There’s no question, says Off-Ramp commentator Marc Haefele, that developer Geoff Palmer hit the sweet spot with his apartment blocks. Long before downtown LA became hip, he started building the Italian-looking apartment buildings with the Italian-sounding names: the Orsini, the Piero, the Visconti, and the Medici. And he did it on land that wasn’t considered developable.
“For Palmer … the Italianate buildings also honor the city’s founders. “The Italians actually settled L.A. before the Spanish and Chinese,” he says. That may be a rather unusual reading of the area’s history, which typically maintains that Spanish settlers founded L.A. in 1781, but Palmer has long demonstrated a tendency to go his own way.”