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On Wednesday, entertainment conglomerate AEG filed plans with the L.A. City Planning Department to build a 385 foot, 38-story addition to its J.W. Marriott hotel adjacent the Staples Center and L.A. Convention Center.
The new building will add 755 rooms to the existing hotel—that sort-of coffin looking tower you can see from the 110—making the hotel, according to Urbanize.LA, the second largest in California with 1,756 rooms total.
Along with some extra entertainment space, the hotel expansion will also inject an extra 17,800 square feet of ground-floor retail space to the neighborhood as well.
This particular expansion is just one of several hotel projects bubbling up around the Convention Center, which has historically been unable to host particularly large conventions due to a dearth of hotel rooms available in its immediate vicinity. Where both the San Diego and San Francisco convention centers are surrounded by nearly 20,000 rooms, the L.A. Convention Center is served by only about 7,000 rooms, according to the L.A. Times.
Along with the AEG project, the Fig-Central development, going up across the street from the Staples Center, will include a 5-star, Roberto Cavalli branded hotel. The Metropolis project just to the north will come with a hotel as well, and another dual-hotel project through Courtyard Marriott was completed relatively recently.
Even the Convention Center itself is going to be extensively renovated through the next decade. While the (slick and futuristic looking!) renovations were originally submitted as a joint plan with the now-defunct plan to build an NFL stadium in downtown, the Convention Center plans were set with the condition that they could advance even if the stadium fell through.
A few years from now, the downtown neighborhood identified as South Park will be completely unrecognizable. Multiple “megaprojects” will fill the Figueroa corridor south of Olympic with skyscrapers, several more than 40 stories tall.
If everything goes as planned, AEG hopes to start welcoming guests sometime in 2018. It’s a definetly a fascinating time for downtown L.A., as parking lots transform into skyscrapers seemingly overnight. Progress is progress, right?
