Most tourists head to cities to enjoy their fine hotels, restaurants, shopping, and activities. Not so with Downtown Los Angeles … until recently. It was a place where people worked and left it pretty much shuttered at 5 pm. Happy Hours, movie nights and home were in the valleys, Inland Empire, Westside and coastal cities. And then the renaissance began. Los Angeles was founded in September 1781 when 44 settlers established El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles—The Town of the Queen of Angels, which a century later, had grown into the largest town in California. With the arrival of the railroads and land boom of the 1880s, the population of 11,000 exploded to 97,000. Los Angeles was here to stay. Growth of Downtown continued until 1957 when the building boom moved to outlying areas creating masses of shopping malls, business centers, entertainment complexes, and residential neighborhoods. The city went into decline, and it wasn’t until the 1990s that the renaissance began. A vibrant new energy in economic and social environments created by millennials and other professionals began building a new social and economic dynamic in the heart of the city. With the resurgence came an influx of new…
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