Main Street Los Angeles

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.

Many Angelenos' place in Los Angeles--their street address--is determined by where they live and work in relation to the historic corner of 1st and Main streets in downtown's Civic Center. First and Main is ground zero for the city's and county's unified house-numbering systems--the manner in which government determines the addresses of large numbers of homes and businesses. Streets are numbered according to their distance from that intersection.