The Los Angeles Central Library

The Los Angeles Public Library system's Central Library building is located in downtown Los Angeles on a large two-block plot running west to east between Flower and Grand Streets, bordered on the north by Fifth Street, and abutted at the center of its south side by Hope Street. The original building was designed by architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue and built in 1922-26. Overcrowding, some dilapidation, earthquake damage, and two serious 1986 fires that gutted most of the structure produced a great deal of support for demolishing the building and beginning again with a new structure on the same site. Plans had already been initiated for adapting the Goodhue building by constructing an extension, but the fires and the most extensive earthquake damage in the bui

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tation of the Goodhue building was tied to the rarity of large buildings more than a few decades old anywhere in the city. In the 1980s and 1990s the surge of major building projects in the downtown area meant that the city was looking to the district as a source of employment and prestige as it had not done for many decades, and the presence of older public buildings in the area created a sense of continuity with turn-of-the-century Los Angeles that not only offered historical connection but leapt over the intervening decades when the city center had fallen victim to complete neglect. The Site in Regional History. As recently as 1971 Banham dismissed the downtown area with a chapter in his book on the city's architecture that was merely "a note . . . because that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves" (201). Although the downtown area, roughly bounded on four sides by the Santa Monica, Harbor, Santa Ana and San Bernardino freeways, had been "the centre of regional employment and retail uses" at the turn of the century, with an "overall building fabric [that] was dense and continuous and generated an active pedestrian life," its subsequent abandonment made it seem as though this era had never flourished (Moule and Polyzoides 2
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Reproduced Features, Los Angeles, Central Library, Moule Polyzoides, Hope Street, Historic Buildings, Children's Reading, Bunker Hill, Grosvenor Goodhue, Maguire Thomas, los angeles, central library, moule polyzoides, goodhue building, public library, angeles public library, angeles public, los angeles public, bunker hill, maguire thomas, fifth street, downtown los, downtown los angeles, moule polyzoides 29, library hand book,
Approximate Word count = 4835
Approximate Pages = 19 (250 words per page)

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