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A few years from now, the intersection of Second Street and Broadway will look virtually nothing like it does today. Aside from a shiny new Metro subway station opening in 2021 and the conversion of the across-the-street Los Angeles Times building into housing (R.I.P. Journalism), the intersection will be joined by an arguably beautiful 30 story building filled with (arguably unaffordable) condominiums.
As Urbanize.LA points out, the mixed-use tower is being developed by the Tribune Media Company, a national media conglomerate which owns the company (tronc) that owns the Los Angeles Times. Times are tough in the media industry, and Tribune seems to be taking advantage of its vast real estate holdings to make ends meet. Along with 107 condominiums, the building will also dump 534,000 square feet of office space and 7,200 square feet of ground-level retail space into downtown L.A.'s Civic Center.
Right now, the land the building will one day sit upon is nothing more than a humble surface parking lot. Adjacent the surface lot rises another multi-story parking structure, used by L.A. Times employees.
Although downtown L.A. has been swept up in an enormous building boom, most of that construction has been occurring on the southern end. Literally dozens of both high- and low-rise towers are mushrooming upwards south of Seventh Street, and will eventually add thousands of housing units to an increasingly dense downtown.
This tower, however, will be located in the Civic Center, in downtown's northeast quadrant. Though the tens of thousands of employees who work there inject vibrancy into the area during the day, the Civic Center effectively shuts down at 5 p.m. It will be interesting to see how, especially with the addition of a Metro station, whether or not the area will see an uptick in residential building into the coming decade.
