Quote:
Originally Posted by ethereal_reality
The Garment Capitol Building explosion October 1930.
found on ebay this afternoon.
ebay |
I saw the picture above on eBay earlier, and before I got too far with my research, I found that
e_r had beaten me to it by over a year!
The original post also includes the back of the photo and a link to a short video showing the aftermath. The store in the center is (was) Caro & Upright, a wholesale drapery business at 219 E 8th Street.
Here's an interior view of the fifth floor showing the damage where the explosion occurred. The caption for this photo suggests some kind of bomb plot, so I decided to look for more information.
eBay
The clipping below is from the Department of City Planning's 2008 recommendation that the Garment Capitol Building should get Historic Cultural Monument status. Click the link below the clipping to see the full 36 page document - it says the 12-story Gothic Revival building was designed by William Douglas Lee and completed in 1926. William Douglas Lee also designed the El Royale Apartments (see
post #6084). Despite some union unrest a few months earlier, the explosion was actually the result of a spark from a burglar alarm igniting a gas leak.
cityplanning.lacity.org (PDF file)
According to
Wikipedia, the Garment Capitol Building was added to the List of Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monuments on July 29, 2008, and to the
National Register of Historic Places on March 8, 2010. I was going to say "here's the Garment Capitol Building today", but all the recent GSV images show it shrouded in scaffolding, so this one is from April 2014.
GSV