Roeder Blocks

Times Mirror Square is a complex of buildings on the block bounded by Spring, Broadway, First and Second streets in the Civic Center district of Downtown Los Angeles. It was headquarters of the Los Angeles Times until 2018. It is currently vacant, with plans being proposed regarding how to best utilize the existing buildings and the total ground area of the site.

The late-Victorian-era Downtown of Los Angeles in 1880 was centered at the southern end of the Los Angeles Plaza area, and over the next two decades, it extended south and west along Main Street, Spring Street, and Broadway towards Third Street. Most of the 19th-century buildings no longer exist, surviving only in the Plaza area or south of Second Street. The rest were demolished to make way for the Civic Center district with City Hall, numerous courthouses, and other municipal, county, state and federal buildings, and Times Mirror Square. This article covers that area, between the Plaza, 3rd St., Los Angeles St., and Broadway, during the period 1880 through the period of demolition (1920s–1950s). At the time (1880–1900s), the area was referred to as the business center, business section or business district. By 1910, it was referred to as the "North End" of the business district which by then had expanded south to what is today called the Historic Core, along Broadway, Spring and Main roughly from 3rd to 9th streets.

The California State Building, originally referred to simply as the State Office Building, was a 13-story PWA Moderne building housing state offices, at the northwest corner of First and Spring streets in the Civic Center district of Downtown Los Angeles. It was completed in 1931 and opened in 1932. Analysis after the 1971 Sylmar earthquake showed it to be structurally unsound and it was demolished in 1975–1976.The building occupied the width of the block from Broadway to Spring and from First Street north to Court Street, with the exception of the Los Angeles Times building which sat at the northeast corner of Broadway and First until the late 1930s. The site had previously been occupied by the Larronde Block, a two-story building of retail stores and offices built in 1882, and which was demolished. The architect was John C. Austin, who was also head of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce at the time. The building cost $1,250,000 to build. Ground was broken August 21, 1930. The dedication ceremony was July 29, 1932, with Vice President Charles Curtis presenting the Flying Cross to trans-Atlantic aviatrix Amelia Earhart at the opening ceremony, which about 300,000 people attended.

The Los Angeles Times bombing was the purposeful dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times Building in Los Angeles, California, United States, on October 1, 1910, by a union member belonging to the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers (IW). The explosion started a fire which killed 21 occupants and injured 100 more. It was termed the "crime of the century" by the Los Angeles Times newspaper, which occupied the building. Brothers John J. ("J.J.") and James Barnabas ("J.B.") McNamara were arrested in April 1911 for the bombing. Their trial became a cause célèbre for the American labor movement. J.B. admitted to setting the explosive, and was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. J.J. was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for bombing a local iron manufacturing plant, and returned to the IW as an organizer. The Times bombing shocked Americans and remains both one of the deadliest criminal acts in U.S. history and the deadliest crime to go to trial in California.

The siege of Los Angeles, was a military response by armed Mexican civilians to the August 1846 occupation of the Pueblo de Los Ángeles by the United States Marines during the Mexican–American War.

The Frank Putnam Flint Fountain, also known as the Flint Memorial, is a monument commemorating Frank Putnam Flint, who was a United States Senator from California, in Los Angeles. It is located on the south lawn of Los Angeles City Hall facing 1st Street.

The Historic Core is a district within Downtown Los Angeles includes the world's largest concentration of movie palaces, former large department stores, and office towers, all built chiefly between 1907 and 1931. Within it lie the Broadway Theater District and the Spring Street historic financial district, and in its west it overlaps with the Jewelry District and in its east with Skid Row. The Historic Core falls into two business improvement districts, Historic Core (south of 4th St.) and Downtown LA (from 2nd to 4th Street). The total Historic Core is thus composed of: Los Angeles Street from 2nd to 6th streets, Spring Street and Main Street from 2nd to 7th streets, Broadway from 2nd to 9th streets, Hill Street from 2nd to 10th streetsPlease consult the articles about the individual streets and historic districts above for a full discussion of the architectural landmarks in the district.

The Los Angeles Theatre Center is an institution in Los Angeles, which is operated by the Latino Theater Company. In January 2006, the Latino Theater Company won a lease to operate The Los Angeles Theatre Center for 20 years and got a $4 million grant from the California Cultural and Historical Endowment to renovate the building. In October 2007, the building was re-opened as the new Los Angeles Theatre Center.

The Children's Museum of Los Angeles opened to the public on June 11, 1979, and operated for 21 years. It was located at the Los Angeles Mall in the Los Angeles Civic Center. It specifically catered to children, with the purpose of educating, entertaining, and enriching children's lives in the greater Los Angeles area. It was modeled after the children's museums in Boston, Indianapolis and Brooklyn. The museum featured a city street (with cars and motorcycles) with a sewer system that could be crawled through, Grandma's attic with wearable costumes, a large Lego play area, and a section called Sticky City consisting of large stuffed fabric blocks with Velcro that stuck to each other and could be used for building. There was also a TV studio where children could be camera operators or news anchors, a large photosensitive wall that would imprint shadows when a strobe light was set off, a workshop where visitors could make their own Zoetrope animations, and other activities.

Fiesta Broadway is an annual event held in downtown Los Angeles to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, Mexican culture and Latin American culture in general. Modeled on Miami's Calle Ocho Festival and harking back to the early 20th-century Fiesta de Los Angeles, it features vendors and musical acts. At its peak, Fiesta Broadway stretched for 36 blocks centered on a long stretch of Broadway and attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors. More recently it has been confined to a few blocks around 1st Street and Broadway and has seen attendance shrink to as little as 7,000. Although the holiday of Cinco de Mayo falls on May 5, which is the meaning of its Spanish name, Fiesta Broadway is always held on the last Sunday in April, since 1995.

Grand Opera House, originally Child's Opera House, also known as Grand Theater, Orpheum Theatre, Clune's Grand, and Teatro Mexico, was a theater located in downtown Los Angeles. It was the first home of the Orpheum Circuit in Los Angeles and also the first theater in Los Angeles to exhibit Thomas Edison's motion picture technology.

The Mirror Building also called the Butterfield Overland Mail Company Los Angeles Building was a large building in the City of Los Angeles. Butterfield Overland Mail Company built the large brick building in 1858. The Mirror Building was designated a California Historic Landmark (No.744) on July 05, 1960. The Mirror Building had business offices and housing space for traveling workers. There was a large stable in the back of the buildings for the horses, along with a large workshop to repair the stagecoaches. The first Butterfield Overland Mail stagecoach from St. Louis to arrive was on October 7, 1858. The Butterfield Overland Mail Company was founded by John Butterfield, he later would be the founder of American Express. While the Mirror Building was being built the Butterfield Overland Mail Company rented space from the Bella Union Hotel. The Los Angeles Butterfield Overland Mail Company closed in 1861. In 1861 the Mirror Building became the Office of U.S. Quartermaster. The U.S. Quartermaster use the stable for army horses and mules. The stable also had space to support the camels used at Fort Tejon and other west outpost. From 1858, Fort Tejon was the western terminus of the experimental U.S. Camel Corps, which used imported camels in an effort to carry supplies across arid regions in the Southwest. The soldiers found the camels hardy, but temperamental, and they spooked the horses used by the cavalry.From 1884 to 1888 the Mirror Building was used as Los Angeles City Hall. The site of the former Mirror Building is now Los Angeles Times Building at 202 West 1st Street built in 1935. The current Times Building has a small museum about the Mirror Building and other offices that were on the site, located at 125 South Spring Street. The 1947 New Times Building, is sometimes called Mirror Building due to the site of the original Mirror Building. The Mirror Building received its name later from the Mirror Printing Office and Book Bindery. Mirror Printing Office became the owners of Los Angeles Daily Times in 1882.The downtown Los Angeles block that the Mirror Building was on is also the location of the Los Angeles School No. 1 built in 1855. This was the first brick school house in Los Angeles. The School was paid for by the new California education property tax assessment started in 1852, which gave schools five cents per $100 of taxable property value. The school was at the northwest corner of Spring and Second streets and cost $6,000 to build. The two story School opened on March 19, 1855.