THE SIMPLE QUESTION OF WHETHER, and where, Los Angeles is "centered" has been a persistent theme in the city's history, perhaps to a greater degree than in any other city. L.A. has uniquely few natural reasons to be located where it is -- no natural harbor, or strategic military position, or river confluence, or natural trade route. The original Spanish settlement of 1781, located in present-day downtown L.A., was a military waystation placed somewhat arbitrarily at a widening of the Los Angeles river, and forcibly settled by the California military governor, rather than being chosen by any settlers themselves.

For much of L.A.'s subsequent history, different interests have struggled to shift power -- in the form of real-estate values, business headquarters, government offices, public infrastructure expenditures -- towards newer areas in the west, or to consolidate power in the old center. Downtown was long associated with the old WASP establishment, the power structure led by the Otis and Chandler family dynasties and the L.A. Times; while the separatist Westside elite, as Mike Davis notes, has tended to be Democratic and Jewish.

The cliche of L.A. says that there is no center at all -- or, appropriating Gertrude Stein's remark about Oakland, "there is no there there." On the other hand, there are probably few cities in which the creation of a "center" has been the subject of greater attention and struggle -- precisely because the center was not geographically obvious at the start.

The Bradbury Building in downtown, completed in 1893, is possibly Los Angeles' single most famous building, both for the building itself and its unusual history. Lewis Bradbury, a mining and real-estate magnate, wanted at the end of his life to build a monument to his own name. He approached a well-known local architect, Sumner Hunt, with the commission, but after failing to be impressed by Hunt's first proposal, he apparently asked George Wyman, a draftsman in Hunt's office, to design the building.

Wyman, who was not trained as an architect and initially declined the millionaire's request, came up with a design inspired, he said, by the futuristic novel Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy. This 1887 work depicts a utopian civilization in the year 2000, in which a commercial building was described as a

vast hall full of light, received not alone from the windows on all sides, but from the dome, the point of which was a hundred feet above....The walls were frescoed in mellow tints, to soften without absorbing the light which flooded the interior."

Wyman's design oriented the whole building towards a interior court illuminated by natural light from a glass floor five stories above. Two free-standing shafts contained open-cage elevators rising to the roof. The offices opened onto the interior balcony surrounding the courtyard, with all railings made of ornate wrought iron. All the interior surfaces use materials chosen, for particular reflective qualities and with little regard for expense: a special pale brick for the walls, Mexican tiles for the floor, Belgian marble for the stairs, and sumptuous wood paneling.

The building was completed in 1993 at a final expense of $500,000, nearly three times the original estimate and an unheard-of sum for such a building at that time. Bradbury died a few months before its completion, and Wyman sank back into obscurity, never to design any major building again. Completing an imaginative cycle that began with Bellamy's novel, the futuristic classic Blade Runner of 1983 used the Bradbury Building as backdrop for many of its interior scenes.

The Los Angeles Central Library is a beautiful, if somewhat underutilized, civic monument at the heart of downtown. Lovingly restored and expanded under Mayor Bradley, the distinctively L.A. Deco/Mayan building sits at the base of I. M. Pei's First Interstate World Center, the tallest building on the West Coast.

Library and Tower engage in a complex and slightly strained conversation at this site. Ironically, the developers saved the library from demolition by purchasing its air rights, after a 1987 arson gutted the building; the library in turn provides a civic anchor at the base of the status-aspiring tower. The Bunker Hill Steps, an elaborate pedestrian feature shaped after the Spanish Steps in Rome, was constructed to connect the library streetlevel with various entrance levels of the tower.

Like other civic interventions downtown, such as the redesigned Pershing Square, Bunker Hill Steps feels well-intentioned but up against difficult odds. It's a sensitive, and no doubt award-winning, design showcase, beautifully incorporating motifs from its Roman antecedent, the Southwest, and even the positive/negative-space semi-circle motif found in other L.A. buildings such as Hollyhock House and the new Getty. It restores, as Steele (1993) approving notes, the pathway of "a fondly remembered funicular [tramway] which traversed the hill near this point" (see Angels Flight below). Yet the blood of urban life is not exactly coursing through the veins of this place. While I was there, a few tourists wandered idly on the steps, and an occasional worker from First Interstate Center cut through on route to a parking garage next to the library, but it was otherwise sadly vacant. But what can you say? They did what could be done.

Among the highlights of the Central Library are the spectacular terra-cotta tilework on the pyramid-capped tower, and the ceiling murals in the soaring rotunda underneath. Gazing up at these ornamental efflorescences, I had an L.A. moment, the shock of seeing a highly unique, exuberant visual language here, in the type of monumental civic space usually done in a respectfully European style.

The Angel's Flight tramway, which was restored in 1996 after 27 years in storage, originally carried residents of Bunker Hill, then an affluent residential area, to their offices downtown. Rebuilt as a civic gesture, probably symbolizing a connection between bank-tower upper-Hill and Latino/Broadway lower-Hill, the railway solves the problem of getting up the steep hill -- but nobody seems very worried about that problem, other than the few idle tourists who've strayed into this largely vacant area. Some ride up and down a few times (25 cents/ride) for full effect.

Iglesia del Cuerpo de Christo, on Broadway features an ornamental facade of the exaggeratedly Baroque style sometimes called Churrigueresque (forgive, and notify me, any architectural historians out there who view this as too broad an application of the term).

Broadway, once the commercial and social hub of downtown, is now a thriving, if somewhat dilapidated and low-income, Latino retail and entertainment center. The financial and commercial district was moved uphill, in the '60s and '70s, to the razed Bunker Hill area -- at tremendous public expense, Mike Davis notes acerbically -- and separated from the public-transit-served Broadway area, for instance by dismantling the Angels Flight tramway.

There was a lot of concrete block and construction detritus strewn around on Broadway when I was there, and strangely it seemed to have been there for years. (the concrete dividers, made for freeways but here used to fence off construction equipment, had multiple layers of graffiti; poured-concrete ballast blocks were holding up traffic signs and had newspaper-vending boxes chained to them).

The semi-permanent disarray on Broadway did allow me to see this extraordinary mural, on the side of a building being renovated (for seven years now, it seems). First Interstate World Center is visible in the background.

Los Angeles Union Station, the last great railroad station built in the U.S. Although the Southern Pacific railroad has terminated here since 1886 (setting off a huge population boom in the city), this station was completed only in 1939.

It's a magnificent combination of moderne (deco) and Spanish Mission styles. My interior photographs didn't come out, but the interior detailing of the station -- tilework, waiting-area armchairs, metalwork on doors --was some of the most beautiful I saw in L.A.  

Right next to Union Station is a huge, strange building that was formerly L.A.'s central Post Office facility. After sitting vacant for many years, it has now been leased out to commercial tenants, but happily the exterior is unchanged, down to the "Post Office Central Annex" carved into the front facade.

Finally, the legendary Kosher Burrito. I'd heard offhand references to this several times, as a sort of proverbial example of L.A.'s ethnic mixture, and then I happened to drive past it.