Through the Viewfinder With a Negative of Broadway at 3rd Street Looking South, ca. Early 1920s

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

A recent acquisition for the Museum’s collection was a group of ten photographic negatives from the early 1920s, seven of which are images of people at the beach, a train station and a house, while the other trio are views of portions of downtown Los Angeles. One is of Third Street looking west toward Bunker Hill, the tunnel on that thoroughfare through it and the Angels Flight funicular railway and another is a view of City Hall on the east side of Broadway between 2nd and 3rd streets directed to the northeast.

The third looks as if the photographer of the last of those views swung around and took an image of Broadway looking south along that street past 3rd. This the featured photo for this post as it takes in a good deal and is reflective of the Angel City during another of its many growth and development booms—in fact, it might from near the 1923 peak of the latest of those.

The shutterbug stood at the edge of the sidewalk on the west side of the street and it looks like there is brick along the last few feet of the street until the curbing. There are several automobiles in view, including one convertible, while a couple of gents ride a motorcycle closest to the photographer. A Los Angeles Railway streetcar (overhead lines for the system are also observed) is heading north and the sign at the top of the car’s front reads “N. Broadway” with one just below it having “Lincoln Park,” indicating that it was heading towards the Lincoln Heights neighborhood terminus.

A gaggle of pedestrians crosses Broadway at 3rd, while there are large numbers of folks plying the sidewalks on either side of the former. At the edge of the walk near the photographer, a gent looks to have a newspaper tucked under his left arm, while next to him in the street is a “newsie,” these being young boys employed in those days to sell papers and this young man appears to be African-American. Also of note are the seven-headed light posts, with a larger center one and a half-dozen smaller ones on the perimeters.

Being an important commercial corridor, Broadway was lined with multi-story commercial buildings, most of which have electric marquees, signs above the first-floor store fronts or painted signs on their sides. Among those that are further down on the east side are the O.T. Johnson and Broadway Central buildings and they, along with many others in this section of downtown, are no longer with us.

Nearer the photographer, however, are a quartet of structures that still stand, including the famous Bradbury Building, at the left with its Broadway facade completely in view. With its highly distinctive interior, much of it involving intricate iron railings, open elevators, marble stairs and its skylights illuminating the open court, the 1893 structure, designed by George H. Wyman (although Sumner P. Hunt, for whom Wyman was previously a draftsman, is often credited, though he was also fired by the building’s dying owner, Lewis L. Bradbury), is not only an amazing architectural specimen, but it is the oldest commercial building downtown.

Bradbury made his pile in silver mines in México, where he married Simona Martínez, and, after some years in the Bay Area, the couple and their daughters moved to Los Angeles, where they build a large hilltop mansion, bought ranch land in the San Gabriel Valley (where the wealthy gated enclave of Bradbury is now) and undertook the construction of the Bradbury Building. Lewis died shortly before its completion and Simona oversaw the final stages, while also erecting the Tajo Building (named for the area in Sinaloa state where their mines were located) in 1898 at Broadway and 1st, though it was razed in 1940 (the house was leveled in 1929.)

Note that the two ground floor store space tenants were a drug store and a branch of the Citizens Trust and Savings Bank, for which a vertical lighted marquee at the southwest corner of the structure read “BANK OPEN,” almost certainly for nighttime hours of operation. It is also interesting to see a fourth floor window awning, the only one detectable on the edifice, though the drug store has them and the bank appeared to have something similar, perhaps retractable. Today, a coffee place and a bagel shop, respectively, are in these locales.

Further down the east side of Broadway portions of some 15 buildings can be detected, with signage showing a dry goods store, music store, and the Boos Brothers Cafeteria. It can be easily seen how, as the thoroughfare headed further south toward 7th Street and the city’s main shopping district, the structures were taller, approaching or at the existing height limit of 11 stories. Note, too, the frequency of American flags flying on the rooftops.

On the west side of Broadway, the immediate foreground shows a portion of a structure containing the store of Albert Cohn. The edifice was completed in late spring 1895 as the Irvine Building with its owner, Margaret Mullen Byrne Irvine (1834-1917), one of the few women commercial property owners in the city. Born in Ireland and a migrant to the United States when young, she married fellow Emerald Isle native Thomas Byrne in 1853. He was a wholesale merchant at Sonoma and San Francisco in northern California and the couple had three sons before Thomas’ death in 1870.

A dozen years later she married James Irvine, also an Ireland native who came to America during the horrific potato famine and who was in New York City for a couple of years before joining the Gold Rush migration to California. A successful grocery and produce merchant, Irvine invested heavily in real estate while joining the sheep-ranching firm of Flint, Bixby and Company, with the 1866 purchase, at dirt cheap prices following a severe drought, of the Rancho Lomas de Santiago, providing Irvine the basis for a massive amount of land in what is now Orange County where the city of Irvine bears his name.

Irvine was previously married and had a namesake son, but his wife died in 1874. Four years after he wedded Margaret Byrne, Irvine died and left her a substantial fortune, though she resided in San Francisco and never moved south. When she built the Irvine Building, the Los Angeles Times of 10 May 1895 called it “AN IMPORTED BUILDING,” quoting from Builder and Contractor, which complained,

The Irvine Block, now in course of erection, on the corner of Third street and Broadway, is the single instance of a San Francisco product in the way of building, dropped down in Los Angeles. The bricks, iron work, glass, cement, lumber, millwork, the contractor and many of the mechanics, all came from San Francisco, only the architect and the plumber are native to Los Angeles soil . . .

No other instance of this character appears in the building history of Los Angeles . . . Los Angeles has extensive brick works, large lumber yards, immense iron works and innumerable contractors out of jobs.

If Messrs. [sic] Irvine had given any of these people half a chance . . . the structure, when erected would have been just as good as will be the one now building, when it is completed.

The architect “native to Los Angeles soil” was Hunt with Wyman credited with overseeing the building. Margaret Irvine’s on, James W. Byrne, kept offices in the structure and, in 1905, bought the edifice from his mother. In February 1911, a fire burst forth from the basement beneath a millinery shop occupying a ground floor store and raced through the lower part of the building and up a central court, causing major damage. Byrne conducted an extensive interior reconstruction, but the architect designing the work was San Francisco’s Willis Polk.

As for the store, which has its owner’s name in a vertical electric sign, Albert Cohn (1861-1941), who hailed from Prussia, born there not quite a decade before German unification, and came to Los Angeles from his home country in 1882. He was a clerk for M.A. Newmark and Company and then the Jacoby Brothers store for a few years before opening his own store in 1887, during the Boom of the Eighties and which the awning over its entrance notes. He operated on Main Street at 1st, where Los Angeles Police Department headquarters is now and then moved about a block south where a parking lot is today.

Cohn opened a second store at Flower and Washington and then, by 1916, the Broadway location (where another basement fire, in December 1918, caused $10,000 in damage, but did not spread beyond that area), though, rapid expansion during the booming Roaring Twenties meant more branches, around 20, throughout the Angel City. When he had the trio of stores, Ruth St. Denis in the Los Angeles Record of 10 July 1919 wrote,

Albert Cohn’s grocery stores . . . are models of business service and helpful efficiency. I had often heard of Mr. Cohn’s wonderful system and how these grocery stores have grown under his able guidance. I can well understand his success. Here is a man of that remarkable human sympathy that extends into the homes of the people. He knows their wants and can supply their needs.

On 4 February 1886, Cohn married Isabella Valle, whose father, Benito, came to Los Angeles some three decades earlier from his native Nicaragua and whose mother was born in México. Though it appears that Cohn was from a Jewish upbringing, he converted to Catholicism, and the couple had two daughters, Isabella and Lillian, though both, who were married and had children, died in their twenties. The Cohns resided downtown on Flower Street and then near the University of Southern California, as well as owned a vacation home in Carlsbad in San Diego County.

Across 3rd Street was the impressive edifice built by capitalist Homer Laughlin and which housed the offices of Southern California Edison, but was best known, as the big vertical electric sign in the photo shows, as the home of Sid Grauman’s Million Dollar Theatre. The lower portion of the building displays some of the ornate carved figures and other ornamentation, including around the large arched entrance to the venue, with the edifice and much of that decoration still with us today.

Adjacent to the south is another structure built by Laughlin, who ran a New York City china pottery company before retiring and migrating to the Angel City in 1897. The Homer Laughlin Building was built quickly and the John B. Parkinson-designed edifice was the first to have steel reinforcements with its poured concrete floors and to be considered fireproof. The structure was opened in July 1898 and an early advertisement noted that it offered “unparalleled elevator, janitor, heating, electric lighting, hot and cold water service” as well as a “fire-proof vault; plenty of fresh air and direct sunshine in every room.”

A major tenant for about a dozen years, following the Benjamin F. Coulter dry goods store, was the second Ville de Paris store before the Grand Central Market took over the space in 1917 and it has remained there ever since and is a Los Angeles landmark. In 1905, an addition extended the structure to Hill Street to the west and was designed by Harrison Albright—among the early tenants was the Los Angeles Public Library, which moved to its current location two decades later.

Another vertical marquee, apparently on the structure adjacent to the south, was for “The Outlet Co.” Further down the street and at the southwest corner of Broadway and 4th Street was the Broadway Department Store building, completed in 1915 for the store’s owner Arthur Letts and designed by Parkinson and his partner George Edwin Bergstrom. Easily noticeable on that edifice, which the store occupied until 1973, is the projecting roof cornice. The heavily vandalized structure was purchased by the state and it opened in 1999 as the Junipero Serra State Office Building.

This photo is another remarkable visual document in the Homestead’s holdings for the continuing evolution in the development of downtown Los Angeles during the 1920s when further growth booms significantly altered the commercial landscape of the Angel City. We’ll look to share at least one other of the negatives from this acquisition as the 3rd Street view is particularly interesting, so keep an eye out for that in a future post!