No. 3 – The Brock & Co Jewelers Building in Downtown Los Angeles
"Eastern architects go west" is a familiar story, but one which played out to beautiful effect in a building in DTLA that's very easy to miss.
Hello Readers – I’ll spare you all the usual blogger’s lament, except to say that I really do wish I were writing more of these! They are fun and I love the feedback I’ve gotten so far. Promise to give you more Local Notes content as the year rolls on.
Happily, I got to go to Dodger Stadium today to watch my Nationals lose the third of a three-game series and slink back east, well and truly swept. The loss didn’t bug me too much though, as going to Dodger Stadium means going downtown and going to downtown Los Angeles means getting to see some really excellent architecture, still standing from a different era of Angeleno development.
Anyone who’s been by the famous Olvera Street is familiar with the fact that Los Angeles used to consist entirely of what we today call downtown. Land speculation in the areas surrounding the old pueblo during the 1880s brought a mass of migrants, swelling LA’s population from its pre-American norm of ~10,000 people to 100,000 by 1896. In the twenty years that followed, the many-tentacled development of railways throughout the Southland would give the city more rail mileage than New York.
At the center of all that iron and all those people was the Historic Core of downtown, where booming economic fortunes spawned arcades of department stores, great canyons of banking houses, and a jewelers’ district, where George C. Brock set up Brock & Co. jewelers in 1903. By the 1920s, Brock was doing so well in the diamond trade that he signed a 99-year-lease at 515 W 7th St, and there asked the architects Dodd and Richards to build him a new corporate headquarters.
515 W 7th is a stunning building, even sitting squat as it does at only four stories tall. Indeed, its height sets it apart somewhat from its immediate neighbors – I find that its stature enhances the presentation of the whole thing, like a sprinter leaning forward to edge his opponents out at the finish line. Starting at bottom, the impression of iron frames and glass storefront is rather utilitarian, artfully set away from the shock yet to come above street-level. As we move up past the awning and into the mezzanine, with its lovely bronzed patina, we run for the first time into 515’s complicated web of columns and windows, inset into its facade as a painting into a gilded frame.
The three stories of curvy pilaster breaking the glass space is striking, reminiscent of what others call the Churrigueresque style – others still refer to it merely as “Ultra Baroque”. The sinuous broken pediment which forms the top of the facade offers one last thrill for the eye, reveling in the full gaudiness of its curves.
The man responsible for the building’s design was William J Dodd, an architect of Midwestern extraction who was trained in the offices of William LeBaron Jenney, builder of the first skyscraper. Dodd spent a remarkable quarter-century in Louisville, there and through other states back east building beautiful houses in the Beaux Arts style.
In 1912, he quit Kentucky for Los Angeles. In truth, no one may be more responsible for the way the south end of DTLA looks than Dodd – for the next twenty years he would have his fingers in most of the city’s developing cookie jars. In 1917, he built an addition to the famous Brockman Building, then built Coulter’s department store a block east.
His Henning Building went up right next to Coulter’s, and the Huntsberger-Mennell Building popped up the same year on the 400 block. He finished his annus mirabilis on 7th St with the construction of the great Ville de Paris department store.
Dodd had a hand, early in his California period, in helping the great architect Julia Morgan to build William Randolph Hearst a new home for his Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. Works like the Herald-Examiner Building show off some of the decorative flair Dodd would bring to the Brock building.
That decorative urge seems to have been everywhere in the SoCal air at this time – the revival of the Ultra Baroque in California is in fact credited to the architects responsible for the Panama-California Exposition of 1915, Bertram Goodhue and Carleton Winslow. The pair chose a decidedly more Spanish style both to honor the history of San Diego, where the fair took place, as well as to stand apart from the Beaux Arts monuments so common of other fairs going on at the time. Think of Daniel Burnham’s White City in Chicago, home of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, and you’ll have a good feeling for what the organizers were rebelling against.
Funny enough, it was at that Panama-California Exposition where the modern history of San Diego was set out: Franklin Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, gave a press conference from Balboa Park where he described the new naval base set for construction in San Diego Bay. While their permanent structures were under construction, the Navy would use some features from the Exposition still standing, as would the San Diego Zoo, which cobbled together some poor leftover critters from the exotic corners of the fair to use for their first exhibits.
For all these reasons, Dodd was a natural architectural call for the jewelry shop to make. Headquarters in hand, Brock pere went on to make his little concern Los Angeles’ biggest diamond dealer. Celebrities of a species we’ve all forgotten now, like Mary Pickford, frequented its 7th St halls.
Ad men combined Brock goods with great copy to make timeless ads like the one below. Per one source, Tiffany’s actually approached Brock with the intention to merge their businesses, but the deal fell through.
Brock & Co even had a minor place in California legal history, as they sought to have a 1937 tax assessment reduced, arguing that much of their valuable stock was not in Los Angeles but actually in Hawaii and therefore not subject to the duties set by the LA County Board of Supervisors. They lost at the California Supreme Court.
George Brock retired in the 1960s and the Clifton family, who ran a network of popular cafeterias, bought the building out from him to install one of their franchises. Clifton’s Silver Spoon Cafeteria operated until 1997 – Jack Kerouac mentions eating at one of their LA locations in On The Road.
After that, the building briefly fell into disrepair, victim of the utter hollowing-out of DTLA in the years following the 1960s. History picked it back up as part of the vaunted Downtown LA revival in the late aughts, when a restauranteur refurbished its second floor and opened Seven Grand, a whiskey bar. Heads swiveled apace as young creatives poured into the watering hole, and a buzzy Mexican restaurant, Más Malo, followed the whiskey bar into operation a few years later. Network producers apparently liked the old styling of the Brock building’s interior too – Scandal and Parks & Rec both have scenes filmed there.
Más Malo met an abrupt end sometime in 2018, and the pandemic has meant that Seven Grand and Bar Jackalope, its speakeasy, have been shut for some time now. But I have faith that the life contained within William Dodd’s otherworldly Spanish terra cotta and marble creation, dropped into the middle of what was once an old pueblo by the mid-century California king of diamonds, will rise again.