Los Angeles Downtown News 09-21-20

September 21, 2020 I VOL. 49 I #38

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Local ‘Starr’ memorialized in vibrant mural Safety First County issues Halloween guidelines Page 7

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SEPTEMBER 21, 2020

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Covered help LETTERSCalifornia TO THE will EDITOR

OPINION

Garcetti’s homeless policy reflects broader failures

By Joseph Laughon his has been a difficult summer for Angelenos. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to threaten public health, unemployment in Los Angeles county has topped 20% multiple times, and now oppressive heat is shattering records in Southern California. Through all of this, however, many of the city’s most vulnerable residents are continuing to struggle without any sign of relief, due in large part to a complete failure to act from Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.

Perhaps nowhere has this been more evident than in Mayor Garcetti’s handling of the city’s homelessness crisis. According to the 2020 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count conducted earlier this year, Los Angeles County saw a staggering 12.7% increase in homelessness just in the past year, leaving 11,000 more people without homes than one year ago.

Notably, the count was conducted in January, long before COVID-19 first struck the city and shut down local businesses. The situation has gotten so out of hand that Mayor Garcetti’s top adviser on addressing homelessness resigned in August.

Earlier this summer, Mayor Garcetti joined Gov. Gavin Newsom in implementing Project Roomkey, which laid out an ambitious plan to provide rooms for 15,000 homeless individuals in Los Angeles County. The aim was to simultaneously help protect the city’s homeless population from being devastated by the pandemic, while also aiding the struggling hospitality industry.

The results? Three months into the program, Project Roomkey had only secured about 3,600 rooms in Los Angeles, barely even a quarter of the program’s goals. The city’s implementation of Project Roomkey has also faced renewed criticism in recent weeks, as advocates sent a letter to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority claiming that disabled Angelenos have been explicitly prevented from taking part in the program. Things are not improving for those struggling with homelessness in Los Angeles; they are getting worse.

Unfortunately, Mayor Garcetti has ignored this troubling reality. In a tone-deaf interview on NBC’s “Nightly News with Lester Holt,” Garcetti claimed he had “not a lot of regrets” over his handling of the pandemic, even going so far as to add, “I think we’ve probably done the best job of a vulnerable city protecting our people.” Whatever positive spin Mayor Garcetti tries to put on the situation simply ignores the harsh realities of life for homeless Angelenos.

In a sense, his abject failure to successfully implement Project Roomkey serves as a microcosm both of his handling of homelessness in Los Angeles and of his tenure as mayor more broadly. It’s no wonder there is a petition to recall Mayor Garcetti.

Take Mayor Garcetti’s “A Bridge Home” program, for example. Designed to offer a temporary housing solution for the city’s homeless residents in order to provide a platform from which they can regain their footing and successfully transition to more permanent options, “A Bridge Home” has instead proven to be not much of a bridge at all. Rather, few have been able to secure permanent housing due to a lack of affordable options.

This is a sensitive time for the city of Los Angeles. The looming threat of the global pandemic presents a very real and serious danger for the city’s homeless population, but Mayor Garcetti has done little to solve either crisis. Instead, the city’s most vulnerable communities are struggling with little indication that things will get better soon. If there is anything that has been made clear by the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic and the city’s growing homelessness crisis, it is that Los Angeles both needs and deserves better leadership than Mayor Garcetti is willing or able to offer.

Joseph Laughon is a former journalist and political commentator.

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SEPTEMBER 21, 2020

Hotel Alexandria: History, hauntings and film stars

By Kamala Kirk t the beginning of the 20th century, Hotel Alexandria was the first luxury hotel in Downtown Los Angeles.

It cost $2 million to build and was the product of Albert C. Bilicke and Robert Alfred Rowan, two Pasadena businessmen who rented plots of land along Spring and Fifth streets so they could build a world-class hotel.

Hotel Alexandria was named after John Alexander, the man who owned the parcel of land at the corner of Spring and Fifth that Bilicke and Rowan had leased. Construction on the eight-story, beaux art hotel began in 1905, and it was designed by Los Angeles architect John Parkinson’s firm, Parkinson & Bergstrom. On February 10, 1906, Hotel Alexandria opened and was an instant success.

“The Alexandria was LA’s equivalent to San Diego County’s Hotel del Coronado,” said Craig Owens, a historian, author and photographer who runs the popular blog Bizarre Los Angeles, which is dedicated to LA’s forgotten history and Old Hollywood.

“Not only was it touted as being fireproof, but it also became LA’s first five-star hotel and was touted as a ‘gemstone set in tile, steel and marble.’ It featured a massive lobby with tall pillars made of Egyptian marble, mosaic tile floors and stained-glass skylights.”

The hotel was frequently sold out and became a popular place where wealthy people would stay when they were visiting LA from around the country. According to Owens, newspaper reporters would often stake out in the lobby, waiting to catch a glimpse of one of the hotel’s famous guests. Hotel Alexandria ended up being such a success that Bilicke and Rowan eventually leased additional plots to expand it.

“They also successfully lobbied the city of LA to raise its height restrictions on buildings from eight stories to 12,” Owens shared. “The owners then built a taller annex that connected to the original building. This newer addition featured a second-floor ballroom and the Franco-Italian Dining Salon, known today as the Palm Court. The new annex opened in 1911, just in time for a presidential visit by William Howard Taft, who spoke at a private dinner there.”

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Craig Owens is a Los Angeles-based historical researcher, photographer and author.

Photo courtesy Craig Owens

A postcard image of Hotel Alexandria, which opened in 1906 as DTLA’s first luxury hotel.

Photo courtesy Craig Owens

In his book, Craig Owens also restaged a fistfight that occurred between Charlie Chaplin and MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer in the lobby of the hotel.

Photo courtesy Craig Owens

Craig Owens shoots restaged photos of ghost sightings in the Valentino Suite at Hotel Alexandria for his book.

Photo courtesy Craig Owens

Attracting the famous A new chapter in the hotel’s history began in the winter of 1910, when film pioneers D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Mack Sennett of New Jersey’s Biograph Company checked in for several months while shooting films in Southern California. It wasn’t long before other film directors and producers from the East Coast followed suit, and film stars that included the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino and others frequently frolicked in the hotel.

“By the late 1910s, the Alexandria had grown from being the West Coast film colony’s Plymouth Rock to its Rome,” Owens said. “D.W. Griffith lived in the Presidential Suite, and future ‘Ben-Hur’ star Ramon Novarro worked as a singing waiter. Elevator operators occasionally pitched and sold movie ideas to producers, and the lobby became so crowded with aspiring filmmakers and stars trying to sell blockbuster movie projects that one of the hotel’s large Persian carpets became known as the ‘Million Dollar Rug.’” Hotel Alexandria also became an important social hub for professional boxers and athletes, with many heavyweight champions, such as Jim Jeffries and Jack Dempsey, frequenting the hotel to socialize and rub elbows with the movie crowd. Its importance as LA’s film capital climaxed in 1920 when Chaplin, Pickford, Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks and William S. Hart gathered inside the Palm Court to announce they were forming United Artists.

After the hotel’s original owners passed away, by 1919 the John Strauss Company in Chicago took over and financed its sister property, The Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, which opened on January 1, 1921. By this time, many of the film-industry guests who used to frequent Hotel Alexandria had moved to Hollywood and Beverly Hills, and the hotel entered a slow decline through the 1920s. The Millennium Biltmore Hotel opened in 1923 and outshined Hotel Alexandria with its size and opulence, replacing it as DTLA’s most luxurious hotel.

Shortly before the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the Strauss Company sold Hotel Alexandria, which eventually closed in 1932. After the hotel went bankrupt, ownership reverted back to the original landowners, who owned parts of the building. All but one sold their section of the hotel in 1937 to Phil Goldstone, a retired silent movie producer who dreamed of restoring Hotel Alexandria to its former glory, although his vision never materialized. Following the end of World War II, Goldstone sold the hotel, then in 1954 the new owners gave

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the lobby a midcentury modern makeover, while the shopping level, basements and electric plants underneath the lobby were converted into underground parking garages.

“In 1958, boxing promoter George Parnassus leased the Palm Court and second-floor ballroom,” Owens said. “He then constructed boxing rings inside both rooms and charged people to watch his fighters train. At first, the novelty of having boxing rings inside the Alexandria resonated with boxing fans and reporters. By the mid-1960s, the novelty had worn off.”

S. Jon Kreedman purchased Hotel Alexandria in the 1960s and refurbished the property, giving it a Victorian theme and naming several suites in honor of well-known silent film legends, including Chaplin and Valentino. The second-floor ballroom is named after King Edward, although he never set foot in the hotel.

“Those in charge of the Alexandria’s Victorian makeover chose a suite on the top floor of the Annex to honor Valentino’s memory,” Owens explained. “They added gold and red wallpaper to the suite, dark red carpeting, mounted a photo of Valentino to the wall, and furnished it with Victorian Revival furniture.”

After arriving to Los Angeles in 1917, Valentino stayed at Hotel Alexandria for two weeks while he was an unemployed actor. His friend and fellow actor Norman Kerry, who later starred in ‘The Phantom of the Opera,’ invited Valentino to stay with him in his suite at the hotel. During that time, Kerry introduced Valentino to film-industry people who frequented the hotel.

According to Owens, the Valentino Suite is haunted. While working on a photo shoot for his 2017 book, “Haunted by History Vol. 1: Separating the Facts and Legends of Eight Historical Hotels and Inns in Southern California,” Owens visited Hotel Alexandria, where he shot restaged photos of various ghost sightings, as well as a fistfight that occurred between Chaplin and MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer in the lobby.

“On the night of my first photo shoot there, a door to the bathroom slammed shut by itself with such force that it rattled all of the glass inside the suite,” Owens said.

“We all knew it wasn’t the wind that caused the door to slam. Earlier that same day, we had tried closing that same bathroom door. It wouldn’t budge because of the warped tiles on the bathroom floor. Not wanting to break anything, we left it open and decided to shoot around it. There’s no logical excuse for it—seven of us heard it and we all jumped out of our skins.”

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Casting a shadow Despite Hotel Alexandria’s glamorous past, the hotel also has its share of darker stories, which include strange deaths and suicides. Some people have reported seeing a ghostly Edwardian woman in black wandering the hallways of the hotel, in addition to phantom waiters from the 1910s in the Palm Court area, ghostly dancers in the second-floor ballroom, and a female child ghost. Folks living in the hotel’s penthouse have reported seeing a dapper man dressed in 1920s clothing reading a newspaper while sitting at a table, while others claim to have seen occasional shadow figures in the parking garage.

“When ‘American Horror Story: Hotel’ came out, people thought that the show’s fictional Hotel Cortez was patterned after the Cecil Hotel in DTLA,” Owens said. “That is only partially true. The season’s storyline also incorporated the Alexandria’s ghost legends as well. For instance, the sealed-off hotel wing and subsequent Valentino vampire subplot is all based on the Alexandria. Most people don’t know that—a few fans of the show, however, figured it out after reading my book.”

When Kreedman sold Hotel Alexandra, it eventually became a low-income housing building in the early 1980s. It changed ownership several more times over the years, then in 2014 it was purchased by developer Izak Shomof, who restored portions of the existing lobby, as well as the Palm Court and second-floor ballroom. These areas are now popular wedding and party venues known as the Alexandria Ballrooms, and in 2019, the 1900s-themed Parisian bar and restaurant The Wolves DTLA opened in the building.

After the release of Owens’ book, he began to receive requests for tours at some of the locations he wrote about, including the Alexandria Ballrooms. He approached the owners and received permission to lead a 90-minute tour there, which sold out immediately. The pandemic occurred shortly after, although Owens is looking forward to offering more tours of in the future.

“We do have plans to resume tours at some time,” he said. “People seem to love connecting with the historic vibe of the building. Plus, the stories are oftentimes surprising since most of us have been given misinformation about the hotel and its history for years.”

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SEPTEMBER 21, 2020

Local ‘Starr’ memorialized in vibrant mural

By Annika Tomlin everal months ago, Mexico-based beer company Estrella Jalisco decided to spend $1 million by 2025 to bring colorful art in all forms to walls throughout the United States.

Partnering with Beautify Earth, Estrella Jalisco started its first Artists-in-Residence program with nine bright and bold artists from across the country to paint vibrant murals over blank walls in Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and El Paso. Each mural features a “Local Star,” a person who is making a positive impact in his or her way.

Echo Park’s Cecilia Romero painted South Los Angeles native Starr Greenfield at 7400 S. Western Avenue.

Romero heard about the Artists-in-Residence program through Beautify Earth and was honored to be chosen.

Painting “since she was in diapers,” Romero was excited to memorialize such a positive person. For her part, Greenfield was nominated by her co-worker at county of Los Angeles, Misty Wynne, for running her “personal ministry,” Favor Fridays, which provides monthly meals and hygiene kits to homeless communities.

Greenfield is working on incorporating her personal ministry.

“Everything I do is solely on me and my sponsors or my donors that help me and fulfilling the different items that I need on a monthly basis,” Greenfield said.

After one meeting over Zoom, Romero started conceptualizing how she wanted portray Starr.

“I was super inspired to portray a portrait of her beautiful loving energy and shining a light on that,” Romero said. “Automatically I knew I wanted to throw in butterflies in the portrait to complement and represent the beautiful transformation that she’s creating with her community. Because she’s an LA native, I knew I wanted to throw in the skyline in there.”

Everything came together after that. Romero accepted Estrella Jalisco’s request to include vibrant colors, which Greenfield enjoys.

While Romero was creating the mural, passers-by watched the portrait come to life.

“Each color that went on the wall, people were talking and cheering me on,” Romero said. “Just as the mural was progressing, I bared witness to just how much this uplifted the whole area.”

The two women hit it off right away when they met after the mural was completed.

“It was still extra special because she came to see the mural on the last day of painting right after I finished,” Romero said. “That was just such a special moment, seeing her and meeting her in real life after I painted her a beautiful portrait.”

Greenfield said she felt the mural is a “good depiction of who I am and the community I serve.”

“It shows the whole city in the background. It also, to me, represents the support that I get to make Favor Fridays even bigger each month. I love the whole thing.”

Greenfield created Favor Fridays because God helped her daily.

“I started it because I’ve always wanted to volunteer at a nonprofit. I just never really knew how to go about it,” Greenfield said. “Because I never really followed through with figuring out how to go volunteer at an actual organization, I just created my own platform.”

After completing her master’s degree in public administration, she tapped into the idea of using her idle time to help give back to the community.

Once a month, Greenfield collects donations through social media and the community to help purchase food and hygiene supplies before packing them up and delivering them to the homeless.

“I’ll sometimes cook spaghetti because that goes a long way to feed more than, I’ll say, 100 to 200 individuals, if not more,” Greenfield said. “Other than that, I buy pizza or McDonald’s cheeseburgers or something like that to give out to them as I give them their hygiene bags as well.”

Starr accepts monetary or product (toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap or wipes) donations through her Instagram @FavorFridays.

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LA native Cecilia Romero painted the vibrant colored mural of Starr Greenfield.

Photo courtesy Estrella Jalisco

The mural of Starr Greenfield is located at 7400 S. Western Avenue.

Photo courtesy Estrella Jalisco

Starr is honored to be “recognized in a way that usually you’re not recognizing until you pass away.”

“For me to have the mural and to be alive to witness, it represents not only for myself, but for my community,” Greenfield said. “I think it just gives us all something to be proud of and to know that we’re making changes and we’re supporting our community as we should.”

Romero echoes that sentiment.

“Murals are so vital to us in society and humans just naturally healing by the color,” she said. “I think anywhere any of these beautiful colorful murals are going up all over across the country, it’s just going to create this beautiful positive impact wherever they go up.”

Both women were honored to be part of this program and are overjoyed to bring color and positivity to the community through Estrella Jalisco.

“Now more than ever we need art, and we need public art for everyone to see and enjoy and to spread that positive healing impact through mural art,” Romero said. “It’s really powerful.”

SEPTEMBER 21, 2020

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County issues guidelines for Halloween

By William Bergholz he Los Angeles Department of Public Health’s Dr. Barbara Ferrer said there’s no way to safely trick or treat this year in light of the coronavirus pandemic.

“As for trick-or-treating, it shouldn’t happen this year,” Ferrer said during a recent press conference. “We don’t think it’s an appropriate activity during this pandemic.

There’s no guarantee house owners will be healthy.”

Ferrer said there are viable options to celebrating Halloween.

“We know that together we can find lots of ways to celebrate that are safe for children and families,” she said.

“We’re asking a lot of each other as we learn how to live through a pandemic. Being prepared, being flexible and constantly figuring out new ways to stay connected and have fun is our reality.”

Permitted Halloween activities include online parties and contests, car parades that comply with public health guidance, drive-in movie nights, meals at outdoor restaurants, art installations at outdoor museums, and dressing up homes and yards with Halloween-themed decorations.

Public health guidance for vehicle-based parades includes drive-by events or contests, with appropriate distancing, and drive-thru events where individuals remain in their vehicles to see displays or receive treat bags with nonperishable items.

Not permitted are Halloween gatherings, events and parties with nonhousehold members; carnivals; festivals; live entertainment and haunted houses.

The Department of Public Health is making the usual recommendation of wearing a cloth face covering, social distancing, and washing and sanitizing hands often. Avoid folks who are ill with coronavirus.

“Every time we have seen transmission rates fall, our natural response is to let up and want to return to greater normalcy,” she said.

“This will be especially true as we’re going into the fall and winter months, when we have a number of important religious and secular holidays. But, unfortunately, what we have learned over the last seven months is that we cannot return to normal at this time.

We actually need to maintain even more vigilance so we can continue to suppress the spread of the virus and get to a place where we can safely reopen additional sectors.”

Info: publichealth.lacounty.gov/media/coronavirus

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Dan Wilson feels strangely fine about Semisonic’s new music

By Christina Fuoco-Karasinski hen Semisonic scored a hit with the 1998 last-call anthem “Closing Time,” the Grammy-nominated song became bigger than the trio.

The Minnesota band couldn’t quite find that sort of success again with “Closing Time’s” album “Feeling Strangely Fine” or its stellar follow-up album “All About Chemistry.”

“You can only be lucky in so many different ways,” said singer Dan Wilson, who is joined by bassist John Munson and drummer Jacob Slichter. “If you have a hit, you have to be lucky in a bunch of different ways with your hit. It’s inconvenient to have a hit that’s bigger than the artist.

“We had this song that turned into an evergreen song that means more to people than the band did. It’s so ubiquitous, so widely known and enjoyed. That’s a huge stroke of luck, but it’s inconvenient for the band as an entity to be overshadowed by our own song.”

That’s not to say Semisonic didn’t have other hit-ready material. The song “Never You Mind” from “Feeling Strangely Fine” is a bouncy, relentlessly hooky song with the line, “Shaking my mind/like an Etch-a-Sketch erasin’.”“All About Chemistry’s”“One True Love” featured Wilson duetting with Carole King, making for a magical ballad.

Wilson says although Semisonic didn’t match “Closing Time’s” success, he has been very fortunate in the rest of his endeavors. He became the go-to songwriter for hitmakers like Adele and the then-known Dixie Chicks with “Someone Like You” and “Not Ready to Make Nice.”

“I don’t feel like ‘Closing Time’ is the only good thing I’ve ever done,” he said.

The 2001 album “All About Chemistry” was Semisonic’s last album until the trio officially reunited in 2017. Wilson recently found the right songs for a Semisonic EP he called “You’re Not Alone,” which is due out September 18 on Pleasuresonic Recordings/Megaforce Records.

The five-song collection includes the first single, the title track—the group’s first new song in nearly 20 years.

“In 2017, I found the key again,” he said. “I found the vibe to write a good Semisonic song again. We recorded it the next year and wrapped it up the end of last year. We had our plan to release the music and the world changed a lot.”

Wilson admits he was hesitant about releasing the EP when the world is plagued by COVID-19.

“There were elements of not wanting to create any mistaken connections between the world as it is and the songs themselves,” he said. “We just decided to throw that caution to the

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wind and put the record out and let people enjoy it as they would. I said we were going to put it out now and tour when we could and if we could, someday, and make a better batch of music the next time around.”

The video for “You’re Not Alone” was directed by Minneapolis-based filmmaker Phil Harder, whose resume includes videos for Prince, Foo Fighters, Liz Phair and Nada Surf.

“For the video, we began with memories of childhood in the woods,” Wilson said.

“Filmmaker Phil Harder creates a fable of the woods, the city, a distant beach, and a young boy who places a message in a bottle and sends it on a long journey. Inspired partly by Richard Powers’ devastatingly beautiful novel ‘The Overstory,’ partly by the paintings of Tomas Sanchez (one of which is featured on the sleeve of the single) and partly by the profound isolation we are experiencing during the pandemic, the video reflects the hopeful message of the song.”

For those wanting to be reacquainted with Semisonic, Wilson says “You’re Not Alone” is a good starting point and then the track “Basement Tapes.” “‘Basement Tapes would be the overture that tells you the story before the story, traveling in vans, being in a van in the Midwest and driving to Kansas City for the next gig,” Wilson said.

“It sets the scene for people in a way. That’s my loose response.”

Wilson says his standards are always high, odd for one of the top songwriters out there.

However, it took a fan’s message on Instagram to make him feel a bit more relaxed.

“They love the Semisonic song ‘She’s Got My Number’ on ‘All About Chemistry,’” he recalled about the piano-driven ballad. “This fan was saying he always wondered if we felt that ‘Closing Time’ was a hard pair of shoes to fill, a hard thing to follow up on.

“We definitely felt that. Trying to write new Semisonic songs over the last many years was difficult. I wanted them to be as good as our best stuff. I felt those shoes I had to fill. It took a while to find my groove. We rose to the occasion, and we’re proud of it. We put our artistic training to the test and did well.”

Semisonic “You’re Not Alone” September 18 Watch the single’s video at https://youtu.be/SPUj68fUsNc

SEPTEMBER 21, 2020

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Conservancy revives in-person walking tours

By Julia Shapero he Los Angeles Conservancy has begun offering in-person tours of historic Downtown LA once again after a six-month break due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The LA Conservancy, a nonprofit that advocates for the preservation of historic structures in LA, started offering its in-person walking tours again at the beginning of September.

The in-person tours are limited to household-only groups and require that guests wear masks, stay 6 feet apart from the docent and receive temperature checks, said program coordinator Alex Inshishian.

Inshishian added that the tours will not include the interiors of the buildings. Instead, they will focus on the exterior structures in order to ensure the safety of the docents and guests.

“Our main priority is not only that our guests and everybody are safe, but also we have about 80 volunteer docents that do most of our tours for us, and so we wanted to make sure that we were doing everything that was best for them,” he said.

During the last few months, the conservancy has also been able to offer virtual tours in place of its traditional in-person walking tours, Inshishian said. These new virtual tours come with benefits as well as drawbacks, he added.

“I think that the main drawback is really (being) with the people,” Inshishian said. “I think a lot of our docents especially are people who want to talk with people and see their faces and kind of joke around with them.”

Chris Spry, a volunteer docent for the conservancy, said he has missed this aspect of leading the live tours, among others.

“I like interacting with the people and … depending on the group there can be a lot more interaction with the live tour,” Spry said. “I also like getting the exercise. I like being out in Downtown Los Angeles.”

Spry added that it’s much more difficult for people to understand the scale of the buildings through photos during a virtual tour.

“In a live tour, again, (you) have the context of scale to people’s own bodies and eyes because they’re seeing it in real time,” he said. “And if you are talking about the scale of something with photos, it’s not necessarily readily apparent and not probably appreciated as much as a live tour.”

However, Inshishian said there are a number of benefits to the virtual tours that the

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conservancy never considered before it started offering them.

“I think if you took a virtual tour, it would be a very different experience in a good way,” he said. ‘I think you’d learn a lot of stuff that you didn’t know before.”

The virtual tours are able to feature historic photos and allow docents to talk about buildings that aren’t next to each other, he said.

“On a walking tour, there’s a lot of buildings that we would love to take people to or to relate one building to another, but they are two miles apart and people don’t want to walk that far on a walking tour,” he said. “But on a virtual tour, that’s something that we’re able to do.”

Inshishian added that the virtual tours have also broadened the audience of the tours to include people from other states and countries.

“I think we’ve realized that there are many, many people … who are very interested in seeing a lot of the great historic treasures or architectural treasures we have here, but they are from Missouri or New York or New Zealand and they aren’t able to get down here,” Inshishian said.

Spry also said that as a docent, the virtual tours allow him to go more in depth since people can hear him more clearly on a virtual tour than in an outdoor situation with a lot of background noise.

He said he is also able to provide more information because the tour group is not taking the time to walk between areas where it’s not feasible for him to be continually talking.

Inshishian added that these tours are important not only to help to educate people but also to help to save historic buildings.

“We’re not just taking you around to different buildings because they have important history or that they’re great to look at,” he said. “We’re actually using this as a venue to raise awareness and to raise a little funds to make sure that the buildings we’re looking at are preserved.”

LA Conservancy 213-623-2489 laconservancy.org

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SEPTEMBER 21, 2020

DTLA ‘Canine Party of the Year’ goes virtual

By Annika Tomlin owntown LA’s 14th annual Dog Days Celebration will run for two weeks— from September 21 to October 2—as a virtual extravaganza to ensure the safety of everyone’s pets and owners.

While the event normally runs for one day, in person, in July, it was “a really hard decision” for Holley and her team to not cancel the event.

“One of the biggest things that it does is bring people together,” said Suzanne Holley, president and CEO of the Downtown Center Business Improvement District. “We held off as long as we could hoping that we could still have an in-person event.

“We didn’t want to do away with the idea altogether because it is for Downtown residents, and the residents are still here and so are their dogs.”

Founded in 2007, this event was created to “support all of the dog owners downtown because we were really building a dog community, so we wanted to have a community event,” she said.

Holley remembers driving up to Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels and seeing Downtown surrounded with people walking their dogs to the event.

“We know there is a community of dog owners who still really want to connect,” Holley said. “There are all of these services, a whole community of dog services, and we really want to support them as well, so we decided to move ahead with a virtual format.”

Knowing it is unlikely to have the same turnout as an in-person event, Holley’s team decided to extend the event to two weeks.

“In that way, we can really spread the love and the community building over a longer period of time,” Holley said.

Similar to past Dog Day Celebrations, there will be giveaways, promotions, discounts and specials offered by several dog services in the community. Some of the services partaking in the event include DTLA Vet, pet store Pet Project LA, South Park Doggy Daycare, Skid Rover that provides nonprofit assistance to the homeless with pets, and FitPals LA. “Everyone will have the opportunity to enter into a drawing to win prizes that are going to be drawn on each of the two Fridays,” Holley said. “We are going to have at least five winners each Friday, and they will win a $100 package of a whole bunch of different things.”

Entries are unlimited; all that is needed is an email address. The winners will be contacted by that email on the Friday of each week.

Participants can enter the Cutest Pooch contest by uploading a photo of their dog in attire. The website will include a full pooch pic gallery to showcase all of the dogs.

“At the end of the event on October 2, we are going to send out an email to everyone who participated letting them know the results of the event,” Holley said.

Access to the event will be at DowntownLA.com/DogDays.

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Silverstein Properties acquires US Bank Tower

By Christina Fuoco-Karasinski ilverstein Properties, a Manhattan-based private real estate developer, owner and property manager, closed on the acquisition of U.S. Bank Tower, a 1.4 million-square-foot Downtown office building.

Silverstein purchased the property from Singapore real estate company OUE Ltd. for $430 million.

This acquisition follows the purchase of 1735 Market Street in Philadelphia and the recent opening of 3 World Trade Center in New York, each the very best office building in their respective cities.

“I am thrilled to add this outstanding property to our portfolio,” said Larry A. Silverstein, chairman of Silverstein Properties.

“I believe in the future of Downtown Los Angeles. Many of the world’s largest and most innovative companies are headquartered on the West Coast. The building is centrally located, easily accessible by car and public transportation. And over the past few years, Downtown Los Angeles has started to transform into a 24/7 community, with new residential buildings, restaurants and bars—much like lower Manhattan in the years after 9/11. It is also home to the city’s top museums, live music venues and sports stadiums.”

U.S. Bank Tower was designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners and built in 1989 by Maguire Properties. Located near the Pershing Square Metro station, it is the second tallest tower in Los Angeles at 1,018 feet, and one of the most prominent buildings on the city skyline. U.S. Bank Tower is LEED Gold-certified, and its tenants include U.S. Bank, Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP, Thompson Reuters and Marsh USA. Since 2013, the property has undergone a $60 million capital improvement program, including lobby renovation, tenant amenities and infrastructure modernization.

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Silverstein Properties plans to invest in a comprehensive capital improvement program to provide building tenants with a creative office campus in a vertical urban environment. The program will include designing and managing new amenity spaces and common areas, new destination dispatch elevators, as well as introducing Inspire, its hospitality-focused tenant experience program and mobile app designed to help tenants get the most out of their workday.

“Downtown Los Angeles is a vibrant and growing market,” said Jeff Grasso, Head of Acquisitions for Silverstein Properties. “It is home to a diverse mix of companies that are attracted by its central location, new housing and easy access. It also benefits from Los Angeles’ comprehensive Metro plan that envisions Downtown as the hub.”

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