Quote:
Originally Posted by odinthor
Beaudry, do you happen to know the circumstances of the Conservative Life Building being demolished? Perhaps it had had fire damage? I don't seem to be able to track down information about its latter days. It seems like too fine a building to just be razed for a parking lot for no particular reason.
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That's an excellent question. I mean, yes, Los Angeles is famous for tearing down first-rate structures for parking lots, but I think of such activity as more postwar, particularly late 1950s and into the 60s, à la the 1963 demolition of the
Stimson Block (which has remained a parking lot for 50 years).
In fact, I look to be wrong about my 1948 date; 1948 is when Walt's Auto Parks took out a permit to build their parking attendant shed. The actual demo permit to demolish Conservative Life was issued in 1940 and again in 1941, so, demolished probably closer to late 41 (building still appears in the August 1941 aerial):
There's no indication of fire in the Building and Safety dox previous to that time, and I can't find any mention of anything untoward happening to the structure in the newspapers, using every available address on Third and Hill.
I guess Whiting-Mead, who owned the structure, crunched the numbers and even in 1940 it made more sense to provide pay-parking on a surface lot than maintain the building, despite it being only forty years old. And now, the northeast corner of Third and Hill has been a surface lot for twice that long, eighty years...