One Wilshire
One Wilshire is an office building located at the junction of Wilshire Boulevard and South Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. Notwithstanding the building's name, its actual address is 624 S. Grand Avenue. Built in 1966,[3] the thirty story high-rise was designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill,[4] and for its first decades in existence it was used almost exclusively by law firms.[5] In the early 1990s it began housing largely telecommunications companies, and in 1992 One Wilshire underwent a major renovation, with the improvements largely related to telecommunication network upgrades.[6] Around this time a large meet-me room was constructed[2][7] on the fourth floor,[4] and in 2008 Wired claimed that One Wilshire had "the world's most densely populated Meet-Me room", with around 260 ISPs with interconnected networks.[8]
One Wilshire
In 2001 the Carlyle Group bought the building for $119 million,[1] and Hines Real Estate Investment Trust in Houston, Texas paid $287 million for One Wilshire in 2007.[3] It sold in 2013 from Hines Real Estate Investment Trust to GI Partners for $437.5 million, the highest price ever paid for an office building in downtown Los Angeles.[3] As of 2013 it was one of the top three telecommunications centers in the world,[3] and by 2015 One Wilshire was "the most highly connected Internet point in the western U.S.",[2] with submarine communications cables allowing "one-third of Internet traffic from the U.S. to Asia [to pass] through the building."[2]
History[edit]
Construction and first decades (1960s–2006)[edit]
Ground was broken for One Wilshire in 1964, and the building was completed in 1966[2] at 624 South Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, on the far eastern end of Wilshire Boulevard.[3][4] The high-rise was designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill[4] and built by Del E. Webb Construction[9] to be a standard office building[2] with thirty floors[2] and 664,000 square feet (61,700 m2) of space.[2] Even though address of the building is on Grand, the building's name, One Wilshire, was suggested by Morris Pynoos,[10] as vice president of S. Jon Kreedman Co., who saw the building's location as the start of Wilshire from the east and end of Wilshire from the west. It selected by developer S. Jon Kreedman, who would later become known for converting The Century Towers in 1977.[3] At one point in its first few decades, One Wilshire entirely housed law offices.[5] "Traditional corporate tenants" began moving out in the early 1990s,[2] and the building instead became popular with telecommunications companies, in part because the AT&T Switching Center was only two blocks away.[2]
Tenants[edit]
Initially One Wilshire leased office space to law firms, though in the 1990s most of its tenants became telecommunications companies. Google was a tenant by 2007,[5] and Wilcon expanded its presence in 2013[12][13] after it acquired IX2,[14][15] which at the time was[14] based in One Wilshire and one of the first colocation tenants in the building dating back to 1998.[12][16] Among One Wilshire's other major tenants that year were Verizon Communications, Sirius XM Radio, and China Telecom,[3] with about a third of One Wilshire used as standard office space for firms such as Musick Peeler and Crowell, Weedon & Co.[3] As of 2015 the building had over 300 tenants.[2] Its largest tenant continues to be CoreSite Realty Corporation,[2][5][17] a data center provider which established an office in One Wilshire upon its founding in 2001.[1] As of 2015 Fiber Internet Center is a tenant, and American Internet Services also maintains a point of presence (OWPOP) at One Wilshire. Others include AT&T, Amazon Web Services, and Netflix.[2] East West Bank also has a branch located at the main entrance, facing Grand Ave.
