Retired Police Station No. 11 Found a New Career

It looks like the kind of police station that Hollywood would design for a period-piece cop series, but it’s a real police station with a real pokey, a place where some big cases came down, and where a future Los Angeles police chief once cooled his heels as a juvenile delinquent.

And now Police Station No. 11, the 77-year-old, two-story brick Renaissance Revival station in Highland Park, has converted its cells and squad room into a museum, with relics and objects that show how the Los Angeles Police Department evolved from a six-man force in 1869 to its modern-day incarnation of nearly 10,000 officers.

“It’s the last of the old city police buildings,” says retired 30-year veteran Sgt. Det. Richard Kalk, founder and director of community affairs of the Los Angeles Police Historical Society, which oversees the museum and Community Education Center. “To the best of my knowledge, all the other old stations have been torn down.”

Los Angeles opened the station on York Boulevard just west of Figueroa Street in 1926 -- the same year that Los Angeles County opened the now-shuttered Hall of Justice in the downtown Civic Center.

The station closed 20 years ago, marking the final chapter in a colorful history of scandal, crime and punishment.

In the 1970s, Mexican Mafia founder Joe “Pegleg” Morgan found the accommodations not to his liking, while Det. Robert Grogan chased the “Hillside Stranglers,” Angelo Buono Jr. and Kenneth Bianchi, and handled a quadruple murder investigation that became known as the “Easter Sunday Massacre.”

In 1973, the Symbionese Liberation Army planted a bomb inside the station; it was a dud.

The thick iron bars of the station’s six cells held thousands of inmates, from the days of Prohibition and speak-easy arrests for illicit drinking to the age of drive-by shootings and crack houses.

The history of the station and the Northeast Division, which covers Highland Park and other communities, including Cypress Park, Eagle Rock, Mount Washington, Glassell Park and Atwater Village, predates the turn of the 20th century.

In 1898, Highland Park, then a vibrant enclave of artists and intellectuals at the edge of the Arroyo Seco, was annexed to Los Angeles because it needed the protection of the city’s professional police department.

The day the annexation papers were signed, the LAPD showed up and deliberately burned down all the brothels that lined the Sycamore Grove Park area, the site of many state picnics.

By 1913, Highland Park’s only policeman, an LAPD motorcycle cop named William B. White, was working out of a substation in a hardware store at Avenue 57 and Figueroa Street, when he tracked down and arrested 17-year-old Louis Bundy, who had brutally murdered a delivery boy named Harold Ziesche for $20.

It was Highland Park’s first juvenile murderer, and perhaps the nation’s first tobacco defense -- that an irrepressible urge for cigarettes drove Bundy to commit the crime. The defense tactic failed, and Bundy was hanged the following year at San Quentin.

For solving the case, White was promoted to lieutenant in 1914 -- and the LAPD organized its first juvenile crime prevention program, calling it the City Mothers’ Bureau. The juvenile crime program would in time snare a future LAPD chief.

It was in 1942 that a 16-year-old Daryl F. Gates was in front of the Franklin Theater on Figueroa Street waiting for a buddy. Two officers pulled up behind his ’36 Ford to write him a ticket for being double-parked.

At the same time, Gates’ brother, Lowell, walked out of the theater and tried to talk the cops out of the ticket. But after one of the officers shoved Lowell, Daryl Gates got mad and punched him.

A buddy of Gates -- who had also come out of the theater -- punched the other cop. Daryl Gates and his buddy were handcuffed and taken to the station, where they were forced to sit on the floor in the upstairs juvenile division until they apologized.

“Nose to nose, I mumbled, ‘Uh sorry. Won’t happen again,’ ” Gates wrote in his 1992 autobiography, “My Life in the LAPD.”

As the city’s population swelled during Prohibition, the Highland Park station opened, at a cost of $100,000, in April 1926. Police Chief James Edgar “Two Gun” Davis, a commander who protected graft, payoffs and cops on the take, was joined at the opening celebration by police commissioners and the station commander, Capt. George McClary.

In 1928, Highland Park Division Capt. J.J. Jones thought he had found a missing boy, and returned the child to the missing boy’s distraught mother. But when the mother said that, although he resembled her son, the boy was not hers, Jones vehemently insisted the boy was indeed her son.

The public was outraged when he suggested she “try the boy out.”

“What are you trying to do, make fools out of us all?” Jones demanded of the woman. “Or are you trying to shirk your duty as a ‘mother’ and have the state provide for your son? ... You are a fool!”

Emotionally drained, the mother caved in and took the boy home. Three weeks later, she returned to the police station with the boy in tow and armed with her son’s dental records, protesting that the child was definitely not hers. Resolved to bend her to his will -- and the department’s convenience -- Jones committed her to a psychiatric ward for evaluation.

During her five days in the hospital, Jones extracted the truth from the boy. He was a 12-year-old orphan, hitchhiking around the country when he saw the missing boy’s picture in a newspaper and decided to assume his identity.

The woman sued Jones and was awarded $10,800. Jones never paid up; each time she took him to court, he claimed to be broke. The mother continued to search the rest of her life for her son.

During the decade after the station opened, the Northeast Division had the lowest crime rate of any LAPD division. The jurisdiction amounted to a little over 10 square miles, almost all residential. About 60 people manned the station. Juvenile crimes such as theft, smoking and drinking were the division’s major concerns.

And patrol officers -- sometimes hamstrung by the topography of the hills and cul-de-sacs -- were called “dead-end kids.”

In February 1963, Capt. Daryl F. Gates began commanding 170 officers at the Highland Park Station. “Never dreaming I would voluntarily return to the station where I’d been brought in for punching a cop, I showed up for work, eager to continue trying out my talents as a boss,” he later wrote.

After Gates moved up to police chief, the Highland Park station began to fall apart -- physically.

Nearly a decade after it was declared a city historical landmark in 1972, the Los Angeles County Grand Jury reported that the building was so dangerously deficient in safety measures that a fire or earthquake “would almost certainly result in a loss of lives.”

In 1983, after more than 63,000 roll calls spanning 57 years, the division moved five miles to the west to a new building on San Fernando Road that was three times larger. The following year, the old station house was put on the National Register of Historic Places.

Inevitably, as art imitated life, Police Station No. 11’s grimy-looking jail, mahogany-paneled booking room and iron wall-mounted radiators found their way into television and films.

In 1980, cop-turned-writer Joseph Wambaugh adapted his novel “The Black Marble” to the screen himself, and some of it was shot at the station.

“Secret Admirer,” a teen-sex comedy starring Lori Laughlin and C. Thomas Howell, was filmed there in 1985, and the place was used again in 2002 for the filming of Clint Eastwood’s film of Michael Connelly’s novel “Blood Work.” More recently, the old station and the streets of Highland Park were used in the pilot episode of the ABC show “10-8,” starring actor Danny Nucci, which debuts later this month.

Over the years, the old station has been abandoned, vandalized and set on fire before being restored as a museum, substation, gift shop, movie location and community center.

The station’s photography exhibits, vintage 911 switchboard, sirens, uniforms, badges, a police bicycle and squad cars, a paddy wagon, a helicopter and bullet-riddled vehicles parked out back can be seen when the museum opens each Friday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.