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Block Party: Spring Between Eighth and Ninth
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| Angelique Café, with its two patios, is a longtime anchor of the block. Photo by Gary Leonard. |
Want Some Onion Soup With That Cocktail Dress?
by Ryan Vaillancourt
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES - In Downtown, historical, architectural and social consistency is fleeting. The community boasts many diverse districts and individual streets have their own distinct identity. As part of a recurring series, Los Angeles Downtown News is profiling single Downtown blocks, examining each one’s character, trademark businesses and people. This week: Spring Street between Eighth and Ninth streets.
Snapshot: This block is in the cradle of some of the Fashion District’s busiest buildings — both the New Mart and California Market Center tower over the street. Those showrooms and surrounding garment manufacturing businesses feed the street level retail on Spring, as restaurants like Angelique and L’Angolo Café feed them, literally. The east side of Spring forms an edge of one of Downtown’s few flatiron, or triangular, blocks.
Neon Recession Buster: Carmen Cristerna and her husband Fernando run an unlikely hybrid business out of 834 S. Spring St.: They tailor clothes in one side of the space (Mike’s Tailor Shop), and sell and make signs, including neon works, in the other (Stunning Signs). Cristerna launched the sign business after her 13-year-old son Eddie’s pet project of hand-drawing schedules for neighborhood retailers to display in their windows generated some nice pocket money. “He did pretty well, so it gave us this idea to do something different during the recession in the 1990s,” Cristerna said, as she stood between an array of high-tech sign cutting equipment.
Dancing Girls: The former City Club building (833 S. Spring St.) stands out as a relic of old Downtown repositioned as a vital piece of new Downtown. Its prominence comes from the detailed stonework on its façade and a seemingly ancient vertical sign, reading “Dancing Girls,” attached to its northern corner. That business is gone, and these days the edifice is known as the Primrose Design building, which owner Marc Sonnenthal has converted into wholesale fashion showrooms for upscale designers such as Atelier (formerly True Religion) and Alternative Apparel.
Garçon!: One of the neighborhood’s iconic destinations is Angelique Café (840 S. Spring St.), the French bistro that anchors the southern point of the Spring/Main flatiron. During the lunch hour, area business people and loft dwellers flock to the outdoor patios (on street level and upstairs) for French onion soup and homemade Merquez sausage, among other staples.
Going Garmentos: In the second half of the last century, the block was largely defined by garment manufacturing. The Anjac Fashion-owned tower at 801 S. Spring St. is one of the only buildings on the street still housing garment makers. The bottom floor is home to Reflection, an apparel store stocked mostly with discount denim, from Levi’s to Wranglers, and other accessories that the store bills as hip-hop gear.
Home Sweet Homes: In 2004 developer and architect David Gray converted the Tomahawk Building (814 S. Spring St.) into seven apartments, bringing the street its first wave of legitimate residents (previously some artist types had made the structure an under-the-radar home). The building’s façade features a sculpture of a tomahawk, decorated with old coins, which was rumored to be a cover for artist Gary Lloyd’s radio transmitter for a pirate station he ran in the building, according to the website publicartinla.com. The block’s biggest residential game changer came in 2008 when Shahram and Shahriar Afshani debuted the 96-unit loft project the National City Tower Lofts (810 S. Spring St.). The NCT Lofts houses Infusion Café on its ground floor, where visitors can grab a cup of Joe or some homemade carrot juice.
Cal-Italian Corner: L’Angolo Café, which opened in 2007 on the southwest corner of Spring and Ninth streets (101 W. Ninth St.), serves a modern cuisine that owner/manager Paul Kim calls “Cal-Italian” food. That gives him leeway to offer a house-ground Kobe beef burger that remains one of the menu’s most popular items. Kim said that while most of his customers are in the fashion business, he’s seen a lot of new faces lately: “We’re getting people from other industries, and a lot of the new residents.”
Also on the Block: Nancy’s Beauty Salon, at 836 S. Spring St., offers haircuts to a coed crowd for $10, or so says the sign in front of the small shop; at 859 S. Spring St., Eddie Co runs Arrow Print Center; over at 820 S. Spring St., Mi Tierra serves tacos, quesadillas and burritos. Then there’s the public art installation on the island that separates Spring and Main streets, just south of Angelique. The glowing green and blue domes were installed in 2008 by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the city Department of Transportation.
Contact Ryan Vaillancourt at ryan@downtownnews.com.
page 8, 03/08/2010
©Los Angeles Downtown News. Reprinting items retrieved from the archives are for personal use only. They may not be reproduced or retransmitted without permission of the Los Angeles Downtown News. If you would like to re-distribute anything from the Los Angeles Downtown News Archives, please call our permissions department at (213) 481-1448.
Snapshot: This block is in the cradle of some of the Fashion District’s busiest buildings — both the New Mart and California Market Center tower over the street. Those showrooms and surrounding garment manufacturing businesses feed the street level retail on Spring, as restaurants like Angelique and L’Angolo Café feed them, literally. The east side of Spring forms an edge of one of Downtown’s few flatiron, or triangular, blocks.
Neon Recession Buster: Carmen Cristerna and her husband Fernando run an unlikely hybrid business out of 834 S. Spring St.: They tailor clothes in one side of the space (Mike’s Tailor Shop), and sell and make signs, including neon works, in the other (Stunning Signs). Cristerna launched the sign business after her 13-year-old son Eddie’s pet project of hand-drawing schedules for neighborhood retailers to display in their windows generated some nice pocket money. “He did pretty well, so it gave us this idea to do something different during the recession in the 1990s,” Cristerna said, as she stood between an array of high-tech sign cutting equipment.
Dancing Girls: The former City Club building (833 S. Spring St.) stands out as a relic of old Downtown repositioned as a vital piece of new Downtown. Its prominence comes from the detailed stonework on its façade and a seemingly ancient vertical sign, reading “Dancing Girls,” attached to its northern corner. That business is gone, and these days the edifice is known as the Primrose Design building, which owner Marc Sonnenthal has converted into wholesale fashion showrooms for upscale designers such as Atelier (formerly True Religion) and Alternative Apparel.
Garçon!: One of the neighborhood’s iconic destinations is Angelique Café (840 S. Spring St.), the French bistro that anchors the southern point of the Spring/Main flatiron. During the lunch hour, area business people and loft dwellers flock to the outdoor patios (on street level and upstairs) for French onion soup and homemade Merquez sausage, among other staples.
Going Garmentos: In the second half of the last century, the block was largely defined by garment manufacturing. The Anjac Fashion-owned tower at 801 S. Spring St. is one of the only buildings on the street still housing garment makers. The bottom floor is home to Reflection, an apparel store stocked mostly with discount denim, from Levi’s to Wranglers, and other accessories that the store bills as hip-hop gear.
Home Sweet Homes: In 2004 developer and architect David Gray converted the Tomahawk Building (814 S. Spring St.) into seven apartments, bringing the street its first wave of legitimate residents (previously some artist types had made the structure an under-the-radar home). The building’s façade features a sculpture of a tomahawk, decorated with old coins, which was rumored to be a cover for artist Gary Lloyd’s radio transmitter for a pirate station he ran in the building, according to the website publicartinla.com. The block’s biggest residential game changer came in 2008 when Shahram and Shahriar Afshani debuted the 96-unit loft project the National City Tower Lofts (810 S. Spring St.). The NCT Lofts houses Infusion Café on its ground floor, where visitors can grab a cup of Joe or some homemade carrot juice.
Cal-Italian Corner: L’Angolo Café, which opened in 2007 on the southwest corner of Spring and Ninth streets (101 W. Ninth St.), serves a modern cuisine that owner/manager Paul Kim calls “Cal-Italian” food. That gives him leeway to offer a house-ground Kobe beef burger that remains one of the menu’s most popular items. Kim said that while most of his customers are in the fashion business, he’s seen a lot of new faces lately: “We’re getting people from other industries, and a lot of the new residents.”
Also on the Block: Nancy’s Beauty Salon, at 836 S. Spring St., offers haircuts to a coed crowd for $10, or so says the sign in front of the small shop; at 859 S. Spring St., Eddie Co runs Arrow Print Center; over at 820 S. Spring St., Mi Tierra serves tacos, quesadillas and burritos. Then there’s the public art installation on the island that separates Spring and Main streets, just south of Angelique. The glowing green and blue domes were installed in 2008 by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the city Department of Transportation.
Contact Ryan Vaillancourt at ryan@downtownnews.com.
page 8, 03/08/2010
©Los Angeles Downtown News. Reprinting items retrieved from the archives are for personal use only. They may not be reproduced or retransmitted without permission of the Los Angeles Downtown News. If you would like to re-distribute anything from the Los Angeles Downtown News Archives, please call our permissions department at (213) 481-1448.
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