In this gently bucolic scene, we’re looking west from the corner of Hill and 5th Streets, downtown Los Angeles, in 1883. That leafy green park is now Pershing Square. Back then the locals called it Los Angeles Park before renaming 6th Street Park in 1886, then changing it to Central Park in the early 1890s, which it stayed until Angelenos changed it once again in 1918 to Pershing Square. Unlike today, the park looks like it offered the locals a quiet escape from the bustle of a rapidly growing town. In the 1880s, the transcontinental railway arrived and Los Angeles turned into a boom town.
Roughly the same view in December 2020. Unfortunately there’s nothing remotely bucolic in sight anymore:
I wish they would return it to its bucolic origins. Downtown could use a nice green space like that. Now it’s just a big gimmicky nothing.
I believe there are plans afoot to bring it back to something approximately a nice green space. But the parking lot underneath it limits them to what they can do and plant and grow.