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https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-9...7nobord175.jpg

When I looked into ER's thought that the Knights of Columbus/KECA buiding on Highland might have once been a fire station, I came across this 1926 shot of Engine Co. 17, which still stands at 710 South Santa Fe Ave, right across, as it turns out, from the side of the old Ford Motor Co plant (see this old post).

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-M...2520AM.bmp.jpgGoogleSV

What intrigued me more than the fire station was the Heinz building next door, which also still stands (and was obviously built before the fire station, since it had lettering on its north side). The lettering on the facades--the two lower parts of the front, at least--appears to have been etched into the brickwork. You can see "shadows" of this signage in current views. The letters have been filled in, presumably when the seismic rods and plates were installed.

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-1...2520AM.bmp.jpgGoogleSV

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-5...2520PM.bmp.jpg Bing

:previous: Great posts GW.

Thanks for the information on the old KECA studios. I like that you noticed that little building down the street.
To me it has the same look and feel of the buildings up in the Sunset Plaza/Boulevard area. I wonder who the architect was.

I really like that old HEINZ building as well. Interesting detail about the 'filled' in letters.
I mean, come on..the lettering was actually carved INTO the building...that was their first clue to leave it alone. -They didn't.
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GaylordWilshire, this looks like your type of place.

http://imageshack.us/a/img4/5048/aaf...sadenahuge.jpg
http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/search...chs-m6096.html

I wasn't even aware of this place until I came across this photograph.
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:previous:

http://img22.imageshack.us/img22/145...lacead1903.jpg[/IMG] Pasadena Star, 1903

I guess I do have a thing for old gated streets... There's not a lot of info on Ford Place; it seems to have been developed soon after the turn of the 20th century; streets were renamed, and later it basically became the campus of the Fuller Theological Seminary. Herkimer Street on this map is now Union; the roadways of Ford Place itself have been altered and renamed as seen in the map below. Quite a few of the development's original houses appear to survive as part of Fuller.

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-e...altfuller3.jpg Fuller Theological Seminary

I remember that the E-W remnant of Ford Place ran you into Fuller Seminary...a place I avoided like it was filled with consumptives. I may have cut through there on my bike. I lived a few blocks due south from there.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ethereal_reality (Post 5882009)

I thought this was an excerpt from a Raymond Chandler novel. It isn't.....is it?
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My dad was a great admirer of Raymond Chandler and modeled his (unpublished) detective novel in a Chandleresque style. My freight hopping experiments were in the late 60's and quite real. I was trying to recall whether I was packing heat at the time. I don't think I wanted to risk losing one of my more valuable pieces so I think I was just carrying my old .22 zip gun as a throw-away. I was certainly carrying a switchblade. A freight train can be a dangerous place.

:previous: Is your father's unpublished detective novel set in Los Angeles?
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Hello All,

I happened upon this site and forum just a few days ago and am enthralled. I live in West Los Angeles and have been here, since 1980 (college) and "full time" since 1985. I love the Then and Now photos- trying to locate amazing architecture that has survived, in various forms, and eluded the wrecking ball.

Here are a couple that I tripped across.. those of the Dicksborough Apts located on Beverly Blvd, on the corner of N. Berendo. The first image is from 1929:

http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/assets...T-BUI-085?v=hr
http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/search...ner-m2655.html

http://i1355.photobucket.com/albums/...cksborough.jpg
https://maps.google.com/maps?oe=utf-...ed=0CCAQ8gEwAA

Anyone have an overview map of the DOWNTOWN area with the streetcar lines? Like, it shows the streets, and the rails for the streetcars.

Quote:

Originally Posted by GaylordWilshire (Post 5882211)

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-9...7nobord175.jpg

A shot looking at the Heinz building and Fire station. I read that the Heinz building has been leased for use as a restaurant space. It is interesting to note how the roof lines of both buildings have been truncated. The fire house had what looks to be 2 interesting cornice pieces (gone) and the top portion of the Heinz building, where the name HEINZ was located, was also sheered off, at the common roof line, for some reason. Truly a shame.

http://www.loopnet.com/xnet/mainsite...Original=False

http://www.loopnet.com/Listing/17298...os-Angeles-CA/

Quote:

Originally Posted by spitfire80 (Post 5882455)

Welcome to the thread spitfire80! Very interesting before and after. :)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.A._Noir

A new TV series to tickle our taste buds????

Made by Frank Darabont of Shawshank and Walking Dead fame

Based on John Buntins great book

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/...500_AA300_.jpg

Sign me up!!!

Quote:

Originally Posted by ethereal_reality (Post 5882405)

:previous: Is your father's unpublished detective novel set in Los Angeles?
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Where else, but LA. I remember it started with the hero driving down Riverside Drive (I think around Burbank) and wondering when he had picked up a bullet hole in his wind wing. I don't know if any copies survived. I last saw it in the mid-60s. I think I was looking at an unbound proof on carbon paper. He probably wrote it in the mid-50s. His only published novel (an historical intrigue) came out after that.

Alexandria Hotel sealed wing update in today's LA Times:

http://www.latimes.com/business/real...,5899510.story

http://www.trbimg.com/img-508c7e7e/t...g-20121027/600
Jay L. Clendenin, Los Angeles Times / September 13, 2012

Quote:

By Roger Vincent, Los Angeles Times

October 27, 2012, 6:23 p.m.

Real estate developer Nick Hadim made a risky climb through an upstairs window of an abandoned building to see what he and his investors had gotten themselves into.

Downtown's Alexandria Hotel had long been rumored to be haunted. But instead of ghosts, he found a time capsule.

There, in a sealed-off wing of the otherwise bustling complex, he encountered a dusty suite deserted in some haste in the 1930s. A crumbling bowler hat lay next to a torn armchair. An antique typewriter sat ready for use on the side of a wooden desk. In the bathroom was a cast-iron claw-foot tub last filled with water during the Great Depression.

"It's freaky," said Hadim, a Culver City entrepreneur with experience renovating old downtown buildings. Hadim plans to spend $3 million turning the Alexandria's abandoned wing into small apartments, which he hopes to rent at premium rates in what he will call the Chelsea Building.

What his investors bought were century-old deluxe hotel rooms once part of the Alexandria, a stalwart presence at 5th and Spring streets since the early 1900s, now a low-priced apartment complex. Hadim's group purchased just a small slice of the old hotel building, a wing that was sealed shut on all seven floors in a fit of pique in 1938 and has been seen by few eyes since then, except those of wandering birds and the occasional vandal.

What most of the 35 rooms hold is a mystery, because the corridors lack an entrance other than the hallways of the Alexandria — which have been walled off for nearly 75 years.

The lowest of the building's six hotel room floors can be accessed from an adjacent roof and has been stripped by scavengers. Still, its tall, wide windows, high ceilings and dark wood floors retain their grandeur even as pigeons flit in and out of the broken windows.

The abandoned rooms were part of what was widely considered the city's premier inn of the early 20th century, according to Los Angeles Times archives. Young aristocrat Winston Churchill stayed at the showplace, as did opera star Enrico Caruso and Presidents Taft, Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt.

But the city moved on. The 500-room Alexandria was eclipsed in status by the elegant Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel in 1923.

The wing became unreachable because the hotel's owner sealed the halls leading to it with bricks and mortar as a punishment, said Lee Roddie, daughter of the wing's builder. Roddie explained her family's tale of woe to The Times in 1967, when the elderly woman was still paying property taxes on her mostly inaccessible building.

As the Alexandria was being built in 1905, Roddie's father, William Chick, tore down his livery stable next door at 218 W. 5th St. and went into business with the hotel's developers. Chick constructed an addition to the hotel on his property that was a seamless extension of the Alexandria, fully accessible from the hotel's corridors.

Stairs or an elevator were an unnecessary expense, he reasoned, and would have eliminated some money-making guest rooms.

"Father made a terrible mistake," Roddie said, looking back on that decision.

The hammer fell in the Depression. Hard times forced the Alexandria to close in 1934. Three years later, movie producer Phil Goldstone bought the hotel and reopened it in 1938, to the delight of Roddie, who was by then sole owner of the wing. But their relationship quickly soured.

"One of the tenants in the main part of the hotel moved into one of the two stores on the bottom floor of my wing because Mr. Goldstone raised his rent," Roddie told The Times.

"It made Mr. Goldstone mad. He said he didn't need my wing. He sealed off the corridors to my rooms on each floor, making access impossible. It's been that way ever since."

Tall tales used to circulate about the "haunted hotel," she said. One of the most common was that the owner's husband was killed on the Titanic and the widow kept it closed in his memory.

"My husband died of flu during World War I," Roddie said.

Roddie and subsequent owners were able to rent out only the building's ground-floor retail space, which has a narrow concrete stairway in back leading to a sealed-off portion of the Alexandria's former mezzanine. Now used for storage, the once-grand mezzanine still has elaborate, gilded crown molding and rounded windows adorned with advertising in gold leaf.

A tall wooden ladder leads to a hatch in the roof. From there, the lowest level of the building's long-lost hotel can be entered through one room's window.

A short hallway bisects the floor, and the transom windows of some rooms remain open, as they would have been in the days before air conditioning. The decayed wallpaper looks like peeling paint. The hardwood floors are speckled with pigeon guano but remain firm and may be restored with simple sanding, Hadim said.

Outside on 5th Street, Hadim will wash the grimy brick walls and scrub the twin griffins guarding the Beaux Arts-style building. For many decades each griffin held in its mouth a chain with an illuminated globe, a detail Hadim may bring back.

In the decades after World War II, the Alexandria's prime neighborhood at 5th and Spring gradually fell into decline. So did the hotel. In 1988, city officials called the Alexandria the worst drug-trafficking spot in Los Angeles.

Now the city's historic downtown-turned-skid row is reviving, with new restaurants, bars, shops and thousands of affluent residents living in converted office and industrial buildings. The Alexandria Hotel-turned-apartment complex, which has separate owners not part of the Hadim group, has also come up in the world.

Hadim figures that by eliminating the utility closets on each floor and a total of seven guest rooms, he can create enough space for an elevator and stairs. He'll work from the original plans by John Parkinson, a famed Los Angeles architect whose later projects included City Hall and Union Station.

Hadim hopes to start work on the Chelsea by January and finish in the winter of 2013. He plans to rent the street retail spaces to a cafe and perhaps a clothing boutique. The building's deep two-story basement might be turned into a nightclub or lounge.

Across 5th Street, another developer recently finished converting the 1923 vintage Chester Williams Building from offices into apartments. A Walgreens drugstore will rent the ground floor of the 12-story building. The first Starbucks in the historic district recently opened about a block away.

"A lot is happening," Hadim said. "In five years, it's going to feel like Manhattan around here."

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lwize (Post 5882647)

Bummer...can't read the story since I exceeded my limits of viewing the LA Times.:hell:

"Become a member to keep on reading.
You reached your limit of free articles over the last 30 days."

Thanks for including the article!!!!

That article on the Alexandria 'wing' is sooo interesting. Thx for posting it Lwize.

Just a reminder of the opulence of the mighty Alexandria (amid all that grandeur is a porcelain spittoon).

http://imageshack.us/a/img593/1230/aabalex.jpg
http://www.homerlea.org/photoarchives5.htm

above: I'd like to see the light at the end of that chain at far right (obviously it's down in the lobby). Lobby pic anyone?

The magnificent stained glass in Palm Court (still in place in the old Alexandria ballroom)

http://imageshack.us/a/img820/5382/aabalexpalmcourt.jpg
http://bigorangelandmarks.blogspot.c...ria-hotel.html
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:previous: Great post KevinW.
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A little blurb about the Wich Stand we discussed a few weeks ago. It cost $192,000!!?!
The Broom Room was much larger than I expected (seating for 58).

http://imageshack.us/a/img577/8301/a...standblurb.jpg
latimesblog

Here's a link to Silverlaker's excellent post (complete with photos)
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...97#post5867397
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Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeff Clark (Post 5882393)

Zip gun? Switchblade? Damn, you were bad to the bone. Was that standard baggage for a young man from Pasadena in that period? Probably not. I'd be fascinated to hear more about hopping freights from the LA freight yards. I always had daydreams about riding the rails, but I chickened out on my one attempt to hop a freight back in the late 1950's.

Found on ebay. Wilshire Boulevard winding through Westlake (MacArthur) Park.

http://imageshack.us/a/img203/295/ebayviewwestlake.jpg

There are quite a few noteworthy buildings in this panoramic scene...from the art deco tower of Bullocks Wilshire at far left to the magnificent
Elks Club Building at far right.

http://imageshack.us/a/img26/1807/aa...lkslodge99.jpg
postcard/ebay

Built in 1925 by the Elks to be used as lodge number 99. The building, in Neo-Gothic style, was created by renowned
architect Claud Beelman. The pool area hosted many indoor swimming events during the 1932 Olympics.

Today, the building survives as the Park Plaza Hotel.

http://imageshack.us/a/img802/6587/aabmacarthur.jpg
google street view
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