Archinect - News

Downtown LA's Parker Center is gone: watch this time-lapse demolition video of the former LAPD headquarters

2019-07-16T14:08:00-04:00

Parker Center, the controversial building that housed the Los Angeles Police Department for over 50 years, is officially no more. Yesterday, the City of Los Angeles' Bureau of Engineering announced that above-ground demolition of the eight-story building is now complete. The process, which began in August 2018, is expected to proceed through the end of 2019.

"The site will be home to a new building, the Los Angeles Street Civic Building, which will house hundreds of City employees that are currently in more remote locations and in rental space," wrote the City of Los Angeles Bureau of Engineering in a statement published yesterday.

Urbanize LA reports that "the City of Los Angeles issued a request for qualifications to developers earlier this year for the construction of a new office tower on the property. The anticipated project would be a 27-story, 450-foot-tall building containing 750,000 square feet of offices, 65,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, and 1,200 subterranean parking spaces."

Watch the time-lapse video of the lengthy demolition process of the controversial building which was home to the Los Angeles Police Department from 1955 through 2009.

Video: City of Los Angeles Bureau of Engineering

Downtown LA's beloved Parker Center Tower to be demolished

2018-12-11T18:26:00-05:00

On Monday, the giant claw of a large piece of machinery tore away at one of the walls of Parker Center, the former headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department. Vacant since 2013, [Parker Center Tower] will be cleared out and a 27-story high-rise will take its place, holding offices for city employees and services that are now spread across multiple buildings.

Los Angeles has an unfortunate history of erasing its not too-distant past, and it continues to show no mercy to the era of hard-edged modernism. Parker Center Tower, one such building the Downtown Los Angeles, is the most recent to suffer from the city's need to tear itself down and reimagine its future.

Completed in 1954, Parker Center Tower is one of the few modernist buildings Downtown. It was the official headquarters for the Los Angeles police department from 1954 until 2009, at which point the department moved into the sleek AECOM-designed building on First and Main.

The demolition of Parker Center Tower is an unfortunate reminder that, without the proper permitting, few buildings of significant architectural value are truly saved from the wrecking ball in Los Angeles.

Plans to raze Parker Center, former LAPD headquarters, move forward

2018-09-17T13:59:00-04:00

The city will eventually demolish the building to put a 27-story office tower on the site, [costing over] $700 million. Last month, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation and the Coalition to Preserve LA teamed up to file a petition...that could have forced the city to halt demolition while the case was being decided...But Garcetti has said the building is contaminated with asbestos and unsound seismically. It is also tarnished by its association with dark LAPD history.

The Parker Center is set for demolition, what other midcentury icons are next?

2017-05-22T20:12:00-04:00

The Parker Center, depending on who you ask, is either a midcentury icon, or a powerful symbol of Los Angeles' racist past. Located downtown, the building was home to the LAPD up until 2009 when they relocated due to expensive retrofits needed on the site. Designed by Welton Becket—the architect behind some of LA's greatest identifiers such as the Capitol Records Building, the Theme Building and the Cinerama Dome—the former LAPD headquarters is seen by historic preservationists, particularly the LA Conservancy, as a historical landmark due to its midcentury stylings. However, beyond being an architectural landmark, the building, as home to the LAPD during an era of racist policing, also serves as a sobering reminder of LA's troubling past. The land upon which the center was constructed had been seized from Japanese property owners less than a decade after Japanese Internment and William H. Parker himself, whom the building was named after, was associated with ushering in policies of...

LAPD directs officers to treat homeless people “with compassion” in new vague policy

2016-06-22T14:22:00-04:00

The Los Angeles Police Commission approved a new policy directing LAPD officers to treat homeless people with “compassion and empathy.” The policy was meant to be a broad statement – a “philosophy more than it is the nuts and bolts,” [Cmdr Todd] Chamberlain recently told police commissioners. More specifics will come in future directives, he added. But the new statement [unsurprisingly] was met with some skepticism from homeless advocates.

“Gary Blasi, a retired UCLA law professor who studies homelessness, said it would take more than a policy to improve interactions between officers and those living on the city’s streets. To do that, he said, the city should limit laws that unfairly criminalize situations involving homeless people — ‘so that the police are not involved in the first place.’”

More about homelessness in LA on Archinect:

LA's homeless population has increased by 11% in a single year

Homes of the homeless, seized: L.A. cracks down on free housing

To each their own home: A peek into the “HOME(less)” exhibition at USC

Los Angeles approves plans to tackle homelessness crisis, but funding is still unclear

A bird's-eye view of LA with Geoff Manaugh and the LAPD

2016-03-23T13:11:00-04:00

The police had allowed me to fly with them so that I could see the world from their perspective. Through its aerial patrols, the division has uniquely unfettered access to a fundamentally different experience of Los Angeles, one in which the city must constantly be reinterpreted from above, in real time, with the intention of locating, tracking and interrupting criminal activity. This also means that the police are not only thinking about Los Angeles as it currently exists.

"Their job is to anticipate things that have yet to occur — not just where criminals are, but where and when they might arrive next. They patrol time as well as space. In this sense, although it has been in continual operation for the past 60 years, the division has much to tell us about policing the cities of the future."

In a fascinating excerpt from his forthcoming book A Burglar's Guide to the City, Geoff Manaugh relates his experience with the LAPD on their helicopter patrols of the city. "Cities get the types of crime their design calls for," he writes. And the sprawl of Los Angeles demands, and facilitates, a policial gaze from above.

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