Los angeles city skyline
In some cases, builders skirted the rules by constructing "attics" or unoccupied towers that supported corporate signage. Buildings in the city's central business district surrounding Main, Spring, and Broadway routinely bumped up against the 13-story limit, as did the Art Deco department stores along Wilshire Boulevard's Miracle Mile. In 1911, the limit was incorporated into the city charter, and a later county regulation imposed the same restriction on structures in neighboring cities. "The limit height restriction causes building activity to spread out over a wide area, benefiting a large number of property owners instead of a few," said Austin, who also served with Parkinson as a drafter of the original height restrictions. Austin told the Los Angeles Times in 1926, business would tend to concentrate in a congested central district. With unlimited building heights, architect John C. Property owners - at least those who held land on the fringes of L.A.'s urban development - also favored a policy that kept Los Angeles growing horizontally rather than vertically. The new restriction would secure the Beaux Arts building's place atop the L.A. When in 1903 John Parkinson joined a blue-ribbon panel of architects charged with drafting the city's first height restrictions, work was almost complete on Parkinson's 12-story, 173-foot Braly Block - considered L.A.'s first skyscraper. Personal pride may have played a role, too. Backers also warned that skyscrapers would create dark, artificial canyons that could turn into dangerous wind tunnels. The height limit resonated with the then-ascendant City Beautiful movement a city Planning Committee report cited "the development of our great city along broad and harmonious lines of beauty and symmetry" as a rationale. Instead, aesthetic and economic concerns weighed more heavily than structural ones, as architectural historian Paul Gleye has argued. But the city first enacted a height limit in December 1904 - a year and a half before the 1906 San Francisco quake reminded everyone of California's geologic instability.
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Distrust of the high-rise - still a novel architectural form in the twentieth century's first decade - certainly motivated the city to impose the restriction.
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avoided the skyscraper for so long out of a fear of earthquakes. While New York furiously erected engineering marvels like the Woolworth, Chrysler, and Empire State buildings, Los Angeles imposed a strict 13-story, 150-foot ceiling on new structures for more than 50 years. The cluster of towers rising today from the remains of Bunker Hill belies the fact that, for decades, Los Angeles lacked a modern skyscraper. Bank Tower's title as L.A.'s tallest building looks again to be secure, but the speculation serves as a reminder of the evolving nature of downtown L.A.'s skyline - a story richly documented in Southern California's photographic archives. Bank Tower's reign above the Los Angeles skyline might come to an end, as rumors swirled of an 80-story skyscraper rising from the current site of the Wilshire Grand. Recently, it seemed that the 1,018-foot U.S.