For more than six decades, Los Angeles’...

For more than six decades, Los Angeles’ Byzantine-style, 27-story City Hall has dominated the Civic Center’s skyline, a stolid industrial mass of concrete and glass towering over a collection of squat government buildings.

But before City Hall, the 13-square-block hub of political power was a vastly different landscape, graced by a collection of unique and whimsical buildings, most of which have disappeared. The focus of the civic center then was the old County Courthouse--a red sandstone structure that rose four stories plus a tower on Pound Cake Hill at the southwest corner of Temple and Spring streets.

The courthouse, which opened Aug. 10, 1891, was built at a cost of $500,000. Amid the squat rows of buildings in the civic center, it stood like a fairy tale fortress.

With its Romanesque architecture, lavish interior, wide corridors and expansive staircase, the courthouse became the hallmark of the civic center. From the center of the building rose a tower with an 11-foot-high clock. The courthouse, the third built by the county, became a theater of controversy and scandal during the 1920s:

* On Jan. 21, 1921, the courtroom was packed for the trial of an alluring brown-eyed woman named Louise Peete, who was charged with murdering her boyfriend. Men were fatally attracted to her--four of her husbands, apparently despondent over her rejection of their love, committed suicide. Peete was convicted of murder, but killed again after she was paroled years later. Her victim this time was a woman who had believed in her innocence and supported her in prison. Peete was executed in the gas chamber in 1947.

* People flocked to the courthouse in 1922 to witness the trial of Clara Phillips, the famed Tiger Woman who hammered her unfaithful husband’s lover to death on a hilltop near Avenue 37. Phillips was convicted of murder but escaped from jail. Months later, she was captured. She was paroled in 1935.

* One of the fastest murder trials of the 1920s was that of four men who killed a grocer in Bell over a dime. One of the men gave the dime to his girlfriend, who informed the police. Within 60 days of the murder, two of the men had been sentenced to be hanged and two were given life imprisonment.

The courthouse, dubbed the Honeymoon Tower because couples ascended to its marriage license office, was condemned after the 1933 Long Beach earthquake. Before the building was demolished three years later, blocks of the distinctive red sandstone were sold to sentimental collectors for $2 a yard. One year after the courthouse came tumbling down, Pound Cake Hill was officially renamed Plaza de la Justicia.

Next door to the old courthouse, standing 12 stories tall, was the Hall of Records. This unique building, topped by pyramidal gables, was built in 1911 at a cost of $1.3 million.

The Hall of Records became the fourth County Courthouse after its predecessor was condemned. It survived until 1973, when it was demolished and replaced with a parking lot. Today’s courthouse, the county’s fifth, was built in 1958 at 1st and Hill streets. The Hall of Records’ neighbor to the south, the California State Building, built in 1932, housed all the state government offices. It occupied a prime piece of property on 1st Street between Broadway and Spring Street until it was severely damaged in the 1971 Sylmar earthquake. After its demolition, the building’s foundation was turned into a park-like plaza. Over the years, it has served as a gathering place for people eating lunch, a bus ticket center for the 1984 Olympic Games, a hangout for homeless people and a protest site for religious and other groups. Today, the site is closed off by a chain-link fence and filled with six-foot-high weeds. Plans to build a $125-million, 21-story office tower on the 4.6-acre site have been collecting dust since 1987.

The Federal Building and the downtown post office stood at Temple and Main streets. In 1940, the current U.S. courthouse was added to the block. The civic center’s hub of financial wheeling and dealing was the International Savings & Exchange Bank on Temple Street. The building, constructed in 1904, was owned and operated by “Big John” Lopizich, a pharmacist turned banker.

Lopizich, an Austrian who spoke eight languages, carved his niche in the banking world by catering to French, German, Russian and Italian immigrants.

Lopizich sold the bank and building in 1917 to banker Amadeo Peter Giannini. Giannini changed the business’s name to the Bank of Italy, which moved across the street, becoming the Bank of America in 1930.

In 1926, the city’s Health Department moved into the building and stayed until it was razed in 1955.