City Hall : Byzantine-Style L.A. Landmark Will Get a New Look With Renovation

It was the Daily Planet in the old “Superman” television series. It was destroyed by Martian invaders in the movie “War of the Worlds,” but somehow survived to portray the U.S. Capitol and the Vatican in other productions.

In real life, it has been the scene of bombings, riots, suicides and shouting matches. It also has played host to kings and queens--and the homeless.

Now, City Hall--perhaps Los Angeles’ most recognizable landmark--is the first project in a public-private effort to restore the city’s historic public buildings.

Scheduled to begin this spring, a $6-million face-lift--$1 million more than City Hall cost to build in 1928--includes illuminating the building at night and sprucing up the tower where, in the days before radar, a beacon shot a beam of light toward Los Angeles’ airport as an aid to pilots. The beacon, along with a light that blinked “L.A.” in Morse code, was turned off during World War II for fear it would attract enemy bombers.

Also planned as part of the renovation is a City Hall museum to display hundreds of gifts that the city has received, many from visiting dignitaries but others from ordinary people. The gifts--now often packed away in closets--range from a Shinto shrine, presented by Los Angeles’ sister city of Nagoya, Japan, to a magician’s wand, presented by performer Doug Henning.

“When Mayor Bradley waves this wand, may the smog and all other problems in Los Angeles vanish,” says the inscription.

Featuring a stepped, pyramidal tower, the Byzantine-style City Hall was--at 27 stories--the tallest building in Southern California until a municipal height limit was repealed in the late 1950s.

It is Los Angeles’ fourth City Hall, replacing a two-story brick building on Broadway, the site of which now holds a parking garage. The new City Hall was built across the street from where a one-story adobe building served as the first seat of city government from 1853 to 1884.

The builders used sand from every California county and water from each of the state’s 21 missions. The landscaping reinforced the local pride, containing a rich sprinkling of the city’s official flower--the bird of paradise.

According to Robert Winter’s and David Gebhard’s “A Guide to Architecture in Los Angeles,” the form of the building was influenced by Bertram Goodhue’s design for the Nebraska State Capitol, a monumental tower placed on a Beaux Arts base. “The top of the tower seems to be a ‘20s interpretation of what the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus must have looked like,” they wrote, referring to the landmark tomb on the Aegean Sea.

Concerned because the structure would be so tall in an earthquake-prone area and because facades made of terra cotta are subject to cracking under movement, the architects had the tower constructed with a compressible joint at each floor--just like a human spine--so that they could safely ride out the waves of an earthquake.

The safeguard has worked as planned in subsequent temblors. After each earthquake, building superintendent Joe Miller walks up 27 stories--he does not take the elevator for fear that it might get stuck--to check for leaks in two 5,000-gallon tanks in the tower, which provide water to the building.

While most people rush through City Hall--as they would through any office building--tending to their business with heads down, failing to notice the structure’s architectural and historical significance, Miller is one of those who relish the landmark’s obscure details. For him and other history buffs, the ghosts of City Hall come alive at every corner.

The building’s April 26, 1928, dedication--billed as the largest civic procession ever staged west of Chicago--featured a parade several miles long, including 32,000 marchers, among them gray-haired Civil War veterans, 34 bands, hundreds of floats and songs sung by Irving Berlin. Some of the windows in the new building were broken by the concussion from aerial bombs discharged during the dedication. President Calvin Coolidge capped off the festivities by pressing a telegraph key in the White House to light the tower beacon.

Shower Still There

A newspaper report trumpeted “one of the up-to-the-minute furnishings of Los Angeles’ new civic home--the shower for the mayor.” The shower is still there, and Mayor Tom Bradley occasionally uses it, an aide said.

“Flashlight photographs can be taken in the mayor’s office, as a special motor arrangement will quietly blow the flashlight smoke out of the room,” the article said.

Cuspidors were also purchased for each councilman, but they are no longer in use. A 1928 Times story noted that each councilman also got a telephone stand “so that he will not knock the telephone off the desk with his feet.”

“If a citizen should call his city councilman during the next 10 days and be told by his secretary that the municipal statesman is out, the probable cause is that the councilman is downtown shopping for furnishings for his office,” another article said.

In response to the questioning of the expenditures, one councilman asked indignantly, “You wouldn’t want us to move the old furniture into the new City Hall, would you?”

A 1928 manual for elevator operators instructed that there be “no one floor stops except for aged or injured people.”

An American flag originally flew from the top of City Hall, but it was moved to a ground-level pole when it kept getting tangled up in the revolving Morse code light.

It is around the corner from the 85-foot-high flagpole that the public--including thousands of schoolchildren and tourists who come for free weekday tours--enter City Hall.

The main Spring Street entrance is a gateway into civic history. The two large bronze doors feature sculptured panels commemorating events such as the arrival of the first Spanish expedition to Los Angeles in 1769 and the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913.

Inside the building, visitors are greeted by a holograph showing Mayor Tom Bradley holding a telephone. It was donated by a holograph company.

Next is the domed rotunda, where the body of Police Chief William Parker lay in state in 1966. “The floor of the rotunda, passages and vestibule consists of marble of many kinds, colors and forms, laid in geometric designs, producing a complete scheme of intricately shaped circular patterns, interlaced bands and checkered fields,” notes the 1928 Board of Public Works guide.

In the center of the floor, surrounded by marble columns, is a brass design of an old Spanish ship that might have once plied the Pacific.

Down the marble-lined corridor, the wooden doors to the city clerk’s office are carved with the symbols of the four governments that have had control over Los Angeles: The lion and castle of Spain, the eagle and serpent of Mexico, the grizzly bear of the California Republic and the Stars and Stripes of the United States. The symbols collectively make up the city seal.

In a dark hallway outside the city controller’s office is a badly tarnished plaque installed in 1941 commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Workman-Rowland expedition, the first large group of Americans to settle in Los Angeles. Painted on another ceiling are portraits of prominent figures in the discovery of California, such as Spanish explorers Juan Cabrillo, who entered Santa Monica Bay in 1542, and Gaspar de Portola, who led an expedition here in 1781.

Why some designs were chosen--such as the signs of the Zodiac painted on the ceiling outside the mayor’s office--is a mystery. “When I look at Zodiacs and some of those things, I sort of have the feeling those were pure decoration,” said Anthony T. Heinsbergen, whose late father helped decorate City Hall. “We have the tendency to analyze those kinds of things much more than they did then. Ornaments were ornaments for ornament’s sake. They didn’t always have a particular significance.”

Inside the cathedral-like council chamber, with its barrel-vaulted ceiling, are marble columns decorated with the seals of 48 states. Alaska and Hawaii joined the Union later.

The chamber has been the scene of real and fictional drama. Sheep were marched into it in the film “Chinatown” to protest the diversion of water from agriculture to serve Los Angeles’ growing population. Several years ago, two council members almost got into a fistfight there. More recently, it was the arena for a Dodger stadium peanut vendor, who demonstrated his skill by tossing bags to council members.

Former Councilman Art Snyder once helped in the performance of a magician, who was being honored by the council, by shooting a gun in the chamber. The magician--not the same one who gave the mayor his wand--caught the bullet . . . with his teeth.

In 1960, the chamber was ordered locked after meetings because of an invasion of cockroaches. The pests were attracted to crumbs left behind by city employees who used to eat their lunches there.

It was here in 1966 that the council voted to install automated water sprinklers on the City Hall lawn, a move intended to rout loiterers. Twenty years later, council members opened City Hall to the homeless as a shelter after several street people died from subfreezing temperatures.

Today, pigeons can occasionally be seen flying around the chamber during debates.

At the top of City Hall is the tower. The highest floor accessible to the public features an observation deck that once offered a panorama of the vast Los Angeles Basin and the Pacific Ocean, but the view now is partly obscured by nearby high-rises and smog.

A sign on a rarely used door to the very top of City Hall, off limits to the public, warns city employees to never go out alone “because if you are injured or suffer a heart attack, nobody would know you’re up here,” said Brookes Treidler of the General Services Department.

In the early 1950s, a carillon was carried up to the 24th floor, along with 400-watt amplifiers, so that the chimes of Christmas carols could be projected out into the city during the holiday season, audible up to three miles away. Also at that time of year, in the days before court decisions ruled out such practices, the lights of City Hall were left on at night to form a huge cross.

Project Restore, a nonprofit organization made up of business and civic leaders, was formed after Public Works Commissioner Edward J. Avila made some pleasant discoveries in 1985 while trying to upgrade the dreary chambers where his commission has met since the building opened. When the heavy drapes were removed for cleaning, Avila discovered that natural light cascaded into the room through the tall windows. And when black cord padding was pried off the walls, it revealed white pumice tiles that give the room and its vaulted ceiling added brightness.

‘All These Great Things’

“I’ve been walking around these halls for a long time, and suddenly I’ve started looking up,” Avila said. “I see all these great things on the ceiling.”

Project Restore is patterned after the nonprofit group that restored the Statue of Liberty, said Chairman Albert C. Martin Jr., son of one of the three architects who designed City Hall. The Los Angeles landmark is “a symbol equal in civic consciousness to the Statue of Liberty,” said the younger Martin, himself an architect.

So far, the group has raised about $1.5 million, with the largest contribution of $350,000 coming from the Community Redevelopment Agency, while a few hundred city employees have agreed to 50-cent deductions from their paychecks.

After City Hall, the restoration effort will move on to San Pedro and Van Nuys municipal buildings.

Pews Replaced

The first phase of the restoration involves returning wooden pews to the Board of Public Works’ meeting room. The pews were replaced years ago--no one knows what happened to them (Avila suspects that they are sitting in a church somewhere)--with chairs bolted to the floor.

The project includes repairing earthquake-caused cracks in the terra cotta covering the outside of City Hall. Also planned is the reinstallation of a giant chandelier that hung in the rotunda but was removed after the 1933 earthquake.

Project Restore officials also hope to create reproductions of the original wooden elevator cars. The city had one of the ornamental cars left, but an employee last year inadvertently sold it to a San Fernando Valley junk dealer, who is demanding $10,000 from the city to return it, according to Project Restore President Kathy Moret.

Souvenir Shop

In addition to the museum displaying gifts to the city, a shop is planned to sell souvenirs, such as plastic, miniature City Halls.

Under study is a shifting of City Council members’ desks so they face the audience. Now, the council’s horseshoe-shaped meeting desk has been positioned so that the lawmakers have their backs to citizens appearing before the body.

Moret goes rummaging through city warehouses when she hears about something that used to be in City Hall. That’s how she found the rotunda chandelier.

Not yet found is a device that was installed in the early ‘50s to measure atomic particles drifting into Los Angeles from nuclear test sites near Las Vegas.

However, the beacon that pointed its light toward what is now Los Angeles International Airport is still in storage. But no one can think of any use for it.