Wilshire Grand Center, tallest skyscraper in the West, debuts in downtown Los Angeles
skyscraper is hard to miss.
With a sweeping sail of a roofline, it stands out by day among the flat tops of its tall rivals and is illuminated at night with an enveloping expanse of ever-changing colored lights.
But for its owner, the best view of the Wilshire Grand Center is looking east from Koreatown, where the just-completed $1.35-billion tower can be viewed as a symbol of how much Korean immigrants and their descendants have shaped their adopted city of Los Angeles.
“From Olympic Boulevard, you can directly see this building, the tallest and in the center” of the downtown skyline, said Yang Ho Cho, chairman of Korean Air. “All the Korean community in L.A. is very proud of this.”
At the peak of visibility is the airline’s logo, emblazoned atop the the 73-story building that houses an InterContinental hotel, several floors of leasable office space and five restaurants.
Cho, who also heads Korea’s Hanjin Group, the airline’s largest shareholder, celebrated the grand opening of the skyscraper on Friday evening with parties and a florid show of the building’s dancing LED lights visible for miles.
“The Wilshire Grand is a new tent pole for Los Angeles,” said Mayor Eric Garcetti a few days before it opened.
Indeed, the building with a curling lobby skylight that looks like a ski jump reflects the resurgence of downtown Los Angeles as the city's cultural center and economic engine. New apartments and condos are attracting thousands of residents — and the long-suffering white-collar office market is starting to turn around as more businesses follow.
For all its scope, the Wilshire Grand Center is only one of several large-scale real estate developments being built by foreign investors, including Chinese and Canadians who have homed in on Los Angeles in recent years.
For Cho, 68, the completion of the Wilshire Grand Center ends an odyssey that began in 1989 when he and his father, Choong Hoon Cho, the founder of the family’s Hanjin business empire, paid $168 million for a hotel they hoped would serve travelers arriving on their flights from Korea.
That community in Los Angeles and Orange counties is now home to an estimated 225,000 Korean immigrants, the most in the United States.
The Chos bought the former Statler Hotel, built in 1952 at Wilshire Boulevard and Figueroa Street, because they thought it was a prime location. For more than two decades, it wasn’t. Downtown’s hotel market was relentlessly weak.
Cho’s company spent $40 million on improvements to the hotel, which was renamed Wilshire Grand, but occupancy didn’t improve much. Cho held on through economic recessions.
“Everyone told me to sell in tough times,” he said. “I’m stubborn. I don’t believe in ‘right’ decisions. I believe in making decisions and then making them right.”
Cho eventually decided that it would be best to level the old hotel and start over. Los Angeles architecture firm AC Martin was chosen to design the building and manage construction.