Los Angeles is the American city that wasn’t supposed to have a downtown. A metropolis built on sprawl, freeways, and the rejection of urban density. For decades after World War II, downtown LA became a place Angelenos avoided—abandoned to homelessness, vacancy, and the perception of danger while life happened in the Westside, the beach communities, the endless suburbs.

But 1987 marked a turning point. Corporate towers were rising. MOCA had opened four years earlier. The historic theaters on Broadway were beginning their slow rehabilitation. Young artists were converting old commercial buildings into lofts. The Blue Line light rail was under construction. Downtown Los Angeles was becoming a place again.

Masumi’s nearly seven-foot-wide panorama captures this moment of becoming. The high-rises and historic buildings, the street-level activity and the density that was just beginning to feel intentional rather than accidental. Her photo collage technique fragments and reassembles the urban landscape, creating a view that feels both documentary and interpretive—the city as it appeared, but also the city as it was being imagined.

The work is huge—83 inches across—because downtown Los Angeles, for all the jokes about “no there there,” is actually dense in ways that defy the city’s horizontal reputation. The compression of Masumi’s panorama captures something true: that downtown, seen from certain angles, could rival any American city for verticality and urban intensity. It just took decades for Los Angeles to notice.