Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
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.
— Urbanize Los Angeles
"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... View full entry
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. — LA Curbed
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... View full entry
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. — Curbed LA
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... View full entry
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.
— Los Angeles Times
“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... View full entry
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. — New York Times
"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... View full entry
