Time Out Los Angeles

Around the same time, the LA Conservancy helped bring about a change in the law that allowed commercial buildings to be converted for residential use. As a result, more than 100 commercial buildings dating from the turn of the century to the 1970s have been transformed, among them the century-old structures around 4th and Spring Streets; the General Petroleum Building (612 S Flower Street), designed by Welton Becket, now the Pegasus Apartments; and Claude Beelman’s Eastern Columbia Building (849 S Broadway), an eye-catching zig-zag moderne building from 1930. The trend has even reached the streets east of Little Tokyo, in the burgeoning Arts District, with the conversions of a 1924 warehouse into the Toy Factory