Downtown Los Angeles

When the Concerto high-rise condominium project opens this year in downtown Los Angeles, developer Hassan "Sonny" Astani will be lucky not to lose his shirt. With the market for condos in woeful decline, he already knows he won't make much money -- if any. Progress, at this point, would be to complete the $300-million project while staying out of bankruptcy.

The building that houses one of Southern California's last remaining cafeteria restaurants is going up for sale. And although the family that owns Clifton's Cafeteria intends to stay open for business, the historic restaurant is facing some serious financial challenges. There was a time when the cafeteria was the undisputed king of Southern California dining. Before World War II, the cheap food and sprawling dining halls brought together strangers to the region and created lasting bonds.

For more than four decades, a dreary, two-level jail in a corner of the Los Angeles Police Department's downtown headquarters has been an unwelcome pit stop for thousands of men arrested in the city each year. Accused of petty theft, murder or anything in between, the Parker Center Jail is where one waits -- sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for a few days -- to see a judge. Never a pleasant place, the jail has fallen into increasing depths of disrepair and inadequacy over the years.

A decade ago, the stretch of downtown L.A.'s Main Street between 4th and 6th streets was a desolate collection of empty buildings and homeless encampments, an area where drug dealing was conducted in the open, and the only longtime residents lived in residential hotels. These days, that stretch resembles a bustling small-town main street. There's the neighborhood bookstore, where an attentive shopkeeper knows her customers by name.

Los Angeles hopes to strike a deal this week for a sports arena project that could lead finally to a revival of its downtown, or at least a significant part of it. But even getting the deal done will be a test of whether Los Angeles is capable of helping itself. Negotiations over the project, infighting among City Council members and competition from other cities in the region are intense at the moment.

In a boost for the struggling downtown Los Angeles office market, fast-growing Aames Financial Corp. said Thursday that it will move its headquarters into a gleaming Bunker Hill skyscraper, one of the largest corporate relocations into the area in recent years. The 15-year lease for seven floors of space at Two California Plaza will bring an estimated 700 workers to downtown Los Angeles, which has lost numerous corporate headquarters over the years as a result of mergers and cutbacks.

After an emotional hearing in which parishioners wept and many speakers invoked God's will, the Los Angeles City Council took a major step Tuesday toward deleting St. Vibiana's Cathedral from the city's list of historic monuments, which could hasten its demolition and replacement with a new church.

With a 120-foot-high bell tower and a giant crucifix built over its hilltop entry, the new Roman Catholic cathedral proposed for downtown Los Angeles is being designed to be noticed. "One of the purposes of the cathedral is to serve as an inspiration to people. And of course, the more easily they can see it, the more readily they will be inspired," Cardinal Roger M. Mahony said Monday at the public unveiling of a preliminary model.

One of the oldest high-rise buildings in California is about to undergo a $7-million renovation to restore its 1920s look. The New Mart Building in the fashion district of downtown Los Angeles, erected in 1928, was originally called the Harris Newmark Building and housed a shirt manufacturing plant, said Joyce Eisenberg-Keefer, owner of the 12-story building. The restoration project, expected to be completed by summer 1997, will concentrate on the facade of the building.

Adding another wrinkle in the debate over whether city taxpayers should help bring a sports arena complex to downtown Los Angeles, Councilman Joel Wachs on Monday said he will introduce a motion to the City Council today that would submit the still-evolving proposal to voters during the June municipal election. Wachs' ballot proposal comes less than a week after a group of Los Angeles residents filed papers to launch a petition drive of their own.