Once, it stood as an armed fortress...

Once, it stood as an armed fortress protecting the City of the Angels.

Before Parker Center, it was the home of the city’s Police Department, where a relative handful of officers watched over the fledgling city for 60 of its most turbulent years.

The Central Police Station, the department’s fourth headquarters, was built in 1896 on the south side of 1st Street between Broadway and Hill at a cost of $50,000. By 1955, 27 police chiefs and many police horses had called it home.

It was a very busy home: For most of the first half of this century, Los Angeles was a corrupt, vice-ridden town. By 1937, there were 1,800 bookmakers, 600 whorehouses and 200 gambling dens.

The station housed a crime lab, jail and court, as well as press, film, assembly and sleeping rooms. The film room--the most popular among the police and press--was always crowded when pornographic films supposedly being held as evidence were screened. Another noted feature were the bullet holes in the ceiling, the results of misfired weapons.

Norman Jacoby, the retired dean of the city’s police press corps, recalled recently that the press room was also home to several loose floorboards under which reporters hid their booze bottles during Prohibition--and maybe thereafter. It was a convenient way station for the newsmen, who raised the floorboards and invited their police friends to take a nip.

The building’s busiest entrance was on Hill Street--probably because it was also the entrance to the Central Receiving Hospital next door.

L.A.’s first policewoman, Alice Stebbins Wells, worked out of the 1st Street building. A self-taught Pentecostal minister from the Midwest, she was one of the nation’s pioneering female officers when she was sworn in in 1910. She had lobbied successfully for passage of the ordinance that created her position on the force, but she still was never permitted to carry a gun.

Her anecdotes about police work made her a popular speaker nationwide. When she was giving a speech in New Orleans, a man begged her to arrest him. “I want to be arrested by a lady,” he explained. She told him that he was outside her jurisdiction.

The building’s basement was where the LAPD stabled its police horses. The mounts bore such mundane names as Grover, Billy, Ted, Barney, Fox and Baldy, and they helped patrol what in those days were considered crime-plagued streets.

The horses were well-known on their downtown beats and often begged at restaurants, conning proprietors and patrons out of sugar and carrots. Newspaper accounts reported that Ted not only got handouts, but he once ate a traffic ticket out of the hand that fed him.

A year after the station was officially dedicated, and Billy and Grover had finally adjusted to their new corrals in the basement, they were put out to pasture in Griffith Park, where they pulled grass sprinklers about.

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Officer Clifford Thomas, in a long-ago interview, said he rode Baldy off into the sunset in July, 1926, when the LAPD’s downtown mounted unit, which had grown to 22 horses, was disbanded under unusual circumstances.

City officials explained that funds were short and that horse feed cost too much. But Thomas never believed that story and said years later: “It was a dirty damned trick that never did come out. There was a guy on the Police Commission who had a business downtown. Every morning he kept making a left turn into a one-way alley to get to his store. Nobody gave him a ticket because he was a police commissioner.” When a Sgt. C.C. Kagley heard about it, he gave the commissioner a ticket, and the commissioner supposedly retorted: “ ‘I’ll put every one of you back on foot.’ Well, a few days later, we were,” Thomas said.

Occasional scandals occurred at the station, including the “Bloody Christmas” beating of seven Mexican prisoners in 1951, which led to the indictment and conviction of eight officers.

In 1955, after nearly six decades of service, the LAPD moved its headquarters from the 1st Street station to the new $7-million administration building on Los Angeles Street, which was later renamed Parker Center.

The old station was torn down two years later, making room for the State Building.

And over at Parker Center, the floorboards are all nailed down.