In my personal psychogeography of Los Angeles, every neighborhood is named after my favorite local taqueria. Boyle Heights? That’s Guisados Gulch. Echo Park? That’s Taco Zone Territory. The Fashion District in downtown LA is clearly the province of Sonoratown, a brightly colored storefront on 8^th Street just east of Los Angeles Street. 

This temple of tortillas operates out of one of the few low-rise buildings in the area. Look down 8th in either direction while you’re chomping on a chivichanga, and you’ll see rows of mixed-use mid- and high-rise buildings. These behemoths define the experience of walking around downtown. You’re dwarfed by them, but they’re so imposing you almost forget that they’re there.

The Fashion District (formerly known as the Garment District) wasn’t always this vertical. In the early 1900s, families were moving out of the residential areas just south and southeast of downtown, making way for a new industrial district of mills, granaries, wineries and warehouses. Most of these businesses operated out of single-story wood and brick buildings on large plots of land. After WWI, an industrial boom brought new manufacturing companies to the area. To maximize their need for space, developers started building upwards; by the end of the 1920s dozens of 10+ story high-rises dotted the area, and for decades tens of thousands of workers (mostly women) would cut and sew the clothing that America wore inside these buildings. According to a contemporary master’s thesis by Bertha Jeanette Wilson, in 1931 LA County’s 9,000 garment factory workers pumped out $37,000,000 worth of garments across 316 factories.

The Great Depression kneecapped much of the new construction downtown, and by the time the economy recovered post-WWII, manufacturers were moving to outlying parts of LA where land was still cheap and plentiful. While the Garment District remained a hub for wholesalers and businesses post-war, it wasn’t until the late ‘90s that it became an attractive destination for developers and shoppers again. The city formed a Business Improvement District around it in 1995 and formally changed its name to the Los Angeles Fashion District. By 2005 the area was undergoing a $500 million economic revitalization that involved the adaptive reuse of the old high-rises for new housing, showroom and retail space. 

The Garment District high-rises that still exist capture a unique period in the economic and architectural development of downtown LA, and many have taken active roles in its renaissance. Here are three of them that you can visit after cramming down a costilla quesadilla at Sonoratown.

#120: Garment Capitol Building

Added to the National Register of Historic Places March 8, 2010

The Garment Capitol Building was built in 1926 by Lloyd and Casler Incorporated. The “Casler” in that firm, Florence Casler, is one of the more fascinating figures in the history of downtown LA – how many middle-aged women do you know who earned their plumbing license and then became respected industrial real estate developers? Originally from Canada, Casler moved to Buffalo, NY and married an American plumber, took over his business when he left (and failed) to find his fortune in gold, then moved to LA with her daughters, joined the JK Lloyd & Company development firm and promptly started killing it. In the 1910s, Casler built some of the first multi-family apartments in LA. After forming Lloyd and Casler, she developed many of the historic Garment District high-rises in the ‘20s and early ‘30s (e.g. the Allied Crafts Building, the Merchants Exchange Building and the Printing Center Building), then started her own firm where she developed the Bendix Building, with its iconic vertical sign. Casler was also VP of the Pico Street Association, and in 1925 was elected Director of the People’s Bank (the first woman in LA to head up a national bank, no biggie). Florence Casler, I crown thee Queen of the Garment District! Read more about her in this great profile by Hadley Meares. 

The architect for the Garment Capitol Building was William Douglas Lee. He’s probably best known for designing Chateau Marmont and the El Royale apartments in Hancock Park. But in the mid-1920s, he established an ongoing partnership with the Lloyd and Casler firm that produced many of their Garment District projects, including the Allied Crafts and Merchants Exchange buildings. In Lee’s hands, these industrial high-rises became more than just functional structures for cramming in as many workers in as little space as possible. Their working spaces were simple but well-lit and well-ventilated, and their attractive facades took cues from the fancy revival-style high-rises being built in the commercial/financial sectors of downtown, further north.

So yes, at heart the Garment Capitol Building is a 12-story industrial rectangle. But it has a lot going for it! It’s full of tasteful gothic revival stylings, with its parapets at the top, bands of decorative terracotta friezes on the 2nd, 11th and 12th floors and a wraparound row of grotesque mascarons (carved faces) staring down haughtily from the top of the ground floor. Some 70,000 brown bricks clad the building in vertical stripes between the window bays, with carved terracotta panels breaking them up in horizontal bands. Inside the Garment Capitol Building is pretty utilitarian. Think wide open floors with no partitions, bare concrete ceilings and lots of fluorescent lighting (not original).

The Garment Capitol Building opened for business on New Year’s Day, 1927 and was sold that same year to Olga Riedeburg, who owned it for the next 19 years. On the morning of October 17, 1930, a massive explosion occurred on the fifth floor, injuring 48 and causing over $1 million in damage to both the Garment Capitol Building and several adjoining ones. Some believed that it was set off deliberately by a labor agitator who opposed the use of non-union labor at the dress manufacturing shop on the fifth floor. But investigators found it was the result of natural gas that had leaked after a worker improperly capped a gas pipe.

In 1962 the property was bought by Jack Needleman, an influential clothing executive and real estate owner who renamed the Garment Capitol Building as Anjac Fashion Building, after his clothing company. In the ‘60s, some 35 garment businesses were tenants at the building. Only a few were left by the 2000s, and in 2012, developer Capital Foresight bought the building and turned it into high-end lofts…but not before researching and replacing the original rooftop finials that had gone missing over the years. Nice touch.

When I visited, the retail space on the bottom floor was occupied by a Mediterranean restaurant and a dog grooming business called The Local Spaw which seems to be no more (with a pun as awful as that for a name, I’m not surprised). 

#121: Textile Center Building

Added to the National Register of Historic Places February 15, 2005

A block southeast of the Garment Capitol Building is another Lloyd & Casler joint, the Textile Center Building, also designed by William Douglas Lee. It bears some superficial similarities to its neighbor to the northwest, as if Lee had taken the 12 stories of alternating brick and terracotta of the Garment Capitol and shaken it until it settled differently. The Textile Center is something of a renaissance revival parfait, with six stories encased by brick, sandwiched by a base and capital of gray concrete, three stories apiece. It’s less ornamented than the Garment Capitol too, but there’s still some artful detailing if you take the time to look. I’m drawn to the herringbone brick pattern above the arched windows on the 2nd and 12th floors, and the fishbladder friezes that cap the first floor. 

The Textile Center Building was the third high-rise that Lloyd & Casler created together, after the Lloyd & Casler Building (1924) and Allied Crafts Building (1925), both on E. Pico. The Textile clearly meant something special to the firm, since they moved their offices there soon after it was completed in January 1926, just as their success was at its peak. 

Lloyd & Casler apparently acquired the land at the corner of 8th Street and Maple through some high stakes real estate swapping. According to the building’s NRHP nomination form, it was traded for 160 acres of San Fernando Valley real estate, which Casler had acquired years earlier by selling some buildings she had developed early in her career.

At the official opening of the Textile Center Building in April of 1926, some 6000 locals visited the building. They were treated to music and dancing, and a fashion show of sportswear, coats and hats designed in Los Angeles. None other than Florence Casler herself organized the opening festivities. By 1927, every one of the building’s floors was occupied by a garment manufacturer, 56 tenants in all.  

Nothing as colorful as a natural gas explosion occurred after Lloyd & Casler sold the Textile Center Building during the Great Depression. There is an interesting tidbit in the November 2, 1945 issue of the Los Angeles Times about some “eastern textile interests” who had put in a bid to buy the building. They were rebuffed by the building’s tenants, who purchased the Textile Center from the current owner for $450,000, wishing “to protect their tenancy and also carry through postwar plans for expansion.”

The fact that Casler’s vision had such a huge impact on the growth of the Garment District in its early years makes it all the more poignant that her buildings were some of the first to be transformed into expensive lofts during the wave of redevelopment that swept through downtown LA in the 2000s. The interiors were dismantled in 2005 and converted into 64 condos and 5,000 square feet of retail space by MJW Investments. I couldn’t tell you how business is going at the current ground floor tenant The Doll House Boutique, but there appear to be only a few condos available at the new Textile Lofts, ranging from $490k to $900k.

#122: Maxfield Building

Added to the National Register of Historic Places September 18, 2017

“Introducing to Los Angeles a new type of architecture dealing in proportion of concrete mass rather than expensive ornamentation, architect John M. Cooper has created quite a distinction in the new American art, which has seen a higher development locally than perhaps anywhere else in the world. Simplicity, character and refinement of proportion are the keynotes of the design.”

–Los Angeles Times, July 6, 1924

Hyperbolic? Maybe. But the Times columnist captures the essence of the 1925 Maxfield Building. Where so many of its brethren in the Garment District echoed the period revival styles that were so popular for commercial buildings of the day, the Maxfield presented something new. This was hailed as the first downtown building with a mass constructed almost entirely out of reinforced concrete, exposed on the exterior walls without any elaborate decorations. What the Maxfield lacks in decorative pizzazz, it makes up for in sleekness. It’s all smooth vertical piers and recessed bays of windows. 

Architect John Montgomery Cooper was no stranger to the Garment District by the mid-1920s.  He designed the Grether and Grether building right around the corner from the Maxfield, and a number of other buildings supporting the garment manufacturing and distribution industries. He even shared an office with Lloyd & Casler’s go-to architect, William Douglas Lee.

Cooper built the Maxfield as a base of operations for Allen Agnew Maxfield. His Maxfield & Co. sold wholesale textiles and dry goods. And he was also important as a financier for the garment industry, as a Director of the Seaboard National Bank (later merged with Bank of America) and its local outlet, the Santee-Textile branch. Through its relationship with Seaboard, Maxfield & Co. helped the industry grow dramatically in the ‘20s through the ‘30s, as one of its earliest “factoring” services – a financing method by which a company takes over your accounts receivable, for a commission. The company also managed the Maxfield Building and rented out floors to all types of garment-related tenants. 

After Allen’s death in 1947, the Maxfield family continued to operate the Maxfield Building. In 1970 it was purchased by Jack Needleman and Anjac Fashion Company, the same guy who bought the Garment Capitol Building. The building underwent some extensive rehabbing in 2015-2016; a new penthouse was added to the top floor, and the original electric sign displaying “819 Santee” was replaced. It now offers up – you guessed it – swanky lofts for the historically inclined.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+Garment Capitol Building’s NRHP nomination form

+Textile Center Building’s NRHP nomination form

+Maxfield Building’s NRHP nomination form (PDF download)

+The female powerhouse who developed 1920s Downtown LA (Curbed LA, 2018)

+Florence Casler—Plumber’s Wife Who Developed 10 DTLA Buildings That Stand to This Day (DTLA Book)

+$20 Million Housing Project Coming to the Fashion District (LA Downtown News, 2015)

+The Big Makeover (LA Downtown News, 2005)

+About the Maxfield Lofts (themaxla.com)

+Developer Capital Foresight Opens Max Lofts, Its Second Neighborhood Project (LA Downtown News, 2016)

“Textile Center Building Sold,” Los Angeles Times, Nov 2, 1945; accessed via ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“CONCRETE IN MASS NOW FEATURED: Eliminate Expensive Ornamentation in Proposed Building,” Los Angeles Times, July 6, 1924; accessed via ProQuest Historical Newspapers