Downtown Los Angeles · Historic Core

Spring Street, one cup at a time

In the early 2010s, a stretch of Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles — the old “Wall Street of the West” — became one of the city’s most talked-about places for coffee. This site is an independent, sourced guide to that moment: the café that once used this domain, the multi-roaster idea it was part of, and the historic streets around it.

The domain coffeebarla.com was once the website of CoffeeBar, a specialty café at 600 S. Spring St. It is now a new, independent project with no connection to CoffeeBar, its owners or the domain’s previous owner. Nothing here is for sale or bookable; every fact links to its source.

What you’ll find here

Why downtown, why then

Specialty coffee’s “third wave” — the term is generally credited to Trish Rothgeb in 2003 — put the emphasis on single-origin sourcing and lighter roasts that show off each coffee’s flavour. By 2011, Los Angeles had a growing set of cafés built around that idea, and downtown’s Historic Core was being refilled with lofts after decades of decline.

LA Weekly’s March 2011 list of “10 places to get a damn good cup of coffee” included two cafés on the same block of Spring Street: Spring for Coffee at 548 S. Spring, a tiny shop of about 200 square feet pouring Stumptown and Ritual, and CoffeeBar at 600 S. Spring, a roughly 2,000-square-foot room serving several roasters “on tap”. A year and a half later, Food Republic’s survey of LA’s multi-roaster coffeehouses featured both again.

The street itself

The Spring Street Financial District, roughly 4th to 7th streets, was the financial centre of Los Angeles in the first half of the 20th century and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. Its bank and office buildings — many by architect John Parkinson, several in Zig-Zag Moderne — are the backdrop to every café on this site. The 600 S. Spring address itself is listed on Wikipedia as a 1961 United California Bank building by Claud Beelman & Associates.

Reading this guide

• Café details reflect the dates of the articles cited. Shops change hands, menus and status; this guide does not claim any of them is open today.
• Where sources disagree — for example on which espresso machine CoffeeBar used — both versions are shown with their dates.
• No ads, no affiliate links, no tracking.