Landmark downtown apartment tower faces foreclosure

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A landmarked downtown Los Angeles apartment building designed by famed Los Angeles architect John Parkinson is on the market as its owners face foreclosure.Residences in the Metropolitan, a 10-story tower built in 1913, are nearly filled with tenants but its ground floor retail spaces on Broadway and 5th Street are unoccupied, as are other street-level stores in downtown’s Historic Core.Business Businesses want the mayoral candidates to deal with downtown’s entrenched troubles.The historic building was once considered one of the best in the city and is owned by the Fallas family, which operated a chain of value-priced clothing stores based in Gardena including one called Fallas Paredes in the Metropolitan.Around 2011, Michael Fallas, who once worked in family’s downtown store as a stock boy, converted the upstairs floors from offices to apartments while continuing to operate Fallas Paredes.

The store closed more than five years ago in the wake of a 2018 filing by its parent company for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.Earlier this month in state Superior Court, a special servicer representing Fallas’ lender asked for a judicial foreclosure of the property, alleging that Fallas had stopped making payments on a $32 million loan dating to 2017.

After leasing the property for years, Fallas bought the building in the 1990s.Fallas didn’t respond to requests for comment.The location of the Metropolitan where the buildings stands was hailed in a Times story in 1912, saying “it is regarded by many realty men as the most valuable piece of real estate in Los Angeles.” The building today is recognized as a city historic-cultural monument because “Broadway became the commercial center of the Southland, a title it retained until well after World War II,” with its development, the city said.One of the architects who designed the Metropolitan in the Beaux-Arts style was John P...