Oranges and grapefruit grew here into the early twentieth century, and the Santa Fe Railroad built a freight depot at 960 East 3rd Street to ship the crop out. Warehouses went up around it for the citrus and, later, for the factories that replaced it. The depot is a National Register building now. It has been home to the , SCI-Arc, since 2001.
Most of the factories were gone by the 1950s. The buildings sat empty until 1979 and 1981, when new laws let artists move into industrial space and live there. Many did, and NATIONAL BISCUIT COMPANY still runs the width of the loft building at 1850 Industrial Street in painted letters.
A local estimate put the number of film and TV shoots here at 900 a year in 2012 and closer to 1,500 by 2019. The building at 544 Mateo Street has done more of that work than any other address, still lettered for its original tenant, Nat Starkman & Son. It played an apartment building in one production. In another, it played a Philadelphia bar front. For a third, it was set on fire.
Several of the district's oldest addresses sit along Traction Avenue and Hewitt Street. The sits on the corner. It became one of the first buildings here to house artists, in 1980. The warehouse at 837 Traction Avenue plays the exterior of the loft on New Girl.
The crosses the Los Angeles River at the district's east edge. Its 1932 predecessor appeared in Grease and Terminator 2 before it was demolished for seismic safety in 2016. The replacement opened in 2022.
