Los Angeles Center Studios | |
---|---|
Former names | Union Oil Center |
General information | |
Address | 450 South Bixel Street Los Angeles, California 90017 |
Coordinates | 34°03′19″N118°15′40″W / 34.055393°N 118.26109°W |
Groundbreaking | 1955 |
Completed | April 1958 |
Design and construction | |
Architect(s) | William Pereira |
Architecture firm | Pereira & Luckman |
Main contractor | Del E. Webb Construction Company |
Los Angeles Center Studios, is a 20-acre film production studio located in the City West neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, United States. [1]
The main building opened in April 1958 as the Union Oil Center and served as the headquarters of Union Oil Company of California. [2] [3] The tower was designed by architect William Pereira. In 1996, Union Oil vacated the premises.
After the construction of six sound stages and renovation of the Unocal building, the studio opened in 1999. The 20-acre complex includes six film production sound stages, ten buildings, three streets and a private park. [2] The main gate is located at 450 South Bixel Street. [4]
In 2006, the Los Angeles Times reported that with Dreamgirls and Numb3rs filming at the studio, the city's decades-old vision for City West was finally being fulfilled. [1] For Numb3rs the studio's distinctive main building and bridge appear as exterior shots of the Los Angeles FBI office. [5]
Greater Los Angeles is the most populous metropolitan area in the U.S. state of California, encompassing five counties in Southern California extending from Ventura County in the west to San Bernardino County and Riverside County in the east, with the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County at its center, and Orange County to the southeast. The Los Angeles–Anaheim–Riverside combined statistical area (CSA) covers 33,954 square miles (87,940 km2), making it the largest metropolitan region in the United States by land area. The contiguous urban area is 2,281 square miles (5,910 km2), whereas the remainder mostly consists of mountain and desert areas. With an estimated population of over 18.3 million, it is the second-largest metropolitan area in the country, behind New York, as well as one of the largest megacities in the world.
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Union Oil Company of California, and its holding company Unocal Corporation, together known as Unocal was a major petroleum explorer and marketer in the late 19th century, through the 20th century, and into the early 21st century. It was headquartered in El Segundo, California, United States.
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Pico Boulevard is a major Los Angeles street that runs from the Pacific Ocean at Appian Way in Santa Monica to Central Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, California, United States. It is named after Pío Pico, the last Mexican governor of Alta California.
Downtown San Diego is the central business district of San Diego, California, the eighth largest city in the United States. It houses the major local headquarters of the city, county, state, and federal governments. The area comprises seven districts: Gaslamp Quarter, East Village, Columbia, Marina, Cortez Hill, Little Italy, and Core.
Claud W. Beelman, sometimes known as Claude Beelman, was an American architect who designed many examples of Beaux-Arts, Art Deco, and Streamline Moderne style buildings. Many of his buildings are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
University Park is a 1.17 square miles (3.0 km2) neighborhood in the South Los Angeles region of Los Angeles, California. The area includes the University of Southern California (USC), and the residential neighborhoods located immediately north of the campus: North University Park, Chester Place and St. James Park.
City National Plaza is a twin tower skyscraper complex on South Flower Street in western Downtown Los Angeles, California, United States. It was originally named ARCO Plaza upon opening in 1972.
The Long Beach Oil Field is a large oil field underneath the cities of Long Beach and Signal Hill, California, in the United States. Discovered in 1921, the field was enormously productive in the 1920s, with hundreds of oil derricks covering Signal Hill and adjacent parts of Long Beach; largely due to the huge output of this field, the Los Angeles Basin produced one-fifth of the nation's oil supply during the early 1920s. In 1923 alone the field produced over 68 million barrels of oil, and in barrels produced by surface area, the field was the world's richest. During the early stages of the field's development, unlike most oil fields, land was leased by the square inch instead of by the acre. The field is eighth-largest by cumulative production in California, and although now largely depleted, still officially retains around 5 million barrels of recoverable oil and has produced 963 million out of 3,600 million barrels of original oil in place. 294 wells remained in operation as of the beginning of 2008, and in 2008 the field reported production of over 1.5 million barrels of oil. The field is currently run entirely by small independent oil companies, with the largest operator in 2009 being Signal Hill Petroleum, Inc.
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Union Oil Building may refer to several different buildings occupied by Union Oil sequentially in Downtown Los Angeles:
How the studios went from an abandoned corporate headquarters to a flourishing center of industry is a dramatic example of a transformation unfolding on the west side of Harbor Freeway. The wave of gentrification that started in the rest of downtown in the late 1990s has finally reached the area known as City West.
Los Angeles Center Studios is a multipurpose facility that includes the former Unocal Center building (opened as Union Oil Center in April 1958) and the surrounding area. In 1999, construction on the six large sound stages and renovation of the Unocal headquarters was complete. The new 20-acre entertainment campus includes 10 buildings and 3 streets. Situated on the west side of the Harbor Freeway, at 5th and Bixel streets, the studio has the amenities of a full-scale Hollywood studio, including office space, a commissary, fitness center, a 350-seat theater, car wash, electric car charging stations, and a private park.