In on the Ground Floor
Say goodbye to the ivory tower
Back in the '70s, TV's the Jeffersons celebrated "movin' on up" when they relocated from next door to Archie Bunker in Queens to "a deluxe apartment in the sky" over Manhattan. At the end of this week, CityBeat will celebrate our own change of scenery, although, elevation-wise, we'll be going in a different direction.
After three-plus years in a rented office on the 22nd floor of 5900 Wilshire Blvd. - still known as "the People's Bank building," although the signage has long outlasted the actual company - we're moving on up, indeed: to our very own historic building on the ground floor, the former Security Pacific Bank branch at 5209 Wilshire. (What is it about this publication and bank buildings, anyway?) As far as I know, the black-and-gold Art Deco jewel box was never destroyed in a movie - à la 5900 in Miracle Mile - but it has its own freaky Hollywood connection of sorts: Its façade is reproduced at Disney-MGM Studios in Orlando as part of a souvenir store.
I won't miss the endless minutes-adding-up-to-hours (days?) we've wasted waiting for the notoriously sluggish elevators. But I will miss the view - from my office I could see the Hollywood Hills and beyond, the Griffith Park Observatory, the endlessness of Park La Brea ... a whole chunk of the L.A. basin laid out like a postcard (except smoggier). We've witnessed a plane crash, brush fires, protest marches, jacaranda unfolding their purple canopy over the city, and all manner of lavish fetes in the County Museum courtyard across the street.
Yeah, we saw stuff - helicopters hovering like dragonflies above the 101, the Grove's Christmas tree looming absurdly high over rooftops - rarely observed by most Angelenos. Yet, as much as I loved the scope of our view, it always felt unnatural in this city of broad sprawl and little height. Skyscrapers are for New Yorkers. Vehicle-obsessed L.A. may not have the rubbing-shoulders-with-the-masses commuter street culture of NYC, but, ironically, most of us stay closer to the ground. In the largely windowless new CityBeat World Headquarters, if we want to see L.A., we'll have to go out into it - which is as it should be.
And now we get to look at something pretty on the inside. Wedged between a fast-food joint and a computer shop just east of La Brea, the 1929 gem is easy to pass by, but hard to miss. Inside is all zigzag silver and glass, outside black-and-gold terra cotta - a miniature version, explains local journalist/blogger Kevin Roderick, of prolific L.A. architect Stiles O. Clements's most renowned design: the downtown Atlantic Richfield headquarters, destroyed (!) in 1969. "The reason [5209 Wilshire] was deemed worthy of the National Register of Historic Places," says Roderick, author of Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles (with research by J. Eric Lynxwiler), "is that it's the last of Clements's black-and-golds." Roderick, the grand poobah of the media-watching Laobserved.com, gives me a glimpse into 5209's many former lives: a gold and silver business; a gallery selling Persian rugs and bronzes; and, in the early '80s, something called Cabaret Zephyr. I've also encountered newer references to it as the Alchemy Building - a totally cool appellation that perhaps alludes to its exterior color scheme: lead into gold, as it were.
"Why," asks Roderick, "did they put so much design into what was a small bank branch? In the '20s, that part of Wilshire was still so far out of the downtown shopping district that the builders felt the need to invest in nice architecture to attract customers. The neighborhood had tar pits, oil wells (where Park La Brea is), and two dirt airfields at Wilshire and Fairfax to contend with, so they had to do something to spiffy up the place." And they did, as attested by the array of interesting-looking buildings - many featured in his book - still dotting the boulevard.
This will be the third Miracle Mile office I've worked in during my nearly two decades in L.A. The first time, some 15-plus years ago, the area seemed to me nondescript, even boring. How could I have thought that? Granted, back then the MM was a shadow of its former self and not yet the unofficial media/entertainment row it's become. But a lot of it didn't, and doesn't, look much different than the vintage postcards I've been finding online. Sometimes perception really is all about perspective.
Now, each time I stroll down the street, I find myself pausing to contemplate some architecture I'd passed countless times without really seeing - things our sweeping, 22nd-floor vantage point never showed us. And I look forward to what CityBeat's new ground-floor position will reveal.
Published: 08/31/2006
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