L.A.’s Reticent Relics
Workmen cleaning out the long-abandoned, 19th century Douglas Building in downtown Los Angeles expected to find asbestos, lead and fire damage. What they didn’t expect was a flood.
The repair team found 4 feet of cold water sloshing around in the basement next to a warren of tunnels. After workers pumped it out, a 30-foot-long, cast-iron steam engine emerged from the darkness. This workhorse of Victorian technology -- with its hulking 100-horsepower tubular boilers, brass fittings and original green paint still intact -- long ago heated the Douglas offices and the nearby Bradbury Building through the underground tunnels.
The steam engine was one of many surprises -- good and bad -- that developers have encountered during the rush to convert many of the city’s oldest commercial buildings into lofts, apartments and condominiums. Amid this rubble of rehabs in downtown Los Angeles, a major challenge for builders is how to take advantage of century-old architectural finds while bringing the battered buildings up to current safety codes.
As demand for downtown lofts and condos continues to heat up, with some units selling for more than $1 million, small armies of construction workers are racing to restore some of the oldest buildings in the city. They are also uncovering immeasurable examples of the city’s history, including forgotten designs from great architects, mementos from the once-thriving banking and theater districts, and even a hidden treasure trove of Batchelder tiles.
In the case of the Douglas Building, more than 30 years ago the fire department ordered the place closed, except for ground floor shops. A previous owner wanted to demolish it. But as the loft and condominium market heated up, developer Goodwin Gaw decided to turn the five-story structure, built in 1898, into 50 condos with underground parking and fancy new stores.
Architect Rocky Rockefeller was hired to transform the place. His first impression: “It had been run by pigeons and rats.”
First, they sealed off the underground spring. The original builders created a cistern in the subbasement to collect water for the steam engine, but as Gaw’s workers tried to reinforce the foundation it triggered even more flooding. The solution was to install permanent pumps, an unanticipated $100,000 expense, and to waterproof the basement with a polymer membrane so it could stay dry and become a garage.
There was still the problem of ventilating auto exhaust from the underground garage. Rockefeller decided to use a furnace flue in the basement, still caked with century-old coal soot, to run a new air duct to the roof to vent the carbon monoxide from the garage.
But the most pleasant surprise came when workmen pulled off the faded Eagleson’s Big & Tall store sign, a fixture since the 1960s, and found “Douglas” etched deeply into terra cotta over the entrance.
“We were all shocked” the name was still there, Rockefeller said.
For all of its problems, the Douglas Building has a grand heritage. The original owner, Thomas Douglas Stimson, was a lumber baron-turned-real estate mogul, who at the close of the 19th century was as important in this city as billionaires Eli Broad and Philip Anschutz are today.
Born in the Midwest, Stimson made a great fortune in the lumber business before retiring here in 1890. But he quickly got involved in banking, built the most expensive mansion in the city and erected one of Los Angeles’ first office towers.
He dreamed of another grand office complex at the northwest corner of Spring and 3rd streets and hired architect James Reid to design it. Reid was one of the West’s hottest architects for his grand design a few years earlier of the Hotel del Coronado resort in San Diego.
Stimson suddenly died in 1898, but his family continued the project as a memorial. Reid’s design followed a Romanesque Revival motif with carved stone, terra cotta and tan bricks, plus rounded corners and hundreds of double-hung windows, a prized amenity in the age before air conditioning. When the building opened, it commanded some of highest office rents in the city.
A century later, Rockefeller tried to retain some of the original design cues as he plowed through the debris. “We like to save beautiful things and find a way to make them work,” he said.
He discovered that some of the original Douglas fir floors were intact but were covered with linoleum. The wood was painstakingly buffed and polished. Another delay came after the original hand-laid octagonal tiles were found under layers of linoleum and carpeting. The off-white tiles were badly discolored from glues, but workmen sitting on their knees restored them by shaving off one-fortieth of an inch with hand-held grinders, which cost an additional $50,000.
Rockefeller thought he was out of luck, though, at re-creating mail slots and doorknobs that had long ago been stripped by thieves. Then a worker discovered an original wooden door sealed in a modern Sheetrock wall. The ornate chrome hardware, complete with a “DB” for “Douglas Building” in the doorknob, was copied and installed throughout the loft complex.
In the main lobby, a bit of urban archeology also helped re-create the grand entrance. When the rehab began, the ceiling was only 8 feet high and was covered with pocked acoustical tiles from the 1960s, and above that was 12 feet of plaster ceiling dating to the 1950s. After workers stripped the false ceilings away, ornate columns emerged that reached to the original 20-foot height.
One of Reid’s master touches also remains intact: a vast, second-floor skylight that stretches up to the roof. Now the lobby looks much as it did in 1898, as does the main staircase, with the original marble treads and cast-iron railings.
In July, five months behind schedule, the renamed Douglas Building Lofts came to market about $3 million over budget. But every unit, priced from $270,000 to $750,000, has been sold. The underground steam engine room remains intact and may be turned into a small museum for residents.
Three blocks away, renovators of the 12-story Subway Terminal Building faced another daunting set of challenges.
A marble cornerstone on the building reads “1925 Schultze & Weaver Architects.” Architect Leonard Schultze had a flair for creating vast city complexes. His designs include the Grand Central Station in New York and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
His Subway Terminal Building, which cost $4 million to build, had four narrow wings with 600 offices and offered a novelty for the 1920s: a private, indoor parking garage. The granite and terra cotta Hill Street building sat over an underground station that for decades served as a major terminus for the city’s trolley lines. About 50,000 commuters a day passed through the station until the last trolley car rolled out in 1955.
Previous owners struggled to make the building competitive in a soft office market. But downtown’s residential renaissance inspired developer Kevin Ratner of Forest City Enterprises Inc. to buy the site two years ago and convert it into 277 apartments, including a rooftop spa, fitness center and other amenities, with rents from about $1,400 to $8,500 a month.
One of his first headaches came when work crews dug 30 feet into what they assumed was raw dirt to rebuild the garage. Instead, they found the foundations of earlier buildings from the 1880s, plus steel rails and wooden ties from the 1920s trolley tunnel and debris from the modern Red Line subway.
And underneath were sewer lines that did not show up on city maps; the workers broke into them several times. They also cracked into an oil well, a remnant of the city’s late-19th century oil boom.
“We had to get a special crew” to drill down 300 feet to cap it, Ratner said.
Another complication from Schultze’s original design was his use of concrete slabs, 18 to 24 inches apart, as floor supports; these days contractors use thin metal decking. So when architect Daniel Gehman tried to add plumbing and vents for washers, dryers and other appliances, his team had trouble lining up the connections floor to floor.
So he altered many room layouts, leaving the occasional slightly odd fixture placement.
“In some bathrooms, the commode has gracious space next to it that maybe calls for a magazine rack,” he said.
The project’s completion was delayed by eight months. But the complex, renamed Metro 417, opened in July and is nearly 30% leased.
Reconciling all the demands of the Community Redevelopment Agency, historic preservation officials and the planning, fire, building and safety departments drives up the price of historic renovation, said Hamid Behdad, who oversees the city’s adaptive reuse program. One complex issue is satisfying the city’s fire and safety codes.
“But that’s the price you have to pay for safety, which cannot be compromised,” Behdad said.
While workers at the Subway Terminal Building were adding bathrooms, developer Tom Gilmore was rapidly tearing them out of the El Dorado Hotel. Gilmore is turning the dilapidated 264-room hotel on Spring Street into about 65 condos. He hopes to get them to market while it’s still sizzling, with units priced from the high $200,000s to more than $1 million, and occupied by early 2007.
Like other hostelries in the area, the El Dorado’s trajectory started at the top when it opened in 1914 and ended up as a skid row hellhole when it closed in the late 1990s.
The building’s history can be seen from the outside. Its original name, “Hotel Stowell,” remains in faded paint near the roof, while a vertical Art Deco sign, “Hotel El Dorado,” speaks of its transformation. As the neighborhood deteriorated, so did its clientele: the word “liquor” was added to the bottom of the Art Deco sign, and another sign, “Pacific Grand Hotel,” hangs above the sidewalk.
Plywood has been nailed over the entrance, and the rehab is in full force. On the top floor, workmen in hard hats recently broke down walls with sledgehammers and picks, bashing and yanking the plaster from its wooden frames before knocking those down too.
“Walls connected to bathrooms are harder because you run into pipes,” said Steven Renderos, a high school student who spent a summer on the demolition crew.
The 12-story building still retains its neo-Gothic design, with a green glazed brick facade, narrow arches, ornamental double balconies and 11 stories of fire escapes. When the hotel had opened, it boasted of a private bath in each room, the top room cost $5 and entertainers such as Charlie Chaplin stayed there, drawn by its proximity to the old theater district. During Prohibition, a banquet room in the basement reportedly was converted to a speak-easy.
Some of the surviving treasures are on the ground floor and mezzanine. The removal of Sheetrock walls exposed a narrow but grand gilded lobby that is set off by a dramatic, 15-foot-wide marble staircase with cast-iron railings.
Here, restorers also found hundreds of decorative tiles designed by Pasadena artist Ernest A. Batchelder, a leading figure of the Arts and Crafts movement of the early 20th century primarily known for decorating fireplaces and fountains. His tiles are so prized that Realtors advertise homes with Batchelder’s work to draw potential buyers.
“I was incredulous that we didn’t know about this” collection, said Robert Winter, a retired Occidental College professor who wrote a book on Batchelder.
The lightly patterned tiles are mostly on the hotel walls and have been painted over through the years, but it should not be difficult to restore them, Winter said. “They are very somber but very beautiful.”
