Bradbury Building

Bradbury Building
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
U.S. National Historic Landmark
L.A. Historic-Cultural Monument #6
(2005)
Location:	304 South Broadway, Los Angeles, California
Coordinates:	34°3′1.93″N 118°14′52.30″W
Built:	1893
Architect:	George H. Wyman
Architectural style:	Italian Renaissance Revival, Romanesque Revival
Governing body:	Private
NRHP Reference#:	71000144
LAHCM #:	6
Significant dates
Added to NRHP:	July 14, 1971
Designated NHL:	May 5, 1977
Designated LAHCM:	September 21, 1962

The Bradbury Building is an architectural landmark in Los Angeles, California. The building was built in 1893 and is located at 304 South Broadway (at 3rd Street) in downtown.

History

The building was commissioned by Lewis L. Bradbury (November 6, 1823–July 15, 1892), after whom it is named. Bradbury was a mining millionaire—he owned a mine named Tajo in Sinaloa, Mexico—who became a real estate developer in the latter part of his life. He planned in 1892 to construct a five story building at Broadway and Third Street in Los Angeles, close to the Bunker Hill neighborhood.

An entryway in December 2011

A local architect, Sumner Hunt, was first hired to complete a design for the building, but Bradbury dismissed Hunt's plans as inadequate to the grandeur of his vision. He then hired George Wyman, one of Hunt's draftsmen, to design the building.

Wyman at first refused the offer, but then supposedly had a ghostly talk with his brother Mark Wyman (who had died six years previously), while using a planchette board with his wife. The ghost's message supposedly said "Mark Wyman / take the / Bradbury building / and you will be / successful" with the word "successful" written upside down. After the episode, Wyman took the job, and is now regarded as the architect of the Bradbury Building. Wyman's grandson, the science fiction publisher Forrest J. Ackerman, owned the original document containing the message until his death. Coincidentally, Ackerman was a close friend of science fiction author Ray Bradbury.

Wyman was especially influenced in constructing the building by the 1887 science fiction book Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, which described a utopian society in 2000.

In Bellamy's book, the average commercial building was described as a "vast hall full of light, received not alone from the windows on all sides, but from the dome, the point of which was a hundred feet above ... The walls and ceiling were frescoed in mellow tints, calculated to soften without absorbing the light which flooded the interior." This description greatly influenced the Bradbury Building.

A restoration and seismic retrofitting by developer Ira Yellin and project architect Brenda Levin Associates was undertaken in 1991. As part of the restoration, a storage area at the south end of the building was converted to a new rear entrance portico, connecting the building more directly to Biddy Mason Park and the adjacent Broadway Spring Center parking garage. The building's lighting system was also redesigned, bringing in alabaster wall sconces from Spain.

Architecture

Interior filigree ironwork in the central atrium

The building itself features an Italian Renaissance Revival -style exterior facade of brown brick, sandstone and panels of terra cotta details, in the "commercial Romanesque Revival" that was the current idiom in East Coast American cities. But the magnificence of the building is the interior: reached through the entrance, with its low ceiling and minimal light, it opens into a bright naturally lit great center court.

Robert Forster, star of the TV series Banyon that used the building for his office, described it as "one of the great interiors of L.A. Outside it doesn't look like much, but when you walk inside, suddenly you're back a hundred and twenty years."

The five-story central court features glazed brick, ornamental cast iron, tiling, rich marble, and polished wood, capped by a skylight that allows the court to be flooded with natural rather than artificial light, creating ever-changing shadows and accents during the day.

The elevators, which go up to the fifth floor, are cage elevators that are surrounded by wrought-iron grillwork rather than masonry.

The entire main building features geometric patterned staircases at all ends. Ornately designed wrought-iron railings are used abundantly throughout the building to create the illusion of hanging vegetation.

The wrought-iron was created in France and displayed at the Chicago World's Fair before being installed in the building. Freestanding mail-chutes also feature ironwork.

The walls are made of pale glazed brick. The marble used in the staircase was imported from Belgium, and the floors are Mexican tiles.

Construction

During construction an active spring was found beneath the work-site, posing a threat to ongoing work on the building by weakening the foundation. However, Mr. Bradbury was very committed to the project, which he believed to be the greatest monument possible to his memory. Consequently, he imported massive steel rails from Europe to bolster the building and allow its construction to continue.

The initial estimate for the construction of the building was $175,000, but the final costs at completion was over $500,000—an extremely large amount for those times. Using the GDP Deflator method, this amount translates to more than $11 million in 2008 dollars.

Sadly, Lewis Bradbury died months before the building opened in 1893, although it stands as a testament to his and George Wyman's vision. It is Wyman's most acclaimed building.

Building today

The building has operated as an office building for most of its history. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1977.

From 2001 to 2003 A+D Museum: Los Angeles had its home in the building.^{[citation needed]}

Today the building serves as headquarters for the Los Angeles Police Department's Internal Affairs division and other government agencies. Several of the offices are rented out to private concerns, including Red Line Tours. The retail spaces on the first floor currently house Ross Cutlery (where O.J. Simpson purchased a stiletto that figured in his murder trial), a Subway sandwich restaurant, a Sprint cell phone store, and a real estate sales office for loft conversions in other nearby historic buildings.

Tourism

The building is a popular tourist attraction. Visitors are welcome daily and greeted by a government worker who provides historical facts and information about the building. Visitors are allowed up to the first landing but not past it. Brochures and tours are also available. It is close to three other downtown Los Angeles Landmarks: the Grand Central Market and the Million Dollar Theater (across the street) and Angels Flight (two blocks away). The building is accessible from the Los Angeles MTA Red Line via the Civic Center exit, which is three blocks away. In the 1970s and 1980s, when the upper balconies were accessible to the public, one of the office doors had an opaque glass pane that read "Sam Spade, Private Detective."

In popular culture

The Bradbury Building, as seen in Blade Runner.

The Bradbury Building is featured prominently as the setting in a wide range of popular media – particularly in the science fiction genre – including films, television, literature, and music videos. Most notably, the building is the setting for both the climactic rooftop scene of the 1982 cult classic Blade Runner, as well as the set of the character J. F. Sebastian's apartment in which much of the film's story unfolds.

The Bradbury Building appeared prominently in the noir films D.O.A. (1950) and I, The Jury (1953). Joseph Losey's 1951 remake of M, starring David Wayne, contains a long search sequence filmed in the building, and a spectacular shot through the roof's skylight. The famed five-story atrium also substituted for the interior of the seedy skid row hotel depicted in the climax of the Jack Lemmon comedy Good Neighbor Sam (1964), supposedly set in San Francisco but filmed, save for some establishing shots and rear-projection footage, entirely in Los Angeles.

The Bradbury also featured in the 1994 film Wolf (starring Jack Nicholson), the Charles Bronson movie Murphy's Law (1986), Chinatown (1974), Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), Marlowe (1969), Avenging Angel (1985), as well as The Indestructible Man (1956), Pay It Forward (2000), the 1972 made-for-television movie The Night Strangler, and the Michael Douglas and Demi Moore vehicle, Disclosure (1994). In (500) Days of Summer (2009) the building features in the last scenes as the location of an architectural firm. In The Artist (2011), it was used as the site for "Kinograph Studios".

Television series that featured the building include the 1964 The Outer Limits episode "Demon with a Glass Hand", written by Harlan Ellison. During the season six episodes (1963–64) of the series 77 Sunset Strip, Stuart "Stu" Bailey (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) had his office in the Bradbury. In Quantum Leap the building is seen carrying the name "Gotham Towers" in "Play It Again, Seymour", the last episode of the first season (1989). The building appeared in at least one episode of the television series Banyon (1972–73), City of Angels (1976) and Mission: Impossible (1966–73), as well as in the "Ned and Chuck's Apartment" episode of Pushing Daisies, which debuted in 2007. The building was also the setting for a scene from the series FlashForward in the episode "Let No Man Put Asunder". In 2010 the building was transplanted to New York City for a two-part episode of CSI NY. The Bradbury Building and a fake New York City subway entrance across the street were also used to represent the exterior of New York's High School for the Performing Arts in the opening credits of the television series Fame.

The Bradbury appeared in music videos from the 1980s by Heart, Janet Jackson, Earth Wind and Fire and Genesis, and a Pontiac Pursuit commercial. Part of Janet Jackson's 1989 film short Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814 was filmed in the building as well. The interior appears in the music video for the Pointer Sisters' 1980 song, "He's So Shy". The Bradbury Building was also used for Tony! Toni! Toné!'s "Let's Get Down" music video.

The building was featured in the photography on the Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 box, while the personal computer game SimCity 3000 shows the building as one of many being built in the so-called Medium Commercial zones.

The Bradbury has been frequently alluded to in popular literature. In Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, the protagonist refers to Philip Marlowe, who would "feel homesick for the lacework balconies of the Bradbury Building." In the Star Trek novel The Case of the Colonist's Corpse: A Sam Cogley Mystery, the protagonist works from the Bradbury Building four hundred years in the future. Other allusions occur in The Man With The Golden Torc by Simon R. Green, and the science fiction multiple novel series The World Of Tiers by Philip Jose Farmer.

DC Comics and Marvel Comics – the latter of which has offices in the real Bradbury Building – both published comic book series based on characters that work in the historic landmark. The building serves as the headquarters for the Marvel Comics team The Order, and in the DC universe, the Human Target runs his private investigation agency from the building.

Gallery

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  Front entrance

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  Oblique view of central court from balcony

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  Detail of stairway ironwork

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  A fire in the building in 1947

See also

• List of Registered Historic Places in Los Angeles

References

Notes

External links

• Public Art in L.A. – Bradbury Building, A History
• Los Angeles Conservancy
• BRmovie.com Blade Runner Film Locations
• University of Southern California's L.A. Walking Tour