L.A.'s bright lights: Los Angeles is on the world's cultural itinerary like never before

Phoenix gravitates to the survivors of earlier eras along downtown's historic main drag, Broadway. Gems range from the light-filled atrium and ornamental ironwork of the 1893 Bradbury Building to Clifton's Brookdale Cafeteria, a themed eatery from the 1930s with columns camouflaged as redwoods, a waterfall, and even a tiny stone chapel.

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Broadway is a few blocks distant but worlds away from the cultural corridor along Grand Avenue. For me, Broadway has always been a place to connect to the city's past and to experience a Los Angeles far removed from its reputation for the gaudy and glitzy.

Gritty but vital, Broadway is a bustling commercial district that belies the long-standing truism that nobody walks in L.A. It is said to be the largest Latino shopping area in the country, and a steady soundtrack pours from the thumping and crackling speakers in front of the street's many discotecas. Clothing-store windows are filled with flouncy quince-anera dresses, while botanicas display folk remedies and statues of saints. It's a street where hope and despair readily mix. For some, Broadway is part of an upward journey; for others, this is where they have bottomed out.

As Los Angeles boomed in the 1920s, Broadway became the focus of urban life here. It's home to a dozen classic theaters that compose the largest concentration of historic movie palaces in the country. At the United Artists Theatre, which now hosts church services, a mural on one side of the auditorium shows silent-film star Mary Pickford fleeing four demonlike figures said to represent the heads of major studios. The mural on the other side depicts her standing triumphant atop the globe, symbolizing her escape and the founding of her own studio, United Artists. Opened in 1926, the Orpheum Theatre hosted entertainers from Judy Garland to Aretha Franklin; it has been beautifully restored and is now used for musicals and special events. And the Los Angeles Theatre, built as a dreamy escape during the Great Depression, is considered, in a city of grand theaters, the most ornate.

For Phoenix, the theaters are part of a local architectural tradition that the city can tap into rather than searching for answers from other cities. He has little patience with current talk of turning Grand Avenue into a Champs-Elysees or Rockefeller Center for Los Angeles. "Even after all these years," he says, "many people don't want to acknowledge that Los Angeles can draw inspiration from itself. They're quick to say there's no real history. Well, you know the movies have been around almost 100 years and are a strong influence on the city. Fantasy environments are a huge part of L.A. That's just the way it is."

Today, many of the theaters have been converted to less glamorous uses, such as housing swap meets, while others are only open for special events or tours. But numerous vintage buildings--together they make up one of the largest intact districts of Beaux-Arts structures in the country--are being transformed into loftlike living spaces for people who actually want to live downtown. (Ironically, decades of neglect had their benefits, notes Michael Tansey, now a general partner with the real estate development firm Peterson & Tansey. "These buildings were sitting fallow just waiting for the world to catch up to them," he says. "There wasn't a use for the land, so there wasn't even a reason to tear them down.") Meanwhile, just to the north, another classic but long-neglected Los Angeles district, L.A.'s Chinatown, has found new life as a center for cutting-edge art.