Convention Center

Convention Center. Los Angeles. , Convention Center , At Last , The Los Angeles Convention Center opened in 1971 , almost 200 years after Los Angeles was founded. But that doesn't mean that conventions and galas bypassed the City of Angels before then. Downtown's Biltmore Hotel hosted the Academy Awards for a time; the Coliseum, which could seat 100,000 and more, was where California welcomed home its World War II native sons, Generals George Patton and Jimmy Doolittle; and the grandest of the trio, the Pan Pacific Auditorium, was an Art Deco delight on Beverly Boulevard, which over time hosted symphonies and rallies, Leopold Stokowski and Elvis Presley, until it closed in 1972. , All of those gatherings were grist for a newspaper that once stood where the present-day convention center draws political rallies and auto shows. In its day, the Herald-Express was its own kind of crowd-pleaser, chronicling the daily doings of a burgeoning Los Angeles. The rollicking broadsheet was perhaps one of the most progressive as well as the most lurid of the city's six papers, and a star of the vast Hearst newspaper chain. , It served up a brew of sex, crime and civic wrongdoing, much of it under the direction of the city's first woman editor, and it was known for sensationalizing murder cases with florid names, like the "White Orchid Murder" and the "Red Hibiscus Murder." , William Randolph Hearst, the nation's flamboyant press lord, had already founded the city's conservative Examiner newspaper in 1903. In 1922, Hearst bought the Evening Herald, a daily newspaper founded in 1873, and employed its news columns to promote the careers of Hearst's longtime mistress, actress Marion Davies, and her Hollywood friends. , Six Newspapers In Town - And One Woman Editor , In the mid-1920s, the Evening Herald's new home rose at Pico Boulevard and Trenton Street. In 1931, Hearst bought the Evening Express newspaper, founded in 1871, and merged the two papers into the Herald-Express, which operated in the Evening Herald's headquarters that once stood here. , In 1927, as Hearst's newspaper covered murder and mayhem, the city brought it all to the newspaper's doorstep. The city built the Georgia Street Receiving Hospital on the top floors of the Georgia Street police station, across the street from the paper, and Hearst's reporters grew accustomed to tapping at their typewriters as sirens whizzed past around the clock. , The city's newspaper business was highly charged and very competitive. Six daily papers cranked out fresh editions all day long. And the Herald-Express, with its screaming headlines and eye-catching photographs, was the loudest of them all. It launched the careers of some remarkable journalists, including the grande dame of Los Angeles newspapering and the first woman city editor of a major metropolitan paper. , Agness Underwood , "Aggie" to her colleagues and eventually to the whole city , was a crusty tough-talking woman who dictated the city's news appetite with a combination of professional know-how and sentimentality. She sometimes cooked up her special spaghetti not only for her two children, but for actor Errol Flynn and gangster Mickey Cohen. , Brewing Up Stories For A News-thirsty City , She demanded from her reporters "absolute loyalty and a reverent devotion to the job," wrote Jack Smith, a Los Angeles Times columnist who had worked for her in the early 1950s. She would sometimes reward the labors of her "boys" with bottles of beer. And like a good beer, the journalism Underwood served up to Los Angeles from 1926 to 1968 was brewed for working-class tastes. Underwood rose from a telephone operator at another paper to a young reporter at the Evening Herald, where she once dropped a white carnation onto the body of a waitress found stabbed to death in a bar, told her photographer to get a picture of the flower-adorned corpse, and gave the killing a name: "The White Carnation Murder." When a police officer interfered, Underwood smacked him with her purse. As a city editor, Underwood expected her reporters to be no less aggressive and inventive. , Hearst merged the splashy Herald-Express with the conservative Examiner in 1962 and called it the Herald Examiner. The somewhat tamer newspaper, the last remaining afternoon paper in the city, folded in 1989 after 118 years of publishing. And the Herald-Express building was torn down in the late 1960s, to make room for the convention center that Los Angeles' mayor so fervently wanted.