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Monday, March 8, 2010 – In Better Times
Enough of Hollywood and the beaches – here's the Spring Street Financial District – the Wall Street of the West. Twenty-three financial structures – elaborate rococo banks and such, including the city's first skyscraper, and three elegant hotels, all located along a stretch of South Spring Street from just north of Fourth and just south of Seventh. The place was hopping from 1900 through 1920 and beyond. And then it wasn't. Everything moved elsewhere. Now it's a historical district, and the beautiful old buildings have gone condo. But in the first half of the Twentieth Century, this stretch of Spring Street was the financial center of Los Angeles.
The street can also claim credit as the birthplace of the motion picture business in Los Angeles, as, in 1898, Thomas Edison filmed a 60-second thing called "South Spring Street Los Angeles California" here – he mounted a giant camera on a wagon to film the action along South Spring Street – streetcars, bicycles and horse-drawn wagons traveling down the street. Perhaps that was the problem. The movie business can ruin everything.
Here's the Hellman Building, housing the Banco Popular – 1902, Alfred F. Rosenheim – 354 South Spring Street –
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The Hotel El Dorado (originally the Stowell Hotel) – 1913, Frederick Noonan – 416 South Spring Street – and shortly after it opened, Charlie Chaplin lived at the Stowell, which he said was "a middle-rate place but new and comfortable." Yeah, well, whatever - Frederick Noonan seemed to like flowers.
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The Alexandria Hotel – 1906, John Parkinson – 210 West Fifth Street at Spring Street – and along with the griffins, it had a Palm Court with a stained glass dome, and it was the most luxurious hotel in Los Angeles, until the Biltmore opened in the twenties. Then it feel apart, But once you might run into Mae West, Humphrey Bogart, Rudolph Valentino, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Sarah Bernhardt, Enrico Caruso or Jack Dempsey here. Charlie Chaplin kept a suite here and did improvisations in the lobby, where Tom Mix sometimes rode his horse – and where D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks met in 1919 to form United Artists. And Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson stayed here, as did King Edward VIII. But by the fifties it had become a transient hotel, with the Grand Ballroom used as a training ring for third-rate boxers. Now it's apartments. Ah well.
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Other façades in the neighborhood –
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All text and photos unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 - Alan M. Pavlik
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