Is downtown L.A. coming back for clubbers? These rave vets hope Origin pulls them home

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Set us as preferred Imperial Street was eerily quiet on a recent Tuesday afternoon in the Arts District.The scrim from the Lineage cold storage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights, just across the L.A.

River, hung over downtown.The only pedestrians passing by one vacant dirt lot near 6th Street were a couple of teens on BMX bikes wearing smoke-blocking face masks.In a few months, this vacant lot will be a very different scene.

It will soon become the outdoor patio of Origin, an ambitious new indoor-outdoor nightclub and live music venue from two veteran promoters in L.A.’s underground electronic scene.The pair hope to turn the property at the foot of the 6th Street Bridge into a beacon of club music in a once-bustling, lately-beleaguered neighborhood.Electronic music helped entice fans into downtown’s revitalization in the 2000s.

Given Central City’s post-pandemic troubles, amid a boom in dance music across culture more broadly, Origin’s founders hope the scene can do it again.“People will be like, ‘I don’t go to downtown anymore, it’s so sketchy now, my car got broken into last time and I feel weird letting a girl walk to a car by herself.’ I think some of that deters people from coming to downtown even if you have a cool place and a cool party,” Origin’s co-founder Roni Mehrabian said.A thriving new music venue in the heart of the Arts District “would revitalize business and foot traffic and people going out,” he added.“It would be one thing that would actually translate into people feeling OK here again.”Origin’s building will be familiar to L.A.

ravers.The former Lot 613 was a semi-permanent pop-up music venue used by various promoters over the years.

Its neighborhood is both bougie (walking distance to SoHo Warehouse, Dover Street Market and Girl & the Goat) and gritty.The new 6th Stre...