Wilshire Escrow Company / Windsor Exchange Corp.

Wilshire Escrow Company would like to extend a hearty welcome to Paul, our new Summer Intern.

This month, Wilshire Escrow Co. opened its 135,000th escrow!

Distortions within the Los Angeles real estate market are concentrated in the Downtown boom. The CoStar analysis cited herein does hold out a measure of long-term optimism, and no doubt an Olympified Los Angeles will rely heavily on a dense and vibrant center. The intervening decade, however, could be a trying one for impatient investors and over-leveraged developers, just as interest rates begin gradually to rise and lenders start to tighten their spigots. The Renaissance may be over. Perhaps it is time to usher in a Reformation.

Our metropolitan economy has ever been a delicate dance between the imperatives of culture and commerce, art and industry. The technological transfiguration of all these sectors will soon reach its apotheosis in a space that has already felt the impact most acutely. The social implications of an unprecedented influx of international capital into an erstwhile bohemian mecca merit reflection. WEC knows that, with ingenuity and a little luck, this delicate dance can discover a choreography sufficient to the new, globalized claims upon it.

"Origin is the goal." Wilshire Escrow Company, 4045-4049 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90010 Circa 1978.

Maps are also mental. The Mercator projection notoriously magnified the spatial dominance of the Global North, but other distortions are not so malign. For example, prior to the Portolá expedition, Spanish depictions of California routinely displayed the territory as dislocated from the North American mainland, as indeed it must have felt to those explorers who could only ever access this enchanted place from the shoreline inward. But it's rare to find Southern California represented such with artistic abandon. "This map shows the United States as seen through the sun-kissed, rose-colored glasses of a true Angeleno, who lives in a world of substantial illusion, largely created by their one most famous industrythe building of dreams illusions and making them into films." http://laist.com///vintage_map_shows_america_as_seen_t.php

"...Bunker Hill...was Los Angeles's most crowded and urban neighborhood. According to the 1940 Census, its population increased almost twenty percent during the Depression as it provided the cheapest housing for downtown's casual workforce as well as for pensioners, disabled war veterans, Mexican and Filipino immigrants, and men whose identities were best kept in shadow. Its nearly two thousand dwellings ranged from oil prospectors' shacks and turn-of-the-century tourist ho...tels to the decayed but still magnificent Queen Anne and Westlake mansions of the city's circa-1880 elites. Successive Works Progress Administration and city housing commission reports chronicled its dilapidation (60 percent of structures were considered 'dangerous') arrest rates (eight times the city average), health problems (tuberculosis and syphilis), and drug culture (the epicenter of marijuana and cocaine use). Yet grim social statistics failed to capture the district's favela-like community spirit, its multiracial tolerance, or its closed-mouth unity against the police."--Mike Davis, "Bunker Hill: Hollywood's Dark Shadow" http://www.newyorker.com//a-split-screen-tour-of-los-angel

From the Tongva to Portolá, through Lummis and Chandler, by way of Faulkner and Asa Call, the utterly singular topography of Los Angeles has sculpted the Imaginary of both place and indigene since the very first. This Automobile Club map from 1970, illustrated by Mr. Jack H. Moffett, expertly captures its gorgeous, heterogeneous convergence: a high desert skirted by an abrupt irruption of minor massifs, deciduously populated in oak and chaparral, veined by irregular watershed...s, and arrayed in a phalanx against the onrushing ocean. The peculiar ecology which nests within these divers features explains the bewitching quality of our sunlightobjects casting harsh, thirsty shadows are nevertheless bathed in a soft, coastal aura; curtains of particulate matter absorb and reflect the luminous wavelengths like a billion miniature moons. As Carey McWilliams wrote in 1946, "the charm of Southern California is largely to be found in the air and the light. Light and air are really one element: indivisible, mutually interacting, thoroughly interpenetrated." If this all sounds vaguely religious, that’s because it is. El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula is alive and well. Wilshire Escrow Co. strives to honor the Big Picture and join the Whole Equation. http://www.lamag.com//see-the-mountain-ranges-of-los-ang/

As a firm with memories of pre-freeway Los Angeles, we observe urbanological schemes such as this with keen interest! http://www.latimes.com//la-et-cm-freeway-essay-20151231-co

A bird's eye view of the Historic Core and the genesis of the Infinite Game: http://www.lamag.com/cit/citydig-los-angeles-hits-puberty/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsOy-6vlNa0

At the inception of the "2nd" Los Angeles, a rare and only recently digitalized portrait of post-war downtown. http://www.ultraswank.net//1946-downtown-los-angeles-in-c/