Blowhard, Esq. writes:

Recently, I attended a walking tour offered by the Los Angeles Conservancy, a charitable organization tasked with “preserving and revitalizing greater Los Angeles’ architectural heritage.” (Don’t laugh.) These tours are offered every weekend of such places as the Victorian homes of Angelino Heights, Union Station, and the Biltmore Hotel. Noir fan that I am, I opted for the Art Deco tour.

We started in Pershing Square at 10am on a Sunday.

Designed by Ricardo Legorreta, the purple pylons are supposed to evoke mountains and water flowing to the orange spheres that are meant to represent L.A.’s citrus industry. Hey, crazy idea: why not just plant citrus trees instead of some goofy abstraction? It’s only been this way since the early 90s but, shock of shocks, the design has never been popular. A redesign is in the works.

For the sake of comparison, here’s what the area looked liked from the 20s until the early 50s.

No joke, they tore that out so they could build an underground parking garage. (Pausing so can shake your head or facepalm.) Apparently the park was a notorious spot for homosexual hook-ups. Hart Crane (who was himself gay, it should be noted) observed, “The number of faggots cruising around here is legion.”

But we’re here to talk about Art Deco, not anonymous gay sex. (I’ll save that for another post.) Although it had roots in pre-WWI Europe, the style gained prominence after a 1925 trade show in Paris dedicated to the applied arts. Camille Paglia notes that while the style catered to the elite in Europe, “[i]n the United States in the 1930s, Art Deco became a more populist style favored by businesses and public works commissions,” not to mention Hollywood “from Cedric Gibbons‘s chic set designs to Busby Berkeley’s kaleidoscopic dance routines.” Art Deco artists and architects drew from a number of styles, including Greek, Roman, Gothic, and Pre-Colombian art. King Tut’s tomb had been recently discovered in 1922, so there is a pronounced Egyptian influence.

Title Guarantee Building, Parkinson & Parkinson, 1929-1931

Designed by the father-son team of John B. and Donald D. Parkinson who are also responsible for Union Station, L.A. City Hall, the L.A. Coliseum, and the Bullock’s Wilshire Building. Creators of some of L.A.’s most beloved structures, they were skilled at many styles apart from Art Deco including Beaux Arts, Mission Revival, and Romanesque Revival. Pretty significant local figures, if you ask me, yet while researching this post I couldn’t find a single book or museum retrospective devoted to their work. Originally a commercial building, today the Title Guarantee is fancy lofts.

Click on the photos to enlarge.

The building is 240 feet high at the tower and is 111,113 square feet. While the flying buttresses are merely decorative, they add a nice Gothic touch. The building isn’t very tall, but the strong verticals and the tower draw the eye upward. Located on Hill and Fifth, this was one of the busiest corners of L.A. when the building opened in 1931. The structure is clad in a cream terra cotta tile manufactured in the nearby city of Glendale. Art Deco is known for its pleasing details. The bas relief is by Eugene Maier-Krieg, a Hollywood production artist who worked on the 1925 version of “Ben-Hur.” A leftover from the days when the ground floor was retail space. Filming notices are frequently seen on L.A. landmarks.



SCE Company Building, Allison & Allison, 1931

The headquarters of Southern California Edison, this was appropriately the first all-electric building in Los Angeles. The firm responsible for this building also designed UCLA’s Royce Hall.

The lower three stories are limestone while the upper stories are terra cotta. The bas relief by Merrell Gage depicts light, power, and hydroelectric energy. The solarium is obviously a later addition. Blech. That sculpture on the right most certainly is not original to the building. It dates from the early 1990s. This entrance is lovely. And this lobby is stunning. The black and white checkerboard floor is a common Art Deco motif. The mural, “The Apotheosis of Power,” is by Hugo Ballin. A Moorish star on the elevator doors.



Oviatt Building, Walker & Eisen, 1927-1928

A haberdasher, James Oviatt would take annual trips to Europe to stock his store that, at the time, was the most expensive men’s clothing store in Los Angeles. In 1925 he attended the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris and hired a number of designers to decorate his store.

The doors are genuine Lalique glass, brought from Paris. The wrought iron grill is not original. A mailbox near the elevators. This interior has been used for numerous movies including “Pretty Woman,” “Indecent Proposal,” and “J. Edgar.” Notice the de Lempika above the staircase.



Sun Realty Building, Claud Beelman, 1931

Beelman, like the Parkinsons, seems sorely in need of more recognition. This master’s thesis from USC looks interesting. One of his works, the Garfield Building, has been abandoned since 1991.

A couple of notes about the construction. These building are, for the most part, concrete covered in a very thin terra cotta skin that’s not even an inch thick. Furthermore, most are no taller than 150 feet as that was the maximum allowed for by the city’s building codes. If an architect wanted to exceed that height, the structures above 150 feet had to be unoccupied, e.g. house electrical or elevator equipment only. The city restricted building heights to prevent the “canyonization” effect from the construction of large skyscrapers one could see in Chicago and New York. They didn’t want to block the famous California sunshine.

Eastern Columbia Building, Claud Beelman, 1930

This building took nine months to erect. As the docent pointed out, nowadays, an environmental impact report will take you at least a year. The building originally housed two retail stores, Eastern and Columbia Outfitting, whose motto was, “You supply the bride, we’ll supply the house.”

The building’s main entrance. Even with a washed-out iPhone snap, it’s still spectacular.

By the end of WWII, Art Deco faded from popularity, giving way to Modernism and the International Style. Paglia writes:

After it became passe in the 1940s, gay male collectors kept Art Deco alive as “camp,” laying the groundwork for the style’s later revival and its current high value at auction. But Art Deco is still underrepresented in major museums and minimized or ignored by many art historians, partly because it does not support the ruling paradigm of art as leftist resistance. On the contrary, Art Deco was promptly adopted for political posters and public architecture by fascist regimes in Germany, Italy, and Russia.

Thus Art Deco remains, like Victorian Academic art, a style that is enormously popular with the public yet derided and dismissed by the critical establishment.

* * *

The tour was two and a half hours of walking, so we worked up an appetite. Luckily, we finished right next to UMAMIcatessen, the latest restaurant in the Umami Burger empire. How about some shredded pig ear and a cheese plate?

Finally, a trip to downtown L.A. ain’t complete without paying homage to Santa Muerte.