One Wilshire
One Wilshire is an office building located at the junction of Wilshire Boulevard and South Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, California, United States. Located at the eastern end of Wilshire, its address is 624 S. Grand Avenue. Built in 1966, the thirty-story high-rise was designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and for its first decades in existence, it was used almost exclusively by law firms. 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. Around this time, a large meet-me room was constructed on the fourth floor, 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.
In 2001, the Carlyle Group bought the building for $119 million, and Hines Real Estate Investment Trust in Houston, Texas, paid $287 million for One Wilshire in 2007. It was 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. As of 2013, it was one of the top three telecommunications centers in the world, and by 2015 One Wilshire was "the most highly connected Internet point in the western U.S.," with submarine communications cables allowing "one-third of Internet traffic from the U.S. to Asia through the building."
History
Construction and first decades (1960s–2006)
Ground was broken for One Wilshire in 1964, and the building was completed in 1966 at 624 South Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, on the far eastern end of Wilshire Boulevard. The high-rise was designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and built by Del E. Webb Construction to be a standard office building with thirty floors and of space. Even though the address of the building is on Grand, the building's name, One Wilshire, was suggested by Morris Pynoos, as vice president of S. Jon Kreedman Co., who saw the building's location as the start of Wilshire from the east and the end of Wilshire from the west. It was selected by developer S. Jon Kreedman, who would later become known for converting The Century Towers in 1977. One Wilshire housed law offices at one point in its first few decades. "Traditional corporate tenants" began moving out in the early 1990s, and the building instead became popular with telecommunications companies, partly because the AT&T Switching Center was only two blocks away.In 1992, One Wilshire underwent a major renovation, largely related to telecommunication network upgrades. Telecommunications companies had "congregated" to One Wilshire by the early 1990s, and by 1998, One Wilshire was a "focal point" for the telecom industry, in part because it had a clear line of sight to the east that helped with microwave transmissions. As the building became a hotspot for telecommunications, the so-called meet-me room was constructed on the fourth floor, which allows the building's tenants to interconnect. In 2001, the Carlyle Group bought the building for $119 million, spending $30 million on infrastructure improvements. As of 2002, the building had five generators for the event of a blackout. Cooling units were primarily on the third floor, as well as on the roof.