Aon Center
In 1973 nothing taller existed outside New York or Chicago — and a single fire here rewrote safety law for every high-rise in Los Angeles.
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Charles Luckman's 62-story bronze tower at 707 Wilshire was the tallest building west of the Mississippi at completion and held that title until 1982. A May 1988 fire on the 12th floor burned for four hours, killed one person, injured 40, and caused $400 million in damage — directly forcing LA to mandate sprinklers in all high-rises. The building's entire fire-code history is embedded in its walls.
What to look for
- The bronze cladding with white trim — and how improbably slender the rectangular tower looks for a seismic zone
- The red Aon Corporation logo mounted at the very top of the crown
- The building's profile against neighbors: U.S. Bank Tower (completed 1989) is what finally bumped it from tallest-in-LA
Street-level exterior at 707 Wilshire Boulevard, downtown Los Angeles; it is a working office tower with no public observation deck.
Aon Center is one of 33 sights worth the detour in Los Angeles, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Los Angeles pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Los Angeles
- Hollywood Walk of Fame2,850 names pressed into pink terrazzo underfoot — actors, inventors, fictional characters, all at six-foot intervals for 1.3 miles.
- Dolby TheatreThe red carpet runs up these stairs every awards season — where Hollywood officially crowns its year.
- SoFi StadiumA million-square-foot canopy embedded with 27,000 LED pucks bright enough to be seen from planes descending into LAX.
- Hollywood SignA 1923 real-estate billboard that refused to come down — and ended up owning the word "Hollywood" itself.
- U.S. Bank TowerLA sold the sky above a fire-gutted library to fund its own rebuilding — and got its second-tallest tower in the bargain.
- Rose BowlA century-old sunken oval where the 1994 World Cup Final was settled — and the 2028 Olympics will return to do it again.