Downtown Up

Sandy Bleifer applies her artistic eye to the defining elements of downtown Los Angeles' Historic Core and helps to create a new vision for their revitalization and reuse.

A photographic narrative of the return to economic and social viability of downtown Los Angeles, which began in the mid-1990s. The pictures simulate a focused walk through the Historic Core - its rich architectural detail, its human-scaled density and its reconnection to the modern office towers on Bunker Hill - looping back to the Central Business District and graphically illustrating how the built environment - both old and new - made the present revitalization possible.

The sequence of these photographs take you on a walking tour from the Historic Core, up Angel’s Flight to Bunker Hill and down the Bunker Hill Steps to the Central Business District following the evolving relationship between the revitalization of the Historic Core and its growing connectivity to Bunker Hill. Public Art and great architecture draw you along. The journey creates a narrative drawn from an inventory of architectural and cultural assets captured at a turning point in the mid-1990s

The author/photographer, Sandy Bleifer was deeply involved in the intensive revitalization efforts of downtown Los Angeles in the mid-1990’s, and conceptualized a self-guided walking tour linking the historic, architecturally significant buildings on Broadway, Spring and Main Streets with the new modern office towers up on Bunker Hill. It was only when this critical linkage was recognized that the old and the new downtown could be joined together and the entire area could be infused with a new vitality for live, work and play.