A Blue-Chip Landmark
In what has to be one of the classic cases of bad timing, 58 years ago this week, ground was broken at 618 S. Spring St. for the Los Angeles Stock Exchange. A few days later, on Oct. 29, 1929, the stock market crashed.
Nevertheless, construction on the classical Moderne-style exchange building continued, as did trading on the badly bruised market. The market, in time, obviously survived. (For the latest reports on this institution, turn to The Times’ Business section.)
As for the building, it was completed in 1931, a marvelous monumental granite structure, faced with four broad, fluted piers and richly sculpted panels. It was designed by Samuel Lunden, with an assist by the architecture office of John and Donald Parkinson.
While the stock market might have been still shaky, the building’s classically symmetrical stone facade and massive, ornate bronze doors exuded a solidity, reinforcing the image then of Spring Street between 4th and 7th streets as “the Wall Street of the West.”
The building was renamed the Pacific Stock Exchange, and operated as such until a few years ago when its trading was relocated to a nondescript office tower in the burgeoning financial-services district on the west side of downtown.
But the Spring Street building was not boarded up like a coffin and laid to rest. Instead, in one of the more imaginative adaptive rescues of an architectural and cultural landmark, the building was transformed last summer into a restaurant and nightclub appropriately named the Stock Exchange.
The building serves its new use well; the travertine marble grand staircase, the stained-glass windows, the ornate gold-leaf decorations, the richly detailed murals. The sumptuous lobby areas and the bronzed interior doors create a distinctive entry into the dramatic 40-foot-high, 70x93-foot-wide former Trading Floor room, which holds the nightclub and restaurant.
The creative rescue continues inside the room, where what had been four large, walnut-top trading booths have been converted into full-service bars, and the wood-sectioned stalls along the wall, where stockbrokers once caught their breath and made telephone calls, are now cozy booths. Overlooking the floor is a mezzanine, which serves as a restaurant as well as a fine vantage point from which to observe the action below.
While the exterior in all its Moderne glory is on display daily, the interior at present only opens five nights a week at 6, for light music and light suppers. At 9 p.m., the club opens, with a cover charge of $7 Wednesday and Thursday nights and $12 Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The club is closed Mondays and Tuesdays.
The management, being friendly and preservation minded, has been known to let persons and groups with an interest in architectural landmarks tour the building on occasion. For more information, please call the Stock Exchange at (213) 627-4400.
Another imaginative rescue of another landmark and financial institution at 514 S. Spring St., where the former Security National Bank building was converted a few years ago into the centerpiece of the Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre complex.
The bank was designed in 1916 by John Parkinson in an extravagant Classical Revival style, its exterior marked by massive, granite Ionic columns and the interior by a huge banking floor with a 50x100-foot stained-glass skylight.
The building is still graced by the columns and the banking floor, the latter now serving as the lobby of the four-theater complex, and is open to the public. The sympathetic reuse and expansion of the landmark was directed by the architectural firm of John Sergio Fisher & Associates.
A less ambitious recycling--but no less sensitive--was the conversion of the 1928 Title Insurance & Trust Co. Building at 433 S. Spring St. into the Los Angeles Design Center.
While the building is restricted “to the trade only,” one can go into the marble-encrusted lobby and view the stylized murals, doors and decorations. Whether labeled Art Deco or Zigzag Moderne, (a continuing debate among some pedants), the style is a delight.
There are a number of other architecturally distinctive buildings along the street, which not coincidentally a few years ago was declared a national historic district. They can be seen and explained on a tour of the district conducted the third Saturday of every month by the Los Angeles Conservancy. The tour is free to members and $5 to the public; it starts at 10 a.m. in front of the Olive Street entrance to the Biltmore Hotel.
In addition, the conservancy has published a brochure with map to the historic district, entitled “Palaces of Finance,” which is available for $2. To obtain the brochure or make a reservation for the tour, please contact the conservancy at (213) 623-CITY.
