Developer Crescent Heights files plans for 70-story skyscraper at 1045 Olive

The flurry of development that has taken over Downtown LA’s South Park neighborhood is spreading farther south: Developer Crescent Heights filed plans today to build a 70-story tower with nearly 800 apartments at South Olive and 11 Street, says Sara Hernandez, an attorney with the developer’s law firm, Liner LLP.

That’s just three stories shorter than the newly crowned queen of LA’s skyline, the Wilshire Grand, and, at a height of 770 feet, it could very well earn it the title of one of LA’s tallest buildings.

The new skyscraper would be almost entirely residential, comprised of 794 apartments above a ground-floor restaurant, bar, “market hall,” and 13.5 levels of parking. The parking will be divided between an underground garage and an eight-level podium wrapped in apartments “so as to conceal” the cars, Hernandez says.

New York-based architecture firm ODA is designing the tower “to maximize light and air,” and renderings show a big cutout on the upper levels for a swimming pool and shared open space, plus wraparound-cantilevered balconies on almost every level.

Jerold Neuman, another attorney with Liner, says the design is trying to bring LA’s suburban “sensibility” to dense Downtown.

“LA’s Downtown is really organized by a series of office buildings. Even if you look at the residential towers Downtown, they’re sort of replicative of other office buildings in the area,” he says. “This building breaks that mold. This building makes most of its defining elements horizontal in nature, as you would see in residential neighborhoods.”

Neuman says Crescent Heights has not determined whether to designate any of the units as affordable.

The Los Angeles Business Journal has reported that Crescent Heights purchased the half-acre site at 1045 South Olive Street last spring for $11.5 million

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