In Los Angeles, downtown is on an upswing

LOS ANGELES -- Dress designer Stella Dottir took a stroll around her downtown neighborhood the other day and marveled at the ordinary.

"There were flowers and people sitting in outside cafes. And it was clean," she says, shaking her head in wonder. "When I moved in, you could get crack, heroin, marijuana and pills. But definitely not milk. This was a supermarket in hell."

A change has blown through in the three years since Dottir opened her namesake shop, one of the first commercial (or legal, anyway) enterprises on this formerly bleak stretch of Skid Row. Next door is a cheerful-looking Vietnamese restaurant and a DVD rental store. And across the way, a yoga studio and a doggie day-care place.

"It's busy at night. There are restaurants, clubs, music," she says. "It's like a different city."

Indeed. Downtown Los Angeles was for decades abandoned at quitting time, when thousands of office workers hopped in their cars and headed home via a tangle of freeways. Few people visited; fewer lived here, unless you count a teeming homeless population. The streets were dark and dirty and dangerous.

Now, downtown L.A. is suddenly hot, thanks to a recent influx of residents, which, in turn, has spawned new shops, restaurants and nightspots and given visitors fresh reasons to venture here. Corralled by three freeways and the Los Angeles River to the east, L.A.'s civic center is really a patchwork of at least 15 distinct neighborhoods that occupy a relatively compact area, from the sleek office towers of the Financial District and over-the-top opulence of the Vaudeville-era theaters lining historic Broadway, to the low-slung buildings of Little Tokyo and crowded storefronts of the Fashion District.

But despite major attractions — the collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art, performances at the Music Center, the Mexican crafts stalls on historic Olvera Street, and, since 2003, the wondrous sight of the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall, which has its own guided tours — downtown was lacking the critical mass to be a serious tourist draw.