A stroll through LA’s historic downtown

By Don Mankin

Despite Los Angeles’ reputation to the contrary, the city does have a walkable downtown. In fact, it’s a surprising mix of old and new, classic and modern, with a smorgasbord of places to eat and drink.

This past June, I spent a day with my wife and several friends strolling through the city’s history and present, exploring its ethnic, architectural and gustatory diversity.

Our urban adventure began at the Grand Central Market, one of the oldest “food halls” in the western U.S., dating from 1917. The market is usually packed with people of all ages and ethnicities cruising among food stalls that offer cuisines ranging from Thai, Chinese and Korean to Mexican and Jewish deli fare.

We got there before most of the food stalls opened, but our destination, Eggslut (yes, that is really the name), already had a long line of hungry customers. I chose the gourmet bacon, egg and cheese sandwich. After wiping yolk off my mustache, we headed to Angels Flight, just across from the market.

Angels Flight Railway is a historic funicular that ferried blue-collar workers from the cramped, clapboard boarding houses on Bunker Hill (before it was leveled in the 1960s) to the stores and businesses on Broadway below. Angels Flight should be familiar to fans of the movies La La Land and 500 Days of Summer as well as the streaming TV series “Goliath” and “Bosch.”

At the top of the short railway is California Plaza, a spacious concrete area with an amphitheater for summer concerts. The plaza is surrounded by the soaring glass office towers and hotels that replaced the working-class houses of Bunker Hill.

From modern art to Disney

We walked across the plaza in a northwesterly direction, past the Museum of Contemporary Art (worth a visit if you have the time), to Grand Avenue, then up Grand past the Broad Museum with its striking collection of modern art (also worth a visit).

Our destination was Walt Disney Concert Hall, one of the city’s most important buildings, architecturally, aesthetically and culturally. Designed by Frank Gehry, Disney Hall soars above the avenue like a gigantic surreal sailboat buffeted by turbulent waves of glistening steel.

We found the winding aerial pathway that wraps around the outside of the hall and inside the swirling, soaring waves of the external facade.

The unique pathway is accessible via a stairway behind a lovely rose-shaped fountain made of shards of blue-and-white Royal

Delft pottery. Gehry dedicated this fountain to Lillian Disney, who supported him through the often difficult and contentious design and construction of the hall.

This pathway is one of my favorite features of Disney Hall because it allows a close-up view of the innards of its infrastructure, giving a glimpse of the building’s intricate, complex engineering. As the walkway emerged from behind the facade, we paused for an expansive view of the city.

Music Center to the Cathedral

From there, we crossed First Avenue to an iconic architectural and cultural landmark of another era: Music Center Plaza, a wide, open plaza surrounded by three of the largest performing arts venues in the country, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Ahmanson Theater and Mark Taper Forum.

Unlike the undulating, free-form architecture of Disney Hall, the style of the Music Center is 1960s modern, typical of the important institutional and civic buildings of the era.

The fountain in the center of Music Center Plaza, which surrounds the “Peace on Earth” work by famed sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, is the first in a series of graceful, modern, “walk on water” fountains that spill (figuratively) down the hill through Grand Park in the direction of City Hall, a building recognizable to any fan of the 1950s TV show “Dragnet” and its taciturn, “Just the facts, ma’am” Sgt. Joe Friday.

Before reaching City Hall, we headed to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, a majestic modern structure markedly distinct from the shiny steel of Disney Hall or the white marble of the Music Center. The 21-year-old cathedral, which has no right angles, is the color of sun-baked adobe.

My favorite part of the cathedral is the mausoleum in the basement. The first thing you see at the bottom of the stairs is Gregory Peck’s crypt — creepy but also cool. Stained-glass windows line the walls of the mausoleum.

From the cathedral, we walked one block east to Broadway, then two blocks to the Bradbury Building, a National Historic Landmark built in 1893 and one of the oldest buildings in Los Angeles.

The five-story, red brick building is best known for its ornate filigree ironwork railings and open cage elevator. Filled with natural light that streams through the skylight that stretches across the entire ceil-