Bell Block (Los Angeles)

On January 28, 1971, at 4:30 p.m. PST, an explosion in the second-floor men's room of the 300 North Los Angeles Street federal building in California, United States, killed 18-year-old employee Tomas Ortiz, a resident of City Terrace. Ortiz was a student at L.A. Trade Tech, and a part-time employee of the General Services Administration, assigned to the Internal Revenue Service. News accounts variously described him as a "janitor" and a "mail orderly."Ortiz's right leg was blown off below the knee, and his left leg was partially severed. He also suffered "severe head injuries," and died en route to the hospital. The coroner declared his cause of death was a combination of skull fractures, brain lacerations, and blood loss from the leg injuries.The bomb ripped a 4 ft (1.2 m) by 5 ft (1.5 m) hole through the wall. The blast was powerful enough to shatter the washbasins in the bathroom and damage the washrooms on the floors above and below the bomb site. Water lines and electric circuits were also broken.The morning after the explosion, the Los Angeles Times reported, "An investigation was underway to see if Ortiz was involved in placing the bomb in the building. The federal building has been under tight security for several months because of a series of bombings of public buildings. Guards use metal detectors at the entrances, and packages are searched." However, people not carrying packages were not searched, and a second and third entrance had little or no security controls. On Sunday, law enforcement told the L.A. Times that there was no obvious "militancy" in Ortiz's background and "absolutely no evidence" that he was involved in planting the bomb.In April 1971, Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty suggested that there was a connection between the federal building bomb and a Chicano Moratorium march that had occurred the same weekend. At the time of the 1974 LAX bombing it was noted that the FBI had not identified any suspects in the 1971 federal building bombing and the case remained open.Historians generally attribute the bombing to the Chicano Liberation Front, which claimed responsibility for a series of bombings in the Los Angeles area in 1970 and 1971. Ortiz's death was described as "obviously accidental" in the Los Angeles Free Press in 1971 and "accidental and unintended" in a 2000 review of patterns in American domestic terrorism. The CLF never claimed responsibility for nor commented upon the federal building bomb; if it was CLF, Ortiz was the only fatality—indeed the only casualty of any kind—as a consequence of their bombing spree. Tomas "Tommy" Ortiz was born September 17, 1952, in El Paso, Texas. He lived with his parents on Volney Drive, and was a graduate of Roosevelt High School. He was buried at Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier, California.

The 300 North Los Angeles Street Federal Building, located across the street from the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building and United States Courthouse, is a federal building of the United States that opened in 1965 and is now on the National Register of Historic Places. The building is also notable as the site of a 1971 bombing that killed an 18-year-old worker.

The Los Angeles Mall is a small shopping center and series of plazas (public squares) at the Los Angeles Civic Center, between Main and Los Angeles Streets on the north and south sides of Temple Street, connected by both a pedestrian bridge and a tunnel. It features Joseph Young's sculpture Triforium, a colorful sculpture unveiled in 1975, which has 1,500 blown-glass prisms synchronized to an electronic glass bell carillon. The mall opened in 1974 and includes a four-level parking garage with 2,400 spaces. It stands on the site of what once was some of the oldest commercial blocks in the city that was demolished in the 1940s and 1950s. The mall was designed by the architectural firm Stanton & Stockwell, which also designed the Los Angeles County Courthouse and Kenneth Hahn L.A. County Hall of Administration. It was conceived as a "town square" for meetings, retail, public institutions, and public art, serving the general public and the tens of thousands of government employees working at the Civic Center's municipal, state, and federal buildings. Cornell, Bridgers, Troller and Hazlett were the landscape designers.

Fletcher Bowron Square is a public square in Los Angeles, in the U.S. state of California. The plaza is named after former mayor Fletcher Bowron and was dedicated in his honor in 1975. The sculpture Triforium is installed in the square.In 2017, the open space served as the end point for thousands of demonstrators who supported the impeachment of U.S. President Donald Trump.

Triforium is a 60-foot high, concrete public art sculpture mounted with 1,494 Venetian glass prisms, light bulbs, and an internal 79-bell carillon located at Fletcher Bowron Square in the Los Angeles Mall at Temple and Main streets in the Civic Center district of Downtown Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Street, originally known as Calle de los Negros or Alley of the Black People, is a major thoroughfare in Downtown Los Angeles, California, dating back to the origins of the city as the Pueblo de Los Ángeles.

Los Angeles Star (La Estrella de Los Angeles) was the first newspaper in Los Angeles, California, US. The publication ran from 1851 to 1879.

The Bella Union Hotel in Los Angeles, California, constructed in 1835, is California Historical Landmark No. 656. It was effectively the last capitol building of Mexican California under Governor Pio Pico, in 1845–47, and was a center of social and political life for decades. The hotel was located at N. Main Street, on the east side, a few doors north of Commercial Street, which then ran east–west between Arcadia and Temple. The hotel was later known as the Clarendon and then as the St. Charles.

The New World is a sculpture by Tom Otterness, installed outside Los Angeles' Edward R. Roybal Federal Building, in the U.S. state of California.

The Edward R. Roybal Federal Building and United States Courthouse is a United States federal courthouse of the United States District Court for the Central District of California, in the Civic Center district of Los Angeles, California. It is located on Temple Street in Downtown Los Angeles, east of and adjacent to the Federal Building at 300 N. Los Angeles Street, architect Welton Becket, opened in 1965. The building was completed in January 1992 and is named for long-serving United States Congressman Edward R. Roybal. In the year after its completion, 1993, it gained publicity as the site of the federal trial of the four Los Angeles Police Department officers who were charged in 1991's Rodney King video beating; the trial being held the year after their acquittals in state court in Simi Valley. Prior to the opening of the building, some controversy was stirred by the removal of a statue of a nude by sculptor Tom Otterness, which Roybal had objected to as appropriate for a museum but not for a federal building.

The Spring Street Courthouse, formerly the United States Court House in Downtown Los Angeles, is a Moderne style building that originally served as both a post office and a courthouse. The building was designed by Gilbert Stanley Underwood and Louis A. Simon, and construction was completed in 1940. It formerly housed federal courts but is now used by Los Angeles Superior Court. The United States Court House initially housed court facilities for the United States District Court for the Southern District of California, until the District was redrawn in 1966. It thereafter functioned as a court house with judges from the United States District Court for the Central District of California. There is another federal court house in the Roybal Building in Downtown Los Angeles. In February 2006, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as U.S. Court House and Post Office. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2012, as the site of Gonzalo Mendez et al v. Westminster School District of Orange County, et al, a major legal case in advancing the civil rights of Mexican-Americans, and a precursor to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.

The second Los Angeles federal building in Los Angeles County, California, more formally the United States Post Office and Courthouse, was a government building in the United States was designed by James Knox Taylor ex officio and constructed between 1906 and 1910 on the block bounded by North Main, Spring, New High, and Temple Streets. The location was previously known as the Downey Block.The second federal building was made of “red sandstone on a white granite base” and cost $500,000. Upon completion, the six-story building housed a post office, Southern District of California courtrooms, customs offices, and revenue offices. The "impressive" post office was a marble-lined hall within the building. The circuit court moved into the building in September 1910.However, the population of Los Angeles grew rapidly in the early part of the 20th century, and a larger building was needed to serve the courts and federal agencies. The second federal building was razed in 1937 by the Works Progress Administration to clear the site for the Spring Street Courthouse.The street address of this building may have been 201 N. Main Street.