One Wilshire

One Wilshire
General information
Address	624 S. Grand Ave
Town or city	Los Angeles
Country	California
Opened	1966
Renovated	1992 / 2001
Owner	GI Partners
Affiliation	Telecommunications industry
Technical details
Floor count	30
Floor area	664,000 square feet
Design and construction
Architecture firm	Skidmore, Owings and Merrill
Developer	S. Jon Kreedman & Company
Known for	Famous meet-me-room

One Wilshire is an office building located at the junction of Wilshire Boulevard and South Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. Built in 1966, the thirty story high-rise was designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and for its first decades in existence it was used almost exclusively by law firms. In the early 1990s it began housing largely telecommunications companies, and in 1992 One Wilshire underwent a major renovation, with the improvements largely related to telecommunication network upgrades. Around this time a large meet me room was constructed on the fourth floor, and in 2008 Wired claimed that One Wilshire had "the world's most densely populated Meet-Me room," with around 260 ISPs with interconnected networks.

In 2001 the Carlyle Group bought the building for $119 million, and Hines Real Estate Investment Trust in Houston, Texas paid $287 million for One Wilshire in 2007. It sold in 2013 from Hines Real Estate Investment Trust to GI Partners for $437.5 million, the highest price ever paid for an office building in downtown Los Angeles. As of 2013 it was one of the top three telecommunications centers in the world, and by 2015 One Wilshire was "the most highly connected Internet point in the western U.S.," with underseas cables allowing "one-third of Internet traffic from the U.S. to Asia [to pass] through the building."

One Wilshire was built in 1966 at 624 South Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, on the far eastern end of Wilshire Boulevard. The high-rise was designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill to be a standard office building with thirty floors and 664,000 square feet of space. The building's name was selected by developer S. Jon Kreedman, who would later become known for converting The Century Towers in 1977. At one point in its first few decades, One Wilshire entirely housed law offices. "Traditional corporate tenants" began moving out in the early 1990s, and the building instead became popular with telecommunications companies, in part because AT&T's switching center was only two blocks away.

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