Hever

Victorian Downtown Los Angeles

From the Los Angeles Plaza south to 3rd Street and west to Broadway. The heart of the city from the 1880 to 1905.

This site portrays a part of lost Los Angeles that very rarely seen… 

There is a lot of material around showing the Los Angeles Plaza area (where Olvera Street is), and of Broadway and Spring Streets south of Third Street, which was the city’s main business district from the 1920s through the 1950s.  

But the area covered here is neither of those. It is lost — almost entirely razed to the ground — and forgotten, once the beating heart of a city that from 11,000 inhabitants in 1880, quintupled to 50,000 in 1890; doubled to 100,000 in 1900; then tripled to 320,000 in 1910.

The area covered here — the Victorian downtown — ran from the Los Angeles Plaza south to Third Street, along Main Street, Spring Street, and Broadway. This site is dedicated to the memory of that place, the people who lived there and worked there and were the first to make Los Angeles one of the most dynamic cities on the planet.

Click on the images below to explore the streets of Victorian Downtown Los Angeles