Prognosis Shaky for Former Drug Company Buildings

For nearly 60 years, Lucien Napoleon Brunswig was Los Angeles’ biggest wholesale drug supplier -- dispenser of legitimate medications, patent medicines and headache remedies that he sometimes whipped up himself and sent to the city’s drugstores from his downtown headquarters.

From 1888 until World War II, Brunswig manufactured, packaged and distributed bunion solvents, dandruff “herpicides” and various elixirs, as well as “pimple poisons,” to treat Los Angeles’ aches and pains, creating what reportedly became for a time the biggest wholesale drug company in the Southwest.

The original two-story building on North Main Street, next to the Old Plaza Church and across from the Pico House and Merced Theatre, was nearly 10 years old when Brunswig moved into it in 1896 from a smaller place a block away. The next year, he added another story and built a contiguous five-story annex, emblazoned with his name.

The business has since been bought out, and the buildings from which Brunswig dealt his concoctions are owned by the county. They are on the National Register of Historic Places but could face destruction to make way for a new $58-million Plaza Cultural y Arte, championed by county Supervisor Gloria Molina. The Board of Supervisors is expected to vote on the project in a few months.

The proposal for demolition is controversial.

“What disturbs us about this project,” said Ken Bernstein of the Los Angeles Conservancy, “is that the environmental impact report, based on information from preservation architect Brenda Levin, said it was entirely feasible and less costly to preserve the historic buildings for $51 million, rather than build new structures for $58 million, especially considering the county is cash-strapped. But this information is being ignored.”

A county official denied that demolition was inevitable.

“Right now we’re in the middle of the analysis process” of the environmental report, said Jan Takata, assistant division chief of the Chief Administrative Office. “We don’t have a conclusion yet, but the board will probably be voting on it sometime in the spring.”

The new fence around the property, Takata said, was erected for public safety because of fires and break-ins.

The buildings’ defenders aren’t so sure. Even the family of the founder, whose company is now part of AmeriSource Bergen Corp., one of the largest pharmaceutical distributors in the nation, finds the proposed destruction a bitter pill to swallow.

“It would be a shame to observe one aspect of Los Angeles history by tearing down another,” wrote Brunswig’s great-grandson Walt Harris of Newton, Mass., in a letter to Molina. The buildings date from the era of Los Angeles’ once-thriving French immigrant community; in their place would be a Mexican American cultural center.

More than structures could be affected.

In 1822, Los Angeles’ first graveyard, Campo Santo (Sacred Ground) was opened on the north side of the Plaza Church, which is officially the Church of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels but is popularly known today as La Placita. Over the next 20 years, 660 people were buried there. The remains were eventually reburied elsewhere, and the space is now a parking lot.

But Msgr. Francis Weber, chief archivist for the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, remembers a photograph of a priest standing in an old graveyard on the south side of the Old Plaza Church, where the Brunswig building now stands. “It’s quite possible that some of the first families of California may still be buried there,” he said.

East Los Angeles banker William Vickery bought the property in 1888 and constructed a two-story building, which Brunswig purchased in 1896.

Brunswig was born in 1854 in the French village of Montmedy. In 1871, after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, his family came to America. His father, a surgeon in the war, settled the family in Kansas. By 17, Brunswig was intent on relieving suffering and began learning the trade of a pharmacist.

Later, he opened retail drugstores in Kansas and Texas and a wholesale drug business in New Orleans. In 1888, he arrived in Los Angeles, where he opened one of the city’s earliest wholesale drug companies.

In an age of patent medicines and homemade remedies, prescription drugs took years to gain footholds and make profits. Doctors tended to stick to the tried and true -- peppermint sticks for an upset stomach, for instance -- and be slow to embrace new drugs.

But as Brunswig’s reputation with the medical profession grew, so did his business. He distributed drugs for the Eli Lilly and Squibb pharmaceutical firms, but also made his own medicinal powders from scratch, distributing them under the Angelus brand.

Brunswig distributed everything from aspirin and legal narcotics to perfumes, stoves and, eventually, even soda-fountain equipment. He created the company’s own toiletries under the Velma brand.

He soon immersed himself in politics and civic advancement. He helped found the School of Pharmacy at USC in 1905, the Los Angeles branch of the French Red Cross during World War I and the French American National Bank in 1920.

As vice chairman of the Soldiers Monument Committee, he helped raise funds for the statue of the World War I doughboy in Pershing Square. He also sponsored one of L.A.’s first Depression-era soup kitchens at the Plaza Church, paying his employees to help run it.

Brunswig’s own 60-hour workweeks were easy, compared to dealing with miscreants whom newspapers dubbed “silk-gloved” safecrackers. During Prohibition, thieves found pharmacists’ medicinal alcohol irresistible.

In 1921, safecrackers armed with blankets, feather pillows and dynamite blew off the heavy steel doors of two large vaults, then drove away with thousands of dollars’ worth of alcohol, which Brunswig used for cough syrups and tonics.

Two years later, a freight car destined for his firm was seized by federal authorities in Georgia. The cargo, 700 cases of Old Crow whiskey, was valued at $85,000. It took Brunswig more than a year and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling to get his shipment back.

In 1924, Brunswig added another building to his complex and set up a laboratory and warehouse. That structure, a gigantic eyesore, was damaged by fire over the years and finally demolished in 2001.

In 1931, Spring Street was cut through from Temple Street to reach Sunset Boulevard. One of Brunswig’s buildings was in the path of the extension. So six horses and 150 muscle-bound men were enlisted to drag the building through a quarter-turn and out of the street’s way.

By then, Brunswig had sold the five-story building with his name on it to the county. He kept his headquarters in the adjacent 1888 building.

With business thriving, Brunswig hired several young women to help around the office. One of them was Theresa Huitric. John Bentley, a pharmacist at Swain Drugstore in West Los Angeles, became smitten with her sharp and sassy voice as she took his orders. He often composed love poems and read them to her over the phone, along with his order. They married in 1948 and bought their own shop, Silvernale Drugstore, in Santa Monica.

“Even the famous Schwab’s drugstore on Sunset used to place their orders through Brunswig,” said their son, George Bentley, in an interview. His Aunt Anna also worked for Brunswig, he said; she “was the one who would take the orders from Leon Schwab.”

Brunswig sponsored baseball, basketball and bowling teams for his 600 employees.

After he died in 1943 at 88, the company moved to Vernon, Bentley said. Brunswig’s wife, Marguerite, died three years later. One of their five children, Marguerite Brunswig Staude, a well-known sculptor, designed the Chapel of the Holy Cross near Sedona, Ariz., and dedicated it to her parents’ memory.

By the 1960s, Brunswig Drug had grown to 14 divisions. It merged with the much smaller Bergen Drug Co. in 1969 to form Bergen Brunswig, which moved its headquarters to Orange County in 1985. It later merged with AmeriSource Health Corp. to form AmeriSource Bergen.

After Los Angeles County took over the five-story downtown building in 1931, it housed old records, including lawsuits and 1850s-era state admission documents. But rats began nibbling on the paperwork, so the county removed the boxes.

Offices of the county Agricultural Commission and recorder were there, and the building was a Superior Court site until the 1970s. Then it was abandoned.

Its only recent face lift came before the 2000 Democratic National Convention: a gold paint job, including painted clouds to cover the windows.