district , which

258-628: A key role in the history of retail in Southern California, as it was home to a number of upscale retailers who would later grow to be big names in the city, and some, regional chains. The site later became a Post Office and Federal Building, and is now the Spring Street U.S. Courthouse . Temple Block was actually a collection of different structures that occupied the block bounded by Spring, Main and Temple, erected in 1858 and expanded in 1871. The block had many law offices and also

301-564: A much larger department store at Hollywood and Vine , originally to have been a Boadway Bros. When Boadway's went out of business the next year, B. H. Dyas , a Downtown Los Angeles –based department store, opened in the 130,000-square-foot (12,000 m ) building in March 1928, then sold their lease to The Broadway in 1931 – the building still a landmark today, known as the Broadway Hollywood Building . By 1930

344-713: A number of federal courthouses, and the magnificent United States Mint in San Francisco . The original plan specified a fifteen-story building. Even before construction began in May 1937, the Treasury Department realized two more floors would be needed. Congress did not appropriate the additional funding until the initial fifteen-story building was finished in January 1939. The building's top two stories and penthouse were added between April 1939 and March 1940. At

387-606: Is now used by Los Angeles Superior Court . The United States Court House initially housed court facilities for the United States District Court for the Southern District of California , until the District was redrawn in 1966. It thereafter functioned as a court house with judges from the United States District Court for the Central District of California . In 2016 the federal courts moved to

430-411: Is used for the steps, retaining walls , and walkway borders. Above a polished granite base, the seventeen-story steel-frame building is clad with a pale pink matte-glazed terra-cotta veneer. It is rectangular in plan, and steps back at the fourth and sixth stories. Above this rises a slab-like tower with a central two-story penthouse. The window openings are organized in vertical strips and set back from

473-535: The Act for the Government and Protection of Indians , which allowed for any indigenous Californian to be declared as a " vagrant " by white Americans and taken before a justice of the peace ; those who did were subsequently sold at public auction into de facto slavery . In Los Angeles, the public auction took place at a site now occupied by the courthouse. The enslavement of indigenous Californians by white Americans

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516-587: The Golden Mall in Burbank , Pomona Mall , and Riverside Main Street Mall and, until its renovation, Santa Monica's Third Street Mall . Discount department stores and membership stores, mostly Los Angeles–based, like The Akron , Fedco , Fedmart , Gemco , Mervyn's , Pic 'N' Save , Unimart , White Front , and Zody's , thrived in this era as well. Timeline of transformation to Macy's In

559-612: The New U.S. Court House on First between Broadway and Hill, leaving the building's courtrooms empty. In 2018, the Los Angeles County Superior Court began leasing courtrooms in the United States Courthouse from the federal government for some of its civil and complex civil departments. This meant the building would again be used as a courthouse, but would now host a state court instead of

602-620: The 1920s, and local department stores as well as branches of national variety stores and J. C. Penney opened in local downtowns in the outlying towns that would become the suburbs. However, real suburbanization took off in the 1950s with the building of shopping centers across the suburbs. By the 1960s few suburbanites ventured to Downtown Los Angeles to shop, and regional and community shopping centers flourished. Local chains Bullock's , The Broadway , J. W. Robinson's , May Co. and Buffums built out dozens of branches each in malls across Southern California, as did Sears and J. C. Penney. In

645-412: The 1990s the local department store chains either closed or were folded into Macy's. Alternative shopping center formats like power centers , lifestyle centers , and outlet malls arose, strip malls flourished, and as elsewhere in the country, shopping malls began to close or were transformed into strip-style community shopping centers . Retail in Southern California today is much like anywhere else in

688-676: The 1990s, via a series of takeovers, the "big four" Los Angeles–based department stores: Bullock's , The Broadway , Robinson's and May Company , plus Bullocks Wilshire and I. Magnin , became part of Macy's, which in turn became part of Federated Department Stores (since renamed Macy's Inc. ), and were turned into Macy's , Bloomingdales , or were sold or closed. In 1988, Robert Campeau took over Federated and sold Bullock's and I. Magnin to Macy's. In 1990 Bullock's Wilshire (BW) became part of I. Magnin and some BW branches were closed. However, Macy's went bankrupt in 1992, and Federated bought Macy's in 1994, and in 1995, Federated's Macy's closed

731-573: The Hispanic market. United States Court House (Spring Street, Los Angeles) The Spring Street Courthouse , formerly the United States Court House in Downtown Los Angeles , is a Moderne style building that originally served as both a post office and a courthouse . The building was designed by Gilbert Stanley Underwood and Louis A. Simon, and construction was completed in 1940. It formerly housed federal courts but

774-479: The United States Court of Appeals on the sixteenth floor is also finished in walnut, with a plaster ceiling, but has less elaborate detailing than the second-floor courtrooms. One of Los Angeles' most distinguished buildings, the United States Courthouse is directly on axis with, and complements, the massing of the twenty-eight-story Los Angeles City Hall (1926–1928), located across Temple Street to

817-604: The United States, with a variety of shopping center formats, and ever-increasing competition from online shopping and major fallout of closed stores as a results of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic which closed stores for months. The first dry goods store was opened by Jonathan Temple in 1827 when Los Angeles was a Mexican pueblo. Some of the dry goods retailers who opened over the following decades included two Harris & Frank (1856) and Desmond's (department store) (1862), that would grow into local chains that survived until

860-550: The civil rights of Mexican-Americans, and a precursor to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. Before it was Downey Block , the northwest corner of Temple and Main that was eventually used for the 1910 and 1937 courthouse buildings was a slave market during the mid-19th century, after California had been incorporated into the Union. In 1850, the California State Legislature signed into law

903-502: The end of the 20th century. The dry goods stores migrated in the 1860s and 1870s a few blocks south of the Plaza to Temple, First, and Main streets, and some would grow into the first department stores, such as the City of Paris , Jacoby Bros. , Hamburger's , and Coulter's . On the northwest corner of Temple and Main streets stood four buildings in succession, the first two of which had

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946-458: The entire I. Magnin chain. In 1995 Federated bought Broadway Stores, Inc. and thus, The Broadway chain. Macy's changed the nameplate of Broadway and Bullock's stores to Macy's, except some locations which it converted to Bloomingdales. Owner May Department Stores combined its midrange May Company and upscale Robinson's chains into a single 45-store midrange chain, Robinsons-May , in 1993. In 2005, Federated took over May and Robinsons-May

989-437: The facades. Sandblasted aluminum spandrels separate the paired double-hung windows. The roofs are flat and concealed by tall parapets. The main entrance, which faces Spring Street, is three stories high and recessed behind fluted columns. Each of the five entrance doorways consists of a pair of bronze doors capped by a projecting curved hood bearing a stylized eagle. Above each doorway, an elaborate aluminum grille extends to

1032-1086: The full height of the bay. These grilles are decorated with flowers and the seals of five U.S. Government departments: State, Treasury, War, Justice, and Post Office. The opposite elevation, which faces Main Street, is similar, but has an additional lower story due to the slope of the site, and three entry bays rather than five. This elevation bears the seals of five additional federal departments: Navy , Interior , Agriculture , Commerce , and Labor . The Spring Street and Main Street lobbies have retained most of their original finishes and furnishings. These include polychrome terrazzo floors, ornamental plaster ceilings, and ornate aluminum light fixtures. The Main Street lobby has an oval plan and has walls of Tennessee brown marble with golden Sienna travertine accents and engaged columns of black and gold marble from Montana. The floor contains an inlaid, eight-pointed starburst design, in red, yellow and green terrazzo with Cardiff green marble accents. Two statues stand at opposite ends of

1075-622: The lobby. "Law," depicting a young woman with a tablet, is by Archibald Garner . The other, titled The Young Lincoln , is by local art student James Lee Hansen ; it won a Federal Works Agency competition The Spring Street lobby, which originally accommodated the post office, is larger, with a rectangular plan, and has a higher ceiling than the Main Street lobby. It is similar to the Spring Street lobby in its finishes. Four murals, originally installed in this lobby, were removed when

1118-606: The mid-1950s claiming to be the largest shopping center on the West Coast of the United States and the third-largest in the country, and Panorama City Shopping Center (1955). Bullock's built a series of four "Fashion Squares", starting with Santa Ana Fashion Square in 1958, and Broadway and Robinson's also backed new suburban centers. By the 1960s, most Los Angeles area shoppers didn't bother (or had no particular need) to go to Downtown Los Angeles to shop, far from most suburbs and with more difficult parking facilities than in

1161-603: The more upscale stores also migrated westward along Seventh Street as far as Figueroa , where Barker Bros. built a million-square-foot store in 1926. Both streets together formed a very large downtown shopping district. The square footage of the four largest Downtown L.A. department stores alone—Bullock's at 806,000 sq ft (74,900 m ), The Broadway at 577,000 sq ft (53,600 m ), May Co. at over 1,000,000 sq ft (93,000 m ) and J. W. Robinson's (7th St. at Hope) at 623,700 sq ft (57,940 m ) —totaled over three million square feet,

1204-403: The nearby film studios. Chains that opened includes Schwab's in 1921, Mullen & Bluett in 1922, I. Magnin in 1923, Myer Siegel in 1925, F. W. Grand and Newberry's (dime stores) in 1926 to 1928, and Roos Brothers in 1929. The independent Robertson's department store, at 46,000 square feet (4,300 m ) and 4 stories tall, opened in 1923. In 1922, stock was sold to finance construction of

1247-558: The new First Street Courthouse . There is another federal court house in the Roybal Building in Downtown Los Angeles . In February 2006, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as U.S. Court House and Post Office . It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2012, as the site of Gonzalo Mendez et al v. Westminster School District of Orange County, et al , a major legal case in advancing

1290-416: The older suburbs like Long Beach, Santa Ana, Anaheim, and Whittier, lost their function as regional shopping districts, except for those building downtown enclosed malls like Plaza Pasadena , Santa Monica Place and San Bernardino's Central City Mall , and Beverly Hills, which retained its status as the premiere luxury shopping district. Pedestrian malls in outlying downtowns were largely unsuccessful such as

1333-411: The only major suburban shopping district of the pre-World War II era, attracting branches of local and national stores, both mainstream and upscale, between the late 1910s and the late 1920s. In the 1920s Hollywood Boulevard and adjacent streets became a major regional shopping district, both for everyday needs and appliances, but increasingly also for high-end clothing and accessories, in part because of

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1376-750: The outdoor, pedestrian-oriented spaces of The Grove at Farmer's Market and Westfield Century City . Lifestyle centers like Irvine Spectrum Center and outlet malls like The Citadel were built. Many of the largest traditional enclosed shopping malls still thrive, such as South Coast Plaza , Los Cerritos Center , and Westfield Santa Anita , to name a few. The formerly busy retail districts of suburban downtowns such as Santa Ana, City of Orange, Burbank, North Hollywood, Riverside, and Pasadena are now often entertainment and arts districts with outdoor dining and eclectic, artsy retail mix. Today, no department store chains are based in Southern California except Pic ‘N’ Save and Curacao , both discount retailers targeting

1419-602: The post office moved out. Two by Lucien Labaudt ( Life on the Old Spanish and Mexican Ranchos , and Aeroydynamism ) and one by Edward Biberman ( Los Angeles Prehistoric Spanish Colonial ) have been returned. Eight original courtrooms for the U.S. District Court are located on the second floor. Designed according to four different plans, they are all three stories in height and similarly finished with walnut wainscoting and plaster ceilings bordered by various geometric designs such as stars, waves, and squares. The courtroom of

1462-778: The shopping district consisted of over 300 stores. The area would later face competition from areas along Wilshire Boulevard : the easternmost around Bullocks Wilshire which opened in 1929, second the Miracle Mile , and finally, the shopping district of Beverly Hills , where Saks Fifth Avenue opened a store in 1938. Bullock's and B. H. Dyas department stores built the first suburban branches in 1929, in Mid-Wilshire and Hollywood respectively, Bullock's and Desmond's opened boutique stores in Westwood Village and Palm Springs , Sears built several stores in

1505-692: The size of American Dream Meadowlands , America's largest mall today. Table of department stores on Broadway and 7th streets as Macy's, reopened in 1986 at Citicorp Plaza, now FIGat7th . In the first half of the 20th century, some outlying towns also saw their downtowns grow into large regional shopping districts, and some of the local department stores based there would become small regional chains after World War II , like Buffums , The Wise Company (closed 1936) and Roberts ( Long Beach ), Boston Stores ( Inglewood ), Harris Co. ( San Bernardino ), Walker Scott and Marston's (San Diego), and Nash's ( Pasadena ). Hollywood established itself as

1548-540: The suburbs (1927-1939), and Saks Fifth Avenue opened in Beverly Hills , which would then soon replace Hollywood as the city's largest upscale suburban shopping district. But Downtown Los Angeles was still a goliath of retail square footage compared to anything else in Southern California. True suburbanization took off after World War II with the opening of very large shopping centers like Crenshaw Center (1947), Lakewood Center (1952), Valley Plaza (1951) – in

1591-780: The suburbs. Broadway instead continued as a great shopping hub, but from the 1970s through the mid-2000s, for immigrant Latin Americans and local Hispanic shoppers with its bazaar (or indoor swap meet -type) offerings and quinceañera and wedding dress shops. More and more regional malls were built, as well as some community shopping centers with single department stores, for example Honer Plaza in Santa Ana, Orangefair Mall in Fullerton, and three centers in three centers in Santa Fe Springs alone. The downtown areas of

1634-414: The time of its completion, it was the largest federal building in the western United States. The post office, located on the ground and first floors, moved to another site in 1965. The expanding U.S. District Court then took over the space. The U.S. Court House has been the venue for a number of notable court cases, beginning in the 1940s with paternity cases against Clark Gable and Charlie Chaplin , and

1677-608: Was a crucial part of the California genocide . Built between 1937 and 1940 by the Federal Public Works Administration , this was the third federal building constructed in Los Angeles. The first Los Angeles federal building , completed 1892, housed the post office, U.S. District Court, and various federal agencies, but it soon proved inadequate. The second Los Angeles federal building

1720-583: Was demolished in the 1920s–1950s and it today the site of the (mostly) government buildings of the Civic Center . The major department stores started to migrate to, or were built along, Broadway between 3rd and 9th streets around 1905–1915, and built very large stores that would over the following decades expand to cover entire or nearly entire city blocks. The Broadway led the way in 1896, Hamburger's (later May Company California in 1906, and Bullock's in 1907. Starting with J. W. Robinson's in 1915,

1763-776: Was dissolved, and as with Bullock's and Broadway nine years prior in 1996, some stores became branches of Macy's, while others were closed, sold, or transformed into Bloomingdales. National discount big box retailers like Walmart and Target became more popular during this people and some malls, like Panorama City Shopping Center , became anchored only by discount stores. The local discount store chains closed. New models of shopping centers thrived. Large power centers with multiple big box retailers, and older malls were demolished to make way for community centers. The strip mall thrived. A renewed Downtown Burbank as well as Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica were successes, as are

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1806-457: Was the first time major retail stores opened on South Broadway, in what would be a shift of the shopping district from 1890 to 1905, from the 1880s-1890s central business district around Spring, Main, First and Temple streets to S. Broadway, and ever further south along Broadway. In 1904 Coulter's bought the building and combined it with a building to the south and at the back (facing Hill St.), renovated and combined them into one, opening it as

1849-716: Was used from 1910 to 1937 when it was razed for construction of the Spring Street Courthouse. Gilbert Stanley Underwood was selected to design the building as consulting architect to the Office of the Supervising Architect of the Treasury Department. The actual plans were prepared by the Supervising Architect's Office. Underwood was acclaimed for his public architecture. His work includes lodges in National Parks, over two dozen post offices,

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