by Paul R. Spitzzeri
One of the more notable architectural landmarks in Los Angeles is the remarkable Bradbury Building, at the southeast corner of Broadway and 3rd Street, with its stunning five-story sky-lit interior court marked by intricate wrought iron, marble stairs, Mexican tile floors and “birdcage” elevators. Designed by George Wyman, who was not a trained architect but worked as a draftsman for the well-known Sumner P. Hunt and, purportedly, consulted a Ouija board for advice from a dead brother whether to continue from work done by Hunt, the structure’s rather mundane exterior belies the futuristic and unique interior.
The Bradbury Building was developed by multi-millionaire mining magnate Lewis Leonard Bradbury, who died just months before its 1893 completion. Born in November 1823 in Bangor, Maine, Bradbury began in business with his brother Nathaniel, Jr. and a third man operating a grocery store in his hometown in April 1842, though this enterprise quickly ended in bankruptcy. Within a few years, the siblings set up shop in Boston dealing in leather goods and the business appears to have lasted until around 1853, at which time Nathaniel went to New York City to establish a business but was murdered.
Information about Bradbury’s life during this period is murky. Accounts from Los Angeles after his death suggested that he took to the sea, became a ship captain, and ended up in México. Other obituaries from Oakland, where he long resided, stated that he went to California as a Gold Rush ’49er and worked the mines, accumulating a small fortune, until he went south. He could not be located in the 1850 or 1860 federal, or 1852 California state, censuses, and no newspaper references were found for him prior to the mid-1870s.
Generally, it is agreed that, by the early 1860s, Bradbury ended up in Rosario, in the southern part of the state of Sinaloa along the Pacific Coast and south of Mazatlán. He acquired the Tajo mine, said to have been developed under Spanish colonial rule, and became very wealthy. In 1867, he married Simona Martínez, who some sources state came from a prominent local family, though others record that she worked as a maid for Bradbury, who was 23 years her senior. The couple had four daughters and two sons, all born in México, except for the youngest child, who was born in Oakland.
With his wealth, Bradbury owned fine houses in Oakland and San José and his first visit to Los Angeles appears to have been in February 1877 when he was recorded by the Spanish-language paper La Crónica as having checked into the Pico House hotel with other “silver kings.” Long a sufferer from asthma, it is likely he decided to invest in land and build residences in this area for his health, so Bradbury acquired large holdings on the ranchos Santa Anita and Azusa de Duarte at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, including where the well-heeled enclave of Bradbury is now, as well as a hillside lot, at the southwest corner of Hill and Court streets, the latter a thoroughfare between First and Temple that no longer exists, formerly owned by former County Clerk Andrew W. Potts.
The Potts property was purchased by Bradbury in February 1885 and arrangements made to move the existing residence to a nearby lot so a palatial Queen Anne-style mansion, designed by the noted San Francisco architects Joseph and Samuel Newsom (California governor Gavin Newsom is descended from the latter). The Newsoms were best known for another massive mansion exhibiting exuberant architectural features, the Carson House in Eureka. In 1886, they set up a branch office in Los Angeles, one major project of note being a commercial building on Fort Street (renamed Broadway in 1890) for Henry C. Witmer, before the brothers’ partnership was dissolved and Joseph remained in the Angel City.
At the end of 1885, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad completed a transcontinental railroad line to greater Los Angeles (extended through the San Gabriel Valley and into Los Angeles within a couple of years) and the great Boom of the Eighties followed. By May 1886, Bradbury began making active plans with the Newsoms for his house and when Simona and daughters came down from Oakland as summer dawned, construction was being readied. Under the heading of “Lines of Improvement,” the Los Angeles Herald of 26 June detailed the many new commercial and residential structures being built or planned as the boom was beginning to pick up steam and it was briefly noted, “the Bradbury mansion, to cost a cool $100,000, will soon be begun.”
The Los Angeles Times of 13 August, noting the Newsom brothers opened their local office, added that “they have in hand the plans for Mr. Bradbury’s new residence, which rumor says will be the finest in the city.” The Herald of 8 August tersely observed that “work is progressing with much speed” on the dwelling and another tidbit in the paper on the last day of September noted “good progress.” There were very few details about the work, however, until the 5 December edition of the Times, which reported that “a bevy of carpenters and workmen” were busily and work and added,
The Bradbury mansion . . . will be as modern a triumph of home architecture as can be found anywhere in Los Angeles. It is none of your square box affairs, with four straight walls and stiff, staring windows, but it has charming curves and broken angles, generous bay windows and lofty towers that lend it grace and beauty till it is a fitting crown for the beautiful hillsite which it covers. Houses of this class are multiplying in Los Angeles.
This was especially true for the section of hills along the western edge of downtown, first developed for former mayor Prudent Beaudry, who introduced a water pumping system there, including Bunker Hill, Bellevue Terrace and others, while, further to the west was Crown Hill. The 23 December edition of the Times provided a wealth of information, courtesy of the Newsoms, but the scan found online was taken of a bound volume and, with the article being on the first column, much of the text is not included.
Still, it was noted that plastering was ready to take place and the “well broken up” exterior provided “a very pleasing and attractive appearance.” The lavish use of balconies, bays, extensions and turrets was considered “something entirely new,” while the decorative elements of the chimney stacks were in “tastely [sic] designs” and the granite base, Romanesque in style, and the bell-shaped towers and turrets were also seen as innovative. The wrap-around curved porch or veranda was also highlighted. The terra-cotta work on the exterior was by Gladding, McBean and Company of San Francisco, this firm would soon have a Los Angeles office that became very well-known for its work as Los Angeles burgeoned in growth in subsequent decades.
As to the interior, the paper reported that Bradbury intended to have Chicago firms provide the interior finishing and furnishings based on “special designs” from the Newsoms, though it was also suggested that some of the work might be done by locals. The Times asserted that patronizing home trade would mean “equally good work done here . . . at a much less figure.” Among the woods being contemplated were Spanish cedar, antique oak, Oregon ash, cherry, mahogany, while the names of some of the contractors were also listed. The piece ended with the opinion that the Bradbury Mansion would be one of the finest houses on the Pacific Coast.
While some sources cite the $100,000 figure noted above or indicate the cost was up to $125,000, the Los Angeles Times of 2 January 1887 recorded a $70,000 price tag, though six months later it was pegged at $75,000 in one source and $80,000 in another. There obviously were costs for the landscape, perimeter fencing and gates, a stable, a carriage house, and other features that could well have accounted for the higher amount. While nothing could be located about when the house was completed, the 3 June edition of the Times noted
L.L. Bradbury’s superb residence on the hill is a familiar object to every one. Mr. Bradbury has been annoyed at the long-windedness of the plumber, who seemed liable to never get through. Yesterday Mr. B. said to the lingerer, sarcastically, “I’ll go into mourning when you get out of here.”
The plumber was equal to the occasion, and replied with delicious earnestness: “Well, I’ll go into mourning when I have to get out of here.”
Speaking of mourning, it was just five years later when Bradbury died on 15 July 1892 at the age of 68. Work on the Bradbury Building continued under the supervision of executor John D. Bicknell, Simona Bradbury and her son John, while, in 1896, the Bradbury Estate erected the Tajo Building, designed by Wyman, named for the Mexican mine that yielded the family fortune and which was situated at the northwest corner of Broadway and First until it was razed in 1940.
Simona Martínez de Bradbury suffered from heart disease and, after a serious health issue as the 20th century dawned, vacated the mansion and moved back to the family house in Oakland where she died in December 1902 at age 57. By the Teens, the mansion became the Hotel El Palacio and, then, the 5 May 1913 issue of the Times reported that “one of the oldest and most historic mansions of Los Angeles, is in the hands of a motion picture company.”
The paper added that realtors and apartment house developers were long interested in buying the property, but the residence, considered the local corollary to the famous Mark Hopkins (of the Central and Southern Pacific railroad companies) mansion on Nob Hill in San Francisco, was turned over to cinematographer James A. Crosby, who’d worked for the New York, Selig and Universal studios, for his studio.
It was reported that the main house was to include lodgings for actors as well as dressing rooms and shooting locations in the halls and many rooms, while a stage was completed in a two-story building formerly used by Bradbury servants, and another in the works behind the mansion. At the end of the year, film star Hobart Bosworth used the interior for his version of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf.
By February 1914, Famous Players, founded by the Frohman brothers and Adolph Zukor, the latter becoming the powerful head of Paramount Studios, used the mansion for filming. The 29 May 1917 edition of the Los Angeles Record recorded another studio using the Bradbury residence, as it featured “H.E. Roach, president and director general of the Rolin Film company, which occupies the old Bradbury mansion at Court and Hill streets.”
Not very well known yet, the young impresario became better known as Hal Roach and one of his earliest collaborators at the Bradbury place was another fledgling in the film industry, comedic actor Harold Lloyd. Lloyd’s knock-off of Charles Chaplin’s The Little Tramp was Lonesome Luke, who made his debut at the mansion in 1915’s short Just Nuts, though the actor, who soon created the glasses-wearing persona that made him a star, later dismissed the Bradbury as “Pneumonia Hall.”
After its brief run as a film studio, the mansion was converted to a boarding house, while judges from the nearby Superior Court then chose to use the Bradbury as the location of their luncheon club. The dwelling’s existence was already threatened as early as 1909 when it was one of several sites for a proposed new City Hall and the Times of 12 September observed that the house was “an excellent house, but something like twenty years old,” as if that was already approaching its natural lifespan!
The structure was one of several “old” mansions profiled in a 6 May 1928 Times article titled “Cupolas of the Past,” with journalist Neeta Marquis visiting it and others, including the mansions of San Gabriel Valley rancher Leonard J. Rose and Mary Hollister Banning, second wife of Phineas Banning (of the Port of Los Angeles and Wilmington) on Fort Moore Hill. As to the Bradbury, which she declared “the most elegant and costly residence of all the early period, “she noted some of the remaining landscaping among the largely unkempt grounds including an old rubber tree.
As to the house, Marquis mentioned the “large reception porch leading to the fluted and columned vestibule” and paved with mosaic work, making this “the first decorative elegance of its kind to be used in a private house in Los Angeles.” The vestibule had numerous niches for ornamental statuary, while tall doors with stained glass opened from the hall into a room that was “of baronial proportions” with carved rosewood panels and a deteriorated parquet floor. She noted the beautiful smooth staircase rail and balustrade with intricate carvings, but she felt compelled to add, inaccurately and demeaning in places,
Ghosts may well flit up and down these stairs, too, some time, for this is a house of interracial romance and tragedy. Built by an Englishman whose fortune came from mines in Mexico, its first mistress was an Indian woman from below the Mexican line, who swathed her head in a black shawl when she went out to drive, and who sat of choice upon the floor in the midst of all her household elegance.
Marquis then told of a “violet-eyed” mistress of the house whose husband was “swarthy with the blood of his mother’s people, with the former as like to trample upon social mores and other people’s feelings “as other women tread upon paving stones.” The reference here was to John Bradbury (1872-1913) and his first wife, Lucy Banning, daughter of Phineas and Mary Banning and who was notorious for her unconventional ways.
In 1928, Marquis continued, the structure was “the habitat of artists, writers, and theatrical people and a Russian woman writer offered to take the journalist to the rooftop, where a spectacular view was enjoyed and it noted that an invalid member of the Bradbury family was taken for outings. As she and her escort made their way through the trap door on the roof, down the narrow stairs lined with peeling wallpaper, and then out to the street, she concluded her essay with,
What stories each of these ancient mansions could tell! And what radiating centers all have been for influences ranging from one extreme to the other and affecting the whole trend of our local history! Gone are the builders, scattered are the families, forgotten are the gayeties which once echoed in the lofty rooms. Only the houses stay, empty shells, which soon must themselves be crushed and swept aside to make way for new life, new laughter, — new tragedy.
Under a year later, the Bradbury was, indeed, “crushed,” torn down to make way for a parking lot and the Los Angeles Express of 22 February 1929 featured the demolition and noted that the lessee, Jack Emehiser, routinely welcomes visitors who came to relive the glories of the house and days of yore. This included an elderly couple, with the woman telling Emehiser, “John and I used to dance here many years ago. We just wanted to look at the old place for the last time.”
As the pair walked up toward the ruins, the paper added that they stopped to listen “where once soft music played and the gay laughter of youth floated out into the night,” but where all that was heard was the hammering of workers prying out the foundation next to piles of bricks and debris. It was remarked that Lucy Banning died just two days prior and that many of the visitors might have been stirred to see the Bradbury’s ruins because of that event, though it was added, in error, that John Bradbury built the house for her.
The steps that were still intact were to be used for a bungalow court, while roof shingles were to be taken to Olvera Street, then being recreated into a tourist site, and used for the renovation of the Avila Adobe. The article, which included photos of the site as the destruction was continuing, concluded with the observation that the house cost $125,000 when built by Lewis Bradbury just over 40 years prior, but was sold for a mere $250.
The Times of 18 February issued a brief editorial titled “Our First Mansion” in which the paper mused,
The razing of the old Bradbury mansion to make way for an auto parking place is an interesting event.
It was the first great house to be built in Los Angeles. As it came along in the early ‘nineties, it fell into the hands of the best Victorian-age architects. The fortune made in the shadows of the lovely old church at Rosario, Mex., went into an ugly monstrosity.
In subsequent decades, more of the historic houses and commercial structures of the City of Angeles were sacrificed to “progress.” The areas in and around the Bradbury site, in particular, were transformed by “urban renewal” and, while much of that work took place in the 1960s and afterward, the attitudes and actions behind that date back much further to at least the Roaring Twenties. The Los Angeles County Superior Court building is now on the site.
Whether Lewis L. Bradbury thought he was building a house that would stand for a substantial period of time or not, it is remarkable that it was already considered old after just two decades and was gone within only four. This photo by Pierce and Blanchard shows the mansion as something of an acme of the exuberance of Queen Anne architecture as rendered by the Newsom brothers, though, whether it was “an ugly monstrosity” or not is an interesting subjective question!