A privately-owned office building next to Lafayette Park which has long housed served as a courthouse is set for a transformation into apartments, according to plans now being reviewed by the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety.

Jamison Services, Inc., which owns the Superior Court Tower at 600 S. Commonwealth Avenue, is seeking approvals for an adaptive reuse of the early 1970s office tower, which stands 19 stories atop a 200-car garage. The proposed project would transform the interior of the nearly 350,000-square-foot building into 428 live/work apartments, with some parking converted into storage space and tenant amenities.

View of 600 S. Commonwealth Avenue from 6th Street looking southwestGoogle Street View

According to Building and Safety permit filings, the valuation of the project is $50 million.

The project is a familiar strategy for Jamison Services, which has long been the largest office landlord in the Koreatown neighborhood, and has pivoted in recent years toward converting many of its buildings into housing. The developer is already in the process of converting the 19-story office tower at 695 S. Vermont Avenue into apartments, and has also looked outside of Koreatown and Westlake toward adaptive reuse projects in Downtown and Mid-Wilshire.

The L.A. Superior Court Tower, originally built as the headquarters of CNA Financial Corporation, occupies a prominent site at the corner of 6th Street and Commonwealth Avenue, and was designed by Langdon and Wilson.

600 S. Commonwealth AvenueGoogle Maps

"The tower is set diagonally on its site on the corner of Commonwealth and Sixth Street, opening the area up for pedestrians," reads a description from the L.A. Conservancy website. "The organic, wave-like buttresses that support it flow down into a granite-paneled plaza, becoming part of a thoughtful landscape designed by Emmet L. Wemple and Associates."

The tower is the latest change for the blocks surrounding Lafayette Park in the past decade, which has seen commercial buildings to the south along Wilshire felled for the 25-story Kurve apartment tower and the Next on Sixth complex, which features a Target on the ground floor.

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