Downtown Los Angeles

Can a cluster of light-filled meeting rooms make California a healthier place? That's the hope of the California Endowment, a $3.7-billion fund created nine years ago to improve the health of state residents. On Thursday, the endowment officially opened the Center for Healthy Communities, an architecturally striking compound in downtown Los Angeles that offers the state's thousands of health-related nonprofit groups a simple but potentially powerful tool: a place to gather.

Thousands are expected to attend a candlelight vigil and procession today in downtown Los Angeles to urge Congress to pass a comprehensive immigration overhaul. It is expected to be one of the largest marches among a number planned around the state. The national "Day of Action" comes two weeks after 500,000 people, according to police estimates, marched in Los Angeles to protest proposed immigration legislation.

Acknowledging that the rapid gentrification of downtown, Hollywood and other parts of Los Angeles is making it harder for the poor to afford housing, the Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday approved a moratorium on the conversion or demolition of low-cost residential hotels across the city.

Trying to persuade L.A. institutions like Dutton's bookstore or Trader Joe's market to move into downtown Los Angeles is one thing. But the success of downtown's future may rest with the investment bankers, real estate developers and others gathered earlier this week in a Manhattan hotel ballroom. Los Angeles business and political leaders were here to pitch downtown's story, complete with upbeat videos of luxury lofts and renderings of glittering buildings under development.

The Giant Village concert, canceled last New Year's Eve because of rain, was staged Saturday on a sweltering night on the streets of downtown Los Angeles. The event, renamed Summer in the City and billed as "a massive open-air block party" with DJs playing music on five stages, began at 8 p.m. and was to end at 4 a.m. today. A spokeswoman for promoter Dave Dean estimated that 7,500 people would pay from $75 to $125 each to attend the event.

For the last three decades, through riots, recessions, building booms and busts, Richard Meruelo and his parents have held an irrepressible faith in the potential of downtown Los Angeles. Beginning with the dress shop Meruelo's mother owned at 3rd Street and Broadway, the family quietly bought up parcel after parcel, and Meruelo managed the portfolio.

Times photo editor Aurelio Jose Barrera started documenting life on Cesar E. Chavez Avenue in 2003. The seven-mile street named for the storied Mexican American labor leader begins where Sunset Boulevard ends, near Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. From there it heads east, over rail yards and beneath freeways, past White Memorial Medical Center and Belvedere Park, finally ending at East Los Angeles College in Monterey Park.

Deborah Racine has lived in downtown Los Angeles for five years, and she calls it home. Nearly every morning, about 9 a.m., she leaves her residential tower near Grand Avenue and 2nd Street for a stroll into the city -- past parking lots, hotels and office buildings, past the public library, past Grand Central Market.

Trizec Properties Inc., owner of more than 50 office buildings in the U.S., bought a 52-story tower in downtown Los Angeles for $356.7 million, increasing its holdings in the area by 30%. The seller of the Figueroa at Wilshire tower was a joint venture of Houston-based Hines and Germany's Deutsche Immobilien Fonds. The 1-million-square-foot building expands Trizec's Los Angeles office portfolio to 4.5 million square feet, the Chicago-based company said Thursday. The tower is 87% occupied.

ESPN, the cable television sports giant, expects to dramatically bolster its Southern California presence by building a television and radio production center and an ESPN Zone sports bar and restaurant in the downtown entertainment district that AEG has proposed for a parking lot next to Staples Center.