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Originally Posted by Niftybox
Yeah it sure looks like L.A. is going to be the metro of many skylines, the basin is just too big to have one cohesive/tapering connected skyline like NYC or Hong Kong. Very interesting.
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There are a few caveats to that. For the immediate future sure. There will be many skyline islands like Downtown, Hollywood, Koreatown, Century City/Westwood etc. However, who knows what the future might hold over the next one to two hundred years, or even fifty years. It wasn't that long ago that the basin was filled with large orchards of fruit. The Los Angeles Basin is not the vast core of Paris, and I don't think its skylines are destined to remain isolated islands. Many of us have Grandparents who remember large sections of Wilshire and Olympic that looked more like Irvine than how they appear today. If you are traveling along the 10 and gaze northward, it won't be too many more decades before Wilshire appears to be one long string of unbroken skyline from Westwood to Downtown. IMO, we're going to see examples of that thinner linear vertical type of expansion like we now see through Westwood and Koreatown. Of course, the width or overall connected unbroken vertical circumferance of the skyline between say Washington and Wilshire may never happen, but there are already many signs on certain parallel commercial streets such as Olympic, Pico, Venice and Washington or 6th of continued linear East/West ever-increasing vertical, and the north south expansion of many vertical nodes. North/South streets such as Vermont and Western have been showing signs of a lot of teardowns and added height replacements over this past decade, increasing the breath and number of vertical nodes. Those mid-rises along Vermont seem to be getting increasingly taller and more numerous between the 10 and Sunset. Of course, a lot of the unbroken skyline vertical development change depends on how fast and where the Basin continues to build its mass-transit corridors, particularly how much subway the Fed. Government will contribute to L.A.'s infrastructure buildup. As far as unbroken vertical development between Westwood and Downtown along Wilshire, and even much of Olympic, vertical is going to explode among the remaining underdeveloped plots as soon as the Metro reaches the coast. The bar of what is considered underdeveloped is rising very quickly. Also, what will developers be able to squeeze out of those making the laws at any given decades period? For example, Manhattan gave up a lot of gilded architectural treasures, even those that were quite tall, in order to reach ever taller in connecting its Upper, Mid and Lower nodes. Many of those grand structures of the late 19th and early 20th Century were far more significant architecturally than much of what lines Wilshire, Pico or Olympic today. Even neighborhoods like Beverly Hills or Hancock Park are not immune to seeing a lot of ever increasing vertical along its major commercial East/West corridors such as Wilshire and Olympic. The Basin will always have a smattering of Deco and Hollywood Golden Age memorabilia. But let's face it, most of what remains along the mixed-use Basin commercial/residential corridors is throw-away and will be replaced by something taller and showing bigger dollar profits. Of course, God forbid that the Basin would ever become another San Paolo, and I don't think it ever will. However, I think a setup like we see with Chicago's thinner strings of mid and high-rise vertical, puncuated by larger more expansive vertical nodes is not too far out over the next few decades. While many of us won't be around to see it reach a mature level, I think it's a given it will happen, and many of us will see a lot of progress to that end. It will also be fascinating to see how far and how fast the Downtown southern and western expansion continues to evolve.
Then again, who knows what the patterns will be after the Big-One strikes. Perhaps taller, but with Chilean like building standards. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Los Angeles or some of the most prone Big-One cities in the West are even now at Chile's urban seismic standards. If a predicted Santiago type earthquake happens to any of the major metros along the coast, or say Salt Lake City's Wasatch Front, it's anyone's guess has to what will evolve.