With a preservation battle now in the rearview mirror, Vancouver-based developer Onni Group is moving forward with plans to construct two apartment towers at the Times Mirror Square complex in Downtown Los Angeles.

Per a draft environmental impact report published by the City of Los Angeles, the proposed development, which would replace a William Pereira-designed structure spanning between 1st and 2nd Street along Broadway, calls for the construction of 53- and 37-story buildings featuring 1,127 studio, one-, two-, and three-bedroom dwellings atop roughly 34,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space.

The towers, which are being designed by AC Martin, are portrayed as contemporary glass-and-steel structures standing above a five-story parking podium.  The new construction would be separated from the adjoining Times and Mirror Buildings by a pedestrian paseo, cutting north-to-south between 1st and 2nd Streets.

The historic buildings, which date to the 1930s and 1940s, are to be rehabilitated as approximately 307,000 square feet of office space with nearly 70,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space - a portion of which would be used for a grocery store.  Onni plans to remove mid-century alterations to both buildings, which were designed by Rowland Crawford and Gordon Kaufmann, and returned to their original appearances.

Besides the ground-floor paseo, which would be flanked by retail space, the project would include open spaces and amenities in the form of fitness centers, a residential terrace between the towers.

The Times Mirror Square development, located across the street from an under-construction subway station at 2nd and Broadway, would feature 1,744 parking spaces within a five-level podium and nine basement levels.

The project's environmental impact report forecasts that the construction of the towers and the rehabilitation of the existing buildings would occur in a single phase, lasting approximately four years.  A groundbreaking date for the project has not been set, though for the purposes of environmental review, a period between 2019 and 2023 was considered.

Onni's plan to redevelop the 1970s expansion of the Times Mirror Square complex has been opposed to preservationists, who have argued that the building is worthy of monument status as a work of the noted mid-century architect William Pereira.  Though the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission recommended that the entire property - including the Pereira building - as a Historic-Cultural Monument, the City Council voted to grant that status only to the Kaufmann- and Crawford-designed structures.

The project site is located across 2nd Street from a proposed 30-story office and residential tower which is being developed by the real estate arm of former Los Angeles Times owner Tribune Media, and two blocks east of a $1-billion Frank Gehry-designed tower complex that is now under construction.