The Bradbury: A Brief History of L.A. s Movie-Star Building

Though most moviegoers will have seen a lot of Bradbury Building, they may not recognize it as a landmark of Los Angeles architecture - unless, of course, theyve seen Thom Andersens documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, which devotes a solid block of its nearly three-hour runtime to the many roles it has played onscreen. The movies discovered the Bradbury Building before the architectural historians did, says its narrator. The earliest appearance I know came in 1943: in China Girl,' it played the Hotel Royale in Mandalay, Burma. The following year, in The White Cliffs of Dover,' it played a London military hospital overflowing with wounded soldiers.

Later films placed the Bradbury Building elsewhere: Caprice in Paris, Wolf in New York, Murder in the First in San Francisco. These and other roles may demonstrate the structures versatility, but theyve surely also caused some confusion as to its actual location. Anyone seeking to satisfy an interest in Los Angeles architecture, though, will hear about the Bradbury Buildings place in its canon before they hear about anything else. It found that place thanks, in large part, to its celebration by influential Southern California architectural historian and Arts & Architecture Magazine contributor Esther McCoy, who launched her campaign in 1953, a decade after the building made its cinematic debut in China Girl and six decades after it first opened.

Bradbury Building at the corner of Broadway and 3rd in 1894. Photo by W.H. Fletcher, courtesy of the California State Library.

Drawing of the Bradbury Building, circa 1893, showing prospective tenants. Courtesy of the Security Pacific National Bank Collection - Los Angeles Public Library.

The Bradbury stands middle-right at the corner of Third and Broadway in this circa 1894 panoramic view of Los Angeles. Courtesy of the USC Libraries - California Historical Society Collection.

There is nothing whatever accidental about it, goes the quote from the magazine proudly included, for a time, on a handout provided to the Bradburys visitors. There are no afterthoughts. It is a forever young building, out of a youthful and vigorous imagination. But it has left nothing to chance. Stairways leap into space because of endless calculations. The skylight is a fairy tale of mathematics. This praise, like almost all the praise heaped upon the building ever since, focuses on its interior. When observers mention the exterior at all, they do so only do dismiss it: David Gebhard and Robert Winters Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles describes its style as mildly Romanesque, but only in a parenthetical aside after theyve first pronounced it dull.

Any work of the Bradbury Buildings distinction, splendor, and sheer cost will get people telling stories.

Its interior, and specifically its Victorian court lobby, made the Bradbury Building a movie star. The patterned Italian marble staircases, Mexican floor tiles, intricate French wrought-iron work, operator-staffed birdcage elevators, and the then-largest plate-glass windows in Los Angeles all under a fifty-foot-high atrium made its image as a refuge of architectural taste and dignity in a city elsewhere regarded even when the building opened in 1893 as an unprecedented concentration of architectural vulgarity. It all came together at the behest of millionaire Lewis L. Bradbury, who, having made his fortune in gold-mining, spared no expense in the construction of this monument to his legacy, one originally estimated at $175,000 and opened just months after his death at the final cost of a then-staggering $500,000.

Any work of the Bradbury Buildings distinction, splendor, and sheer cost will get people telling stories. In an architecture of steel and glass, marble, tile and movement, George Wyman envisioned and presented the material dream of Southern California as a technology flooded by sunlight, writes California historian Kevin Starr. Wyman, according to the widely repeated legend, drew inspiration for the design from Looking Backward, a futuristic novel by the utopian visionary Edward Bellamy which became a popular sensation in the early 1890s. Bellamy conjures up a twentieth-century public building offering 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. Beneath it, in the centre of the hall, a magnificent fountain played, cooling the atmosphere to a delicious freshness with its spray. The walls and ceiling were frescoed in mellow tints, calculated to soften without absorbing the light which flooded the interior.

The Bradbury Buildings famous interior. Undated photo by Julius Shulman, courtesy of the Getty Research Institute and the USC Digital Librarys Library Exhibits Collection.

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The Bradbury Bradburys atrium may only rise to half that height - strikingly smaller, like so many movie stars, in real life than on the silver screen - and it may lack a fountain, but a comparison of passage and building makes the influence seem plausible. Some may find harder to swallow the story of how Wyman came to accept the commission in the first place. A draftsman employed for five dollars a week in the office of architect Sumner Hunt, whom Bradbury had originally hired up to draw up a plan for his building, Wyman somehow impressed the millionaire enough to give him second thoughts. When Bradbury offered Wyman the job instead, Wyman agonized over the morality of the situation, supposedly going so far as to use a planchette, an early form of Ouija board, to contact his dead brother. Take the Bradbury Building and you will be successful, the spirits dangling pe

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