WROUGHT METAL RAILINGS frame the staircases and run along the wall, leaving a great wide open space in the middle with which to admire the straight black lines of everything. Ornately patterned, these rails and the open elevators are like the icing atop this century-old building located on 3rd Street and Broadway in LA.
The ceiling is all of glass, and gives the space a natural glow, with the sun bleaching the places where it falls directly. Unlike any building in Los Angeles, the Bradbury Building has a charm that history did not need to add anything to, but even so, its story is as unique as is the architecture.
Mining tycoon Lewis Bradbury fired his original architect, only to hire one of the man’s draftsmen, named George Wyman. Wyman didn’t originally want to take the project, but he and his wife were spiritualists, and decided to try to see what the spirits were telling them to do. According to lore, they were meditating over what was similar to an Ouija board, and they received a message from Wyman’s brother, Mark, who had died at the age of 8, telling him to take on the project. His inspiration for the project was supposedly a science fiction book he had read, that depicted a building in the year 2000. The great irony comes now in the year 2000, when movies like 500 Days of Summer feature the gorgeous building as a model of great architecture in LA history.
-- Kimberly Dennis
(photo caption: steam-powered elevator, the bradbury building
photo credit: pink_fish13, flickr, creative commons)
