Los Angeles High School in the context of "Los Angeles City College"

The Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center (formerly known as the Criminal Courts Building) is the county criminal courthouse in the Civic Center neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. It is located at 210 West Temple Street, between Broadway and Spring Street occupying the former site of the historic Red Sandstone Courthouse from 1891–1936, and prior to that, Los Angeles High School (1873–82), on the former Pound Cake Hill, now flattened.

Originally known as the Criminal Courts Building, in 2002 it was renamed the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, after Clara S. Foltz, the first female lawyer on the West Coast of the United States (and also the first person to propose the creation of a public defender's office).

Hill Street is a major north–south thoroughfare in Los Angeles, measuring 4.8 miles (7.7 km) in length. It starts on Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard near the campus of USC, and passes north through Downtown Los Angeles, past such landmarks as Pershing Square, the Subway Terminal Building, Angels Flight, Fort Moore and Chinatown. Hill Street merges with the Arroyo Seco Parkway near Dodger Stadium.

Olympic Boulevard, formerly 10th Street, is a major arterial road in Los Angeles County, California. It stretches from Ocean Avenue at the western end of Santa Monica to East Los Angeles. It runs north of Pico Boulevard and south of Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards from Santa Monica to downtown Los Angeles.

Like other major Los Angeles streets, Olympic is at least four lanes in width. Unlike other east-west arterial roads such as Wilshire Boulevard, Santa Monica Boulevard, and Sunset Boulevard, it does not cross major attractions and sites and therefore contains far less traffic. While Wilshire crosses through the heart of Los Angeles, Olympic runs through the southern end of principal areas such as West Los Angeles, Westwood, Century City, Beverly Hills, Hancock Park, Koreatown, Westlake and Downtown Los Angeles. Little Ethiopia is east of Fairfax Avenue and Olympic. Proceeding east on Olympic, it breaks off in Downtown LA's Fashion District but continues on from there, passing the southern areas of Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, Commerce, and Montebello with an eastern terminus in Pico Rivera as a small neighborhood street.

The late-Victorian-era Downtown of Los Angeles in 1880 was centered at the southern end of the Los Angeles Plaza area, and over the next two decades, it extended south and west along Main Street, Spring Street, and Broadway towards Third Street. Most of the 19th-century buildings no longer exist, surviving only in the Plaza area or south of Second Street. The rest were demolished to make way for the Civic Center district with City Hall, numerous courthouses, and other municipal, county, state and federal buildings, and Times Mirror Square. This article covers that area, between the Plaza, 3rd St., Los Angeles St., and Broadway, during the period 1880 through the period of demolition (1920s–1950s).

At the time (1880–1900s), the area was referred to as the business center, business section or business district. By 1910, it was referred to as the "North End" of the business district which by then had expanded south to what is today called the Historic Core, along Broadway, Spring and Main roughly from 3rd to 9th streets.