premiere towers

Monday, August 30, 2004, at 03:13PM

By Eric Richardson

There's not a lot online about the downtown building I call home, so I've sort of pooled the different info I have on the building together to make a page on Premiere Towers. I'll add to it as I get more material, especially material on the history of the buildings.

Right now I'm reading a really interesting piece from the April 1, 1991, LA Times. The piece, titled "Condo Pioneers Bitter as Spring Street Rebirth Fails," was written right in the midst of the dark times the Premiere conversion project went through. The CRA though there was going to be a condo market downtown, so they converted two old buildings into one condo project. Only about a quarter of the units sold and the CRA lost a lot of money in the resulting buy-back and resale.

It's interesting to look at what pricing was like back then.

Pierson, Tanasaphaisal and the other residents plunked down from $70,000 to $135,000 to buy condominiums at Premiere Towers, located at 6th and Spring streets. The 12-story, $12-million redevelopment project, which opened seven years ago, was described by the CRA as "a unique alternative for middle-income households desiring downtown living."

Look around at the current downtown condo market and you'll see lofts going for a half million dollars or more. Every unit that makes it to market is getting snapped up. But the CRA jumped the gun by a decade or two and lost its shirt on it.

Interestingly, the article mentions the Stock Exchange as being a failed nightclub.

Both the Stock Exchange nightclub, which opened in 1987 in the architecturally imposing former home of the Pacific Stock Exchange, and Irwin's, an upscale restaurant that had been aimed at the City Hall crowd, closed within the last two years.

Today the Stock Exchange is again a nightclub, and one that seems to be doing pretty well to judge by the traffic I see going in and out.

From a different Times article from 1986...

The artists who live in downtown Los Angeles' northeast industrial district have been predicting for years that as soon as word got out that something hip was happening in their reconstituted neighborhood, the yuppies would buy up all their funky lofts and spoil the fun.

You can check that one off as done.