1100 Wilshire Building

Downtown

Built during the boom years of the 1980s, 1100 Wilshire Blvd. has become infamous for having stood virtually empty from day one.

The 38-floor, 330,000-square-foot tower was the brainchild of Tsai Ming Yu, a Taiwanese businessman who had made a fortune in Hong Kong and Tokyo. He built the triangular-shaped building in 1986, basing its design on traditional Chinese systems of divination. The result is a highly unusual structure a glass-sheathed triangular office tower atop a square concrete parking structure.

If the design was meant to bring good luck, it failed utterly.

“The parking is difficult to access because it is not subterranean, the elevators are on the side rather than in the middle, and the building has smaller, triangular floorplans, whereas everybody wants rectangular floorplans,” said Ted Simpson, a senior broker with Cushman Realty Corp.

Making matters worse was that Tsai insisted on personally approving all lease deals, which in effect meant that none got approved. He also ended up alienating the brokerage community, relegating his odd-shaped building to the equivalent of Siberia.

In fact, the building’s location, while not Siberia, might as well be. It sits just west of the Harbor (110) Freeway, in an area once called Central City West. During the 1980s boom, the area was master planned to become another major business district, but that vision crumbled once the recession took root.

The closest Tsai ever got to success with his triangular tower was in 1991, when the L.A. Department of Water and Power agreed to lease most of its space. But soon after that the Japanese real estate market collapsed, and Tsai’s fortune evaporated overnight.

By 1992, Tsai’s U.S. subsidiary had filed for bankruptcy protection and 1100 Wilshire was in foreclosure. It was sold by Great Western Bank to a group of Taiwanese investors for $18 million in 1993.

It remains empty to this day.

Edvard Pettersson