Over 11 years and 570 episodes, John Rabe and Team Off-Ramp scoured SoCal for the people, places, and ideas whose stories needed to be told, and the show became a love-letter to Los Angeles. Now, John is sharing selections from the Off-Ramp vault to help you explore this imperfect paradise.
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Get up early any morning and stand where Wilshire crosses the 110 Freeway, and you'll see a parade of men and women carrying lunch boxes, wearing Carhart and Dickies, steel-toed Red Wings and hard hats, safety glasses and gloves, all them converging on the Wilshire Grand, which is rising inexorably over downtown Los Angeles.
In 10 months, it'll eclipse the U.S. Bank Tower as the highest building west of the Mississippi. Nine hundred fifty people work there every day now; before long it'll be 1,000, skimming drywall, painting, installing fixtures, laying tile and hardwood, checking level and plumb, and — hopefully — measuring twice and cutting once.
And then, when it's done, as Mayor Garcetti told a crowd of workers at the weekly safety meeting Monday, parents will point to the building and tell their kids, "Your mom (or dad) built that."
That's a very Eric Garcetti thing to say, but I can verify that every time we see the U.S. Bank Tower, my crazy father-in-law, who was a carpenter on that skyscraper, does exactly that.
Garcetti says the Wilshire Grand represents 2.669 million man- and woman-hours of construction work, with a total of 11,000 jobs in the building phase, and 2,000 permanent jobs. "And that's not even counting the city bureaucracy that supports this," he laughs.