Filming in the Arts District, Downtown Los Angeles
Brick warehouses carry loading docks and painted wall signs, and the corner at Mateo and Palmetto has played an apartment and Paddy's Pub.
What Arts District looks like
The former Santa Fe Freight Depot at 960 East 3rd Street is a low warehouse with arched windows across its front, running the length of the block behind a chain link fence. , the architecture school, occupies the building now. It is on the National Register of Historic Places. Brick and concrete warehouses of one to six storeys fill the surrounding blocks, loading docks and roll-up doors at ground level.
Painted company names survive high on several facades. The at 1850 Industrial Street still shows the company's name in raised letters across the top. PAINTS OILS VARNISHES is still legible in ghost lettering above the arched windows at , over NAT STARKMAN AND SON. Chain link fences, some topped with razor wire, run along blocks where lots still sit empty.
Murals cover many of the blank end walls and loading bay doors, tags layered one over another in places. The Hewitt Street wall by the runs one continuous mural corner to corner. Some ground floor warehouse space has been converted into galleries and cafes, tables set out under awnings where a loading dock used to be. The at 837 Traction Avenue is another loft conversion, built in 1906.
The crosses the Los Angeles River at the district's east edge, its concrete arches completed in 2022. Chain link fencing lines the approach on Sixth Street near Mateo, with the arches visible down the length of the block.
Shot in Arts District
The warehouse at 544 Mateo Street was built in 1908 for Nate Starkman and Son, whose sign still runs across the front. Its exterior has been rented out more than almost any other address in the district.
The building's other credits
The building has also carried a street party in the original The Fast and the Furious. It played a traffic stop in a Parks and Recreation episode. For the finale of the series House, it was set on fire.
National Treasure, 2004
Ben Gates's apartment
Played Ben Gates's apartment building
The exterior plays Ben Gates's apartment building in the film. The ghost sign across the top, PAINTS OILS VARNISHES over NAT STARKMAN & SON, is original to the warehouse.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Played Paddy's Pub, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, present day
The same building's exterior plays Paddy's Pub on the series, the bar the whole show is built around. The show is set in Philadelphia, so this Los Angeles warehouse stands in for a bar thousands of miles from where it is filmed.
Fulton Market's brick warehouses were built for the meatpacking and produce trade and still carry the same scale of loading dock and cold storage building that fills the Arts District's own blocks. The city designated its core streets the Fulton-Randolph Market Historic District in 2015, which has kept the brick facades and dock doors at street level even as newer floors and towers went up above them. Fulton Market's streets carry more corporate signage and glass additions above the old cornice line, so a period-accurate frame needs to stay low and keep the newer construction out of the top of shot. Try searching brick warehouses with loading docks now.
Wynwood in Miami, Florida
Wynwood's warehouses went up in the 1920s for garment and manufacturing work and sat mostly empty until 2009, when their blank exterior walls became canvases for murals, the same trade of warehouse wall for mural wall that runs through the Arts District. Most of Wynwood's buildings are a single storey, well under the Arts District's own one to six. A wide shot gives away the height difference immediately, so Wynwood only holds up for tight coverage on one mural wall or loading dock rather than a full block. Try searching single storey mural warehouses now.
