Bradbury’s Architectural Gem

His name may be better known by many for Bradbury, the hillside town of wealth and horseflesh against the San Gabriel Mountains, but mining tycoon Lewis Leonard Bradbury made his biggest mark on Southern California with his magnificent architectural gem--the Bradbury Building.

His “fairy tale of mathematics” had its genesis in the spiritual and its reality in commercial real estate. But as a backdrop to some of the most famous films noir, it seems assured of immortality as downtown Los Angeles’ most intriguing landmark.

Bradbury, son of a wealthy family from Bangor, Maine, came west in the 1850s, settling in Oregon before striking it rich in the Mazatlan gold mines. At 45 he married Simona Martinez, the daughter of a prominent Mexican family who was 20 years his junior. With a fortune in his pocket and six children in tow, the couple landed in Oakland.

But Bradbury’s chronic asthma attacks drove them to the warmer climate of Los Angeles, where he bought a 2,750-acre ranch, the core of a town that would eventually be named Bradbury. The family’s city home was a 50-room Victorian showplace on Bunker Hill, near the present-day Los Angeles County Courthouse.

Hal Roach would later use the mansion as the headquarters for his film company and make two comedies, “Just Nuts” (1915) and “Haunted Spooks” (1920) starring Harold Lloyd.

It was here on Bunker Hill in 1891, looking down on the streets below, that Bradbury fancied having a unique office building within walking distance of his home that would still be considered modern in a hundred years.

The man Bradbury commissioned to tackle the project was Summer P. Hunt, a leading Southland architect. But Bradbury was uninspired by Hunt’s design and promptly offered the job to a young, $5-a-week draftsman in the architect’s office.

George Herbert Wyman, who like Frank Lloyd Wright had no academic training as an architect, at first turned down the offer, judging it unethical to accept. But while using a Ouija board with his wife, he received a message purportedly from his dead brother, Mark: “Take the Bradbury assignment. It will make you famous.”

With that assist from the occult, Wyman used a radical new concept after reading “Looking Backward” by Edward Bellamy, a cult classic that imagined a 21st century world of cooperative housing and work spaces organized around crystal courts. That inspiration became the focal point of the building’s breathtaking interior courtyard, which is bathed with sunlight that filters through a massive glass roof.

The ambitious and ornate five-story masterpiece boasted Italian marble, Mexican floor tiles, delicate water-powered bird cage elevators from Chicago, 288 radiators, 50 fireplaces, 215 washbasins and the largest plate-glass windows in Los Angeles.

But construction was not without its problems. Excavation uncovered a spring that threatened to undermine the foundation and raise costs substantially. Instead of capping the spring, steel reinforcements were installed to overcome the hazard, and the water was used to run the elevators and supply tenants with steam heat.

The open-cage elevators were ingenious. When water was pumped into a suspended cylinder, the elevator descended. When water was released, the elevator ascended with the aid of cast-iron counterweights. Decades later, the system would be upgraded and operated by means of a hydraulic jack and electric pump.

The delicate foliate grillwork was made in France and first displayed at Chicago’s World’s Fair before being installed in the building.

Bradbury never saw his building completed. He died unexpectedly in Oakland more than a year before it opened in January 1894 at a cost of $500,000, more than twice as much as expected.

Among its first tenants was the law firm of Bradbury’s attorneys, John Bicknell and Walter Trask, founding partners of what eventually would become Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Bicknell oversaw the complicated construction of the building as an obligation of friendship, and accepted no fee.

Members of the posh California Club signed a lease for the fifth floor when Bradbury was alive, but his widow, fearing the members were too rowdy, canceled the lease.

Today, the Bradbury Building, home to the Los Angeles Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division, is no stranger to law enforcement. L.A. cop Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, searched there for 21st century “replicants” in the 1982 movie “Blade Runner.” And Jake Axminister, the 1930s Los Angeles gumshoe played by Wayne Rogers, kept an office there in the 1976 TV series “City of Angels.”

After the Bradbury Building, Wyman designed nothing else of significance. The Bradbury was his ticket to fame.