Perhaps it needed a native New Yorker to see the vibrant street-life potential in a city ruled by cars. The dream of revitalising Downtown LA has tantalised generations of Angelenos with distant memories of a buzzing cluster of marble-fronted department stores, Art Deco theatres and beaux-arts hotels where the likes of Bogart, Chaplin, Valentino, Gable and Garbo co-mingled during Hollywood’s heyday.

But until Manhattan-born architect/ developer Tom Gilmore arrived around 1998 with a $32m plan to convert a short row of mouldering historic buildings into Manhattan-style lofts, Downtown LA remained a source of embarrassment and a no-go zone after sunset once financiers and lawyers bolted their skyscrapers and federal buildings. “For the last 30-40 years, Downtown was the last port of call for LA,” recalls Gilmore, the chief executive of Gilmore Associates. “People just gravitated to the surf and the suburbs.”

Left abandoned, Downtown became the flophouse shelter to one of the largest populations of impoverished transients in the US. The name Skid Row was sufficiently official that it was long emblazoned on the sides of the fire trucks that roared out of LAFD Fire Station 9, the busiest in America. Downtown, it was said, was where you went on trial, not on a date.

The homeless are still in evidence today, but joining them is a fast-growing residential population of upwardly mobile types who have latched onto these turn-of-the-last-century architectural wonders and a multiethnic mix of micro-neighbourhoods teeming with pedestrians and local retail businesses. Actor Johnny Depp paid $2.1m for a penthouse here, a two-bedroom spread atop the Eastern Columbia monolith.

After several false dawns, a new Downtown has finally taken root. More than 15,000 residents have been added to the local population over the past 10 years. Add in Chinatown, and the area is the permanent home to just under 60,000. The highest growth has been in the Historic Core, the beneficiary of an ‘adaptive reuse ordinance’ passed by the city council in 1999 that made it easier for developers to convert vacant office and commercial buildings into open-space lofts, luxury apartments and condo complexes. Around 20,000 units have been put into motion.

Gilmore is widely credited with catalysing this development when he bought up a 56,000m² trio of run-down buildings that ran from Main to Spring streets between 4th and 5th and turned them into 230 living spaces. Recognising the area’s image problem, he shrewdly rebranded this block as the Old Bank District.

The architect points to 2007 as the tipping point in Downtown’s makeover.

The first phase of LA Live, a $2.5bn entertainment complex, opened next to the Staples Center where the Lakers basketball team play. Now completed, this 520,000m² expanse encompasses concert venues, restaurants, cinemas and a 54-storey hotel and condominium tower where Ritz Carlton and JW Marriott have hotels.

With its mix of attractions, LA Live has a wider demographic appeal than the one modern building that has come to be globally identified with Downtown’s rebirth: the Walt Disney Concert Hall designed by Frank Gehry. A symphony of stainless- steel curves that resemble an unfolding flower, it opened in October 2003 and has done for Downtown’s cultural image what Gehry’s Guggenheim did for Bilbao. Already the location for the nearby Museum of Contemporary Art, Downtown’s artistic credentials will be further enhanced when billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad builds a three-story museum to house his art collection just down the street from the Disney concert hall. New York’s starchitects Diller Scofidio + Renfro are responsible for the distinctive cloak that will wrap around this in a porous honeycomb – a metaphor for Broad’s vision of Downtown LA as a bustling urban hive of culture and street life.

While Gilmore applauds such iconic developments as proof of the area’s vitality, he doesn’t see them as the determining factors for Downtown’s sustained future. “We don’t need another big building, or more speculative developments. That’s not what makes a successful living/working urban centre,” he says. “I believe in incremental developments that encourage people to come here and stay.” For him it’s the mom-and-pop restaurants that dot the neighbourhood; it’s the underground art scene that has cropped up along pedestrian Chinatown alleys strung with lanterns; it’s the funky bars that attract throngs of scenesters after dark or the art walk that draws in crowds every second Thursday of the month; and it’s the residents who come here and end up having families. “For some reason this is not an area yet where couples arrive with children, but it is one that seems to result in people having children while they’re here,” he adds. Talk about sex appeal. Colin Brown