“Los Angeles: What Can the 1920s Tell Us About the 2020s?”
Los Angeles feels unusually haunted by its own past because the city still wears, in stone and stucco, the ambitions of the 1920s. Walk through Hollywood, downtown, Koreatown, or the old boulevard corridors. You keep meeting the 1920s decade again and again: movie palaces, courtyard apartments, ornate office blocks, grand churches, towers, stairways, and façades built with the confidence of a city that believed its future would be bigger than its present.
That impression is not merely sentimental. A remarkable share of central Los Angeles’s visual identity really does come from the great metropolitan surge of the 1920s, when population growth, speculative real estate, automobile culture, oil wealth, and the rise of the film industry all reinforced one another. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
So what can the 1920s tell us about the 2020s? First, they remind us that Los Angeles has always been a boom-built city. Its character was shaped not by slow continuity but by bursts of reinvention. The 1920s were one of those rare moments when nearly everything seemed to expand at once: neighborhoods, studios, churches, institutions, commercial corridors, and civic self-belief. Buildings from that era still feel charged with momentum because they were erected by people who thought they were standing at the start of something immense. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
Second, the 1920s suggest that Los Angeles thrives when it possesses a convincing story about its own future. That is precisely what feels unstable in the 2020s. The film economy has weakened, with FilmLA reporting a 22.4% decline in on-location filming in the first quarter of 2025. Office real estate has remained under severe pressure; Cushman & Wakefield reported overall Los Angeles office vacancy at 24.1% in Q2 2025. And the mood downtown is troubled enough that the Los Angeles Times recently summarized it in plain words: “DTLA is hurting.” (FilmLA) From vacant offices to vacant restaurants to crime, it seems dark.
The deeper lesson, then, is not that the 1920s were simply glorious while the 2020s are simply grim. It is that Los Angeles has always depended on imagination as much as economics. The city becomes most itself when it believes in its next act. The poignant thing about Los Angeles now is that it still looks like a boomtown of destiny, while often feeling like a metropolis in retrenchment. The arches, towers, and old façades of the 1920s are more than relics. They are reminders that this city was built before, and at high speed, by people who were certain the future was arriving here first. The question for the 2020s is whether and how Los Angeles can recover that confidence in a new form.
