Flames Spell an End to Last Word in Art Deco

The Pan Pacific Auditorium had flirted with death for years--death from fire, death from neglect, death from bureaucratic indifference.

It was not always so.

From the day it opened on May 18, 1935, and for more than 35 years thereafter, the Pan was one of the biggest gathering places in Los Angeles, and the last word in Art Deco. Its western facade, 228 feet long with four upswept fin-shaped towers, was a magnificent piece of Streamline Moderne that epitomized a 1930s America enamored of flight, speed and dynamism.

Before the Music Center, the Sports Arena and the Convention Center ever existed, it was the Pan that embraced in its cavernous hall the home and auto shows, the ice hockey games, the Ice Capades and political rallies. The 28-acre park included a theater, a bowling alley and an ice rink, the latter of which prompted a neighbor to sue for damages from the constant rumbling.

From Stokowski to Elvis

In 1936, Leopold Stokowski conducted in its all-wood auditorium. Twenty-one years later, Elvis Presley played the Pan just before he entered the Army, and police reportedly warned him to keep his act clean.

In 1947, a dozen years after it was built at a cost of $125,000 to host a Depression-era national housing show, the Pan’s stockholders--among them Gen. James Doolittle, orchestra leader Kay Kyser and actors Walter Pidgeon, Dick Powell and Joan Blondell--sold it for $2.25 million to auto magnate E. L. Cord, whose magnificent cars matched the Pan’s sleek facade for aerodynamic chic.

Ten thousand people showed up in 1945 for the broadcast of the radio program “Queen for a Day”; only 6,000 could be seated. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke to more than 20,000 people at the Pan, a month before the 1952 election that made him President.

For Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who saw the fire from his home four blocks away, the blaze swept up pleasant memories. “I saw my first basketball game here, the Harlem Globetrotters, my first indoor tennis match, my first ice skating contest.

“There are probably several hundred thousand people in Los Angeles County who grew up with this as the main indoor arena.”

By 1972, a year after the Los Angeles Convention Center opened, the Pan was closed, left behind as an outmoded shell. Behind the glorious facade was a less-distinctive and less-than-salable 100,000 square feet of space.

On Historic Register

By 1978, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which did not seem to impress the vandals and drifters who hacked at it, painted it, set it on fire once or twice. Around Los Angeles, around the country, the Pan was more talked about than tended. Architectural historians lauded it, and managed to hold off the wrecking ball, but in the end, the Pan was a place many people talked about but few really did anything about it.

Endless proposals came and went. The Pan seemed perpetually on the brink of being torn down, or perhaps just falling apart on its own. In 1981, its operating owner, Los Angeles County, solicited proposals for the space. The one they embraced would have made it a cultural and commercial center with theaters, a hotel, boutiques, and restaurants--including a kosher kitchen.

As late as last November, the Board of Supervisors was still trying to revive it, voting this time to negotiate with a developer to put in an ice rink, and theater.

Robert Winter, co-author with David Gebhard of “Architecture in Los Angeles,” which praised it as “probably the city’s most photographed and painted monument,” was in his office at Occidental College in Eagle Rock when he saw the faraway smoke.

“What a disaster,” he mourned when he learned the source. The Pan, he said, was “incomparable. . . . Nobody took it seriously because it was just a plaster facade, but it spoke of the ‘30s like nothing else I know.”