Charnock Block/Pershing Hotel

I overheard a Facebook conversation: "How's the new S.R.O. on 5th and Main working out for the neighborhood?"  Lots of opinions about drugs and drug dealers, people passed out or screaming on the street, the need for housing, housing first, the police, the city councilman and who's responsible for what.  I laughed because the "new SRO" has not only been around longer than most downtowners have lived downtown, but before they were born.  Long ago, it was a real estate office, but it's functioned as an SRO since the 1950s, if not earlier.

I knew the name "Charnock" since I was a small child.  Charnock Road ran through the little neighborhood of Mar Vista where I grew up.  It was the main street to take you into Palms, before Palms Blvd was paved and the school in the middle of it was split in two.

Here's Charles Charnock, all dressed up for his picture when he got to L.A. in the 1880's, just in time for the real estate boom.  He was born in 1836, the seventh of the ten children of John and Sophia Charnock of England.  He came with his parents and seven of his siblings to Canada in 1846 .  Of the two siblings who didn't come to America, one went to Australia and the other died by drowning at a young age.  Poor Sophia, his mother, "succumbed after three years to the hardships of a pioneer life" and died in Canada. The hardier members of the family moved on to Wisconsin, where they all set about claiming land. With a brief interruption for the Civil War, the Charnocks continued to be involved in real estate.  Oldest brother John James Charnock was the most successful of them, buying part of the Rancho La Ballona.  Charles came to live there too, and by 1883 L.A.Times shows Charles buying land in Pomona and Hemet as well in as the city of Los Angeles.  John James is the one the road is named after.  He was a confirmed bachelor, but when he died in 1909, a woman came forward waving a forged document that said she was his wife and therefore entitled to most of his great wealth.  After she was exposed as a forger, a bunch of the siblings, nieces and nephews all started suing each other.  Charles Charnock, the one who built the Charnock Block, was dead by then, but the other relatives wanted to prevent his adopted daughter from inheriting anything.  Charles had been a wealthy man himself when he broke ground for Charnock block Apr. 23, 1889.  He didn't realize that the real estate boom that made him rich had come to an end. He and his wife lived there a few short years, where she collected donations for the Ladies Aid Society.  

Charnock had sold the Charnock Block by the time of his death in 1907, but he still had a beautiful house in Boyle Heights.  The house where he lived was eventually torn down to build a school. but the church he attended, Euclid Heights Methodist Church still stands as La Casa del Mexicano. 

Main street was living up to its name in the 1880's, as the civic and commercial buildings expanded into the residential area. Main St. looked like this in 1885, before Charnock built his place.  The building on the right was the Federal Building, constructed in 1883.  

As time went on, Broadway became the main street for shopping and entertainment, while Spring became the "Wall St. of the West." David Belasco left his once fashionable theater on old Main Street  to open a new one on Hill.  The former Belasco became the Follies, a burlesque house. The Charnock Block became the Pershing Hotel, and its next door neighbor, the Roma, was home to the World Museum of Human Oddities.  It became the main street of "sin."  

The World Museum was regarded as a nuisance by the Downtown Business Men's Association, and was raided more than once. Street barkers were arrested for advertising on the street.  Mrs. Mary Faser was unable to run her boarding house at the Roma Hotel because the noise drove her boarders away.  Her physical health was also affected, according to her testimony in court. 

In the 1920's or earlier, the Charnock Block became known as the Pershing Hotel.  The Pershing Hotel and its inhabitants survived a fire in 1952. There was only one injury, a fall down stairs attributed to loss of consciousness due to smoke inhalation.  The structure also survived the slum clearance, building code enforcement and modernization of the 1950s, 60's and 70s.  

  In 1955,  Helga Bender Henry wrote Mission on Main Street, a book about the history of the Union Rescue Mission, a venerable institution.  It occupied Main at 2nd Street from 1926 until 1994, when it was moved to make way for the "revitalization" of Spring St.   She described Main St. 

"Some people apologize for their neighbors; Union Rescue Mission picked hers: loan banks, flop houses, taverns, burlesque halls.  Here congregate the forgotten men and women, object of the mission’s search and remembrance.

In the “City of the Angels” Skid Row comprises approximately ten blocks.  Beginning at First and Main, it pushes south to Fifth and across to Towne Avenue.  It’s habitués come from everywhere with a destination of nowhere.  Day after day, night after night, thousands upon thousands repeat their established cycles from bar to bar, doorway to doorway, gutter to gutter, shuffling the tread of defeated yesterdays and hopeless tomorrows.  In this world of the living dead, dragging feet rasp dully along the pavements in ever-deepening grooves of sin and vice.  Shoulders stooped, eyes hollows and averted, faces drawn and unsmiling, the patrons of Main Street, whatever the diversity of background and experience, have one common bond: despair."

The Esotouric Bus goes to Main St. too.

For all that, the corner of 5th and Main didn't look so bad in the 1930s, when the Owl Drug Co. occupied the Charnock Block,  Lorry's Men's Shop doesn't look so bad either even though the place next door is a pawn shop, or "Loan Bank" in Helga Bender Henry's parlance. 

It took until the 1980's for officials to realize that the disappearing Single Room Occupancy Hotels might actually fill a need for society in general as well as the individuals who lived in them.  After decades of destruction, a moratorium on demolition was declared in 1987.  In 1989, All Saints Church of Pasadena and  Baeck  Temple of Bel Aire, along with corporate philanthropists, formed the Skid Row Housing Trust to fix these old places up, under the direction of Alice Callaghan.  They were not thinking in terms of preservation at the time, but just thought it would be cheaper to fix up the old ones than to build new ones.  Their first project was the Pennsylvania which later became the Genesis, and the second was the Pershing and the Roma, combined into one place.  At that time, the Pershing was described as a battered three story green building.  One of the occupants said the owners just went "around collecting rent. That's all they care about."  The bathroom was down the hall, and the showers were all in a row with no partitions. By May 1990, the renovations were complete, with no more "gang showers." 80 tenants had moved in, and there was a waiting list.

The plan had been to rent out the ground floor for retail outlets in order to finance the low cost housing upstairs.

It was not all smooth sailing though.  By November 1991, the hotel had gone through 5 managers.  "Management is Hell," said Alice Callaghan.

Mar Vista, the neighborhood of my childhood, had formed an historical society, and I attended a few meetings.  That's where I learned of the lawsuits proceeding from  the death of John J. Charnock.  Wait a minute, I thought, isn't there a Charnock Block described in Los Angeles, an Architectural Guide, by David Gebhard and Robert Winter.  I borrowed that classic book from a friend over ten years ago and have yet to return it.  They described the Peshing Hotel as a "rare late nineteenth century commercial building......Five classical decorated oriel bays and a corner bay tower punctuate the facade."

Oriel bay windows do not reach the ground, but are supported by corbels and brackets.  Here is one of the five.

This is the corner bay tower.

 I found the Pershing Hotel at 5th and Main and photographed it in 2009.

Here is the entrance.  That's my elbow on the right side of picture, with a man looking very curiously at my camera.  Rules are posted.  If you are not a guest you can't come in.

The idea of having retail outlets on the ground floor had apparently not worked.

One day in 2013, I found some sort of construction going on.

I snapped this from the car window because there was no place to park.  By then, its historic value was appreciated, but the interior was considered inadequate.  Because the two hotels, the Pershing and the Roma, had been joined cheaply, the second floor was at two different levels.  It was described as being like a rabbit warren or an Escher painting.  The exterior was carefully preserved while the interior was gutted, with selected parts saved for re-use.  “It’s a holy old building; you can’t approach it lightly,” architect Wade Killefer was quoted in the Sept. 18, 2013 Downtown News.

There had been some trouble getting the project started when Gov. Brown closed the California Community Redevelopment Agency.  Today's C.R.A. is a local organization.  It was taking shape in May 2014.  The formerly homeless started moving in early 2015, according to the Mar. 19, 2015 Downtown News.  

The architecture was done by Killefer Flammang Architects.   Westport Construction Co. built it.  Adam's Gallery did the stained glass restoration.

I took this picture looking up 5th St. when the copper was gleaming in the cloudy sunshine, and these, a month later.  

The New Pershing opened officially on July30, 2015

Reaganomics on Spring St. and Skid Row

The building is named after Ronald Reagan. It was opened with ceremony Oct. 27, 1990.  The ex-president himself showed up and was handed an oversized key. "I wish all who enter here good luck," he said.  Then-governor George Deukmejian bragged that the 850,000-square-foot structure--state government's largest office building--was constructed on time and within its $106-million budget. There were protestors too, carrying signs with posters of Robbie Conal's painting "Contra-Diction" for Reagan's role in the Iran-Contra scandal.

The building was a project of the Community Redevelopment Agency, intended to improve Spring St. "I think it is a tremendous asset for that area," C.R.A. chairman James M. Wood said. "Nothing is going to improve North Broadway, Spring and Main like this building."  He forgot to mention that it was the C.R.A.'s Bunker Hill Project that had lured the banks away from their traditional locations on Spring Street which had been known as the "Wall Street of the West." I should be fair: the Bunker Hill Project began well before Wood's tenure as C.R.A. chief.

Like many buildings of the era, it was heavily secured against the rising tide of people for whom the economy had not "trickled down." Leon Whitson in the May 12, 1991 L.A.T.  referred to the building as "Fort Ronnie." His description of the interior was attractive, but I've never been inside.  "Security is a prime concern," he wrote. "Employees who arrive by car will enter the building from underground garages, ensuring their safety and their isolation from the street...... One new building cannot change the fact that the hub of the downtown business community has moved irrevocably west to Bunker Hill. Even a street-friendly architectural masterpiece would not overcome the drawbacks of a location on the edge of urban desolation, and the Ronald Reagan State Office Building is far from friendly....Fort Ronnie may effectively defend itself from its surroundings, but it fails to send out a clear message of official optimism in Spring Street's revival."

 I thought it wasn't too ugly, until I compared it with the old state building, a 1932 W.P.A. project.

The old state building at 217 S. 1st. St. had been damaged in the 1971 earthquake, but it was still in use until 1973.  It was demolished in 1976, over the protests of preservationists.  It served as a temporary public park while the plan was to rebuild on the site. After it was demolished in 1976, it was used as a public park, with plans to rebuild on the location. In 1979, the C.R.A. had chosen a different location for the new building, and by 1982 they chose the current location at Spring St.  It was the fourth they had considered.  2600 state employees were to be relocated there from 31 locations around the city, and more space would be leased out to generate income. It was supposed to bring shoppers to Spring St. as well as serve as office space.

The old location is still vacant.

Here's another story about the old location/

Construction of the Ronald Reagan State Building began in 1988 and was completed in October 1990.  

George Kalebdjian, manager of a clothing store less than a block away, agreed the state building would help the area. But he said merchants will be at a disadvantage until the city does something to rid the area of street people who frighten away customers according to the L.A. times 1990 

He probably didn't know that the C.R.A. had been working to get the mission to another location for several years and that construction would begin at San Julian within the year.  

The mission was not exactly welcomed with open arms at the new location, either.

The Union Rescue Mission was not far from the new building site.  It is the oldest and largest of the rescue missions in downtown L.A. The Mission's location on Main and 2nd was at least a block away from the skid row "containment zone" that had been established in the late 1970s.  The Mission got its start in1891in canvas tents  and a gospel wagon under the name  Pacific Rescue Mission.  It moved to Main St. the location of city hall in  It was and is the oldest and largest of the rescue missions. Turkey dinners on Thanksgiving were and still are a long-standing, well known tradition.  Thousands who were down on their luck took shelter there over the decades.

1983 was the year that persons with mental illness began to outnumber alcoholics on skid row, according to the LAT.  Reagan has been blamed for closing the mental hospitals.  Persons with mental illness were to be cared for in their communities, he said, but made no provision for any such care.   1984 was the year the crack epidemic made the news. In the 1970's, cocaine was "nature's way of telling you you had too much money." That completely changed when crack became widely distributed, with help from Oliver North and the CIA.  

1984 was the year the C.R.A. began to pressure the Union Rescue Mission to find another location, father from the future state building, and deeper into the center of skid row.  That "Mission on Main St." which had been there since 1926, was too frightening for the delicate sensibilities of state employees.    May 6, 1984 L.A.Times reported that Lee Holthaus, director of the U.R.M. did not want to move, but realized that it might be unavoidable. "As soon as the state building is approved", he said, "we'll just be in the way."  

In 1989, the C.R.A. agreed to pay URM 6.5 MILLION DOLLARS moving expenses, if they would move to 517 S. San Julian St. at the location of an unused factory.  Executive director George Caywood hoped the move would allow the mission to serve more people in a more compassionate way, but was appalled at the hostility toward the very poor. Mike Neely, head of the Homeless Outreach Program, said there is more need for low income housing than for shelter beds, a situation that continues to this day.  Charles Woo, chairman of the Central City East Association, a group of area business owners, complained that the move would affect property values.  Toy importers and fish processors had been moving to the land left vacant by several decades of "slum clearance."  Woo saw another form of discrimination at work. "Why should the Union Rescue Mission be offensive to state employees yet be acceptable to the blue collar women and men working in Central City East?" he asked. Other skid row service providers were concerned about the concentration of services in a small area.  

Construction began with a dedication ceremony in Jul 1991 and was completed in 1994.

  

The parking and delivery entrance is on San Pedro.  You see pedestrians, as well as tents and shopping carts, on San Julian, and trucks on San Pedro. It was designed that way to calm the fears of the local business owners. This is the respectable entrance, where employees, administrators and visiting dignitaries come it.  Apparently San Pedro St. claims a higher degree of respectability than San Julian, although it's still skid row.

St. Vibiana's Cathedral was its next door neighbor. 

The plans were to build "Plaza St. Vibiana," a pedestrian space and complex of low rise housing and commercial structures south of the cathedral.  Before that could happen, St. Vibiana's was damaged in the 1994 earthquake, and a long debate between the Catholic Church and historic preservationists began.  The old cathedral building was preserved as a wedding and performance video, and a new cathedral was built at a different site.   Now, February 18, 2015, I read that a housing complex will break ground here.

The former building was dismantled in Mar 1995.

This is what Main St. looks like now.

Vibiana is the one that's still there, and it's not the same, either.  Once it was St. Vibiana's Cathedral.  Now its just Vibiana, a venue for weddings, concerts and other fancy events.  

The interesting building with the palm trees appears to be a parking structure--employees only--but employees of what?  I don't know.

Spring St. had lovely old architecture, but didn't regain its vitality until the adaptive re-use ordinance of 1999. A new generation moved into the office spaces turned apartments, and patronized the shops and restaurants of their ground floors.

They take pictures of each other.

Dogs and trees have also played their part in revitalizing Spring St.

  

Did the construction of the state building and the relocation of the Union Rescue Mission have anything to do with it?  I don't know, but on 5th St. between Spring and Main, you can buy Skid Row souvenirs with your unhealthy soda.

I like to think that the younger generation looks at the needy with compassion, rather than the hatred and fear that forced the Union Rescue Mission's relocation.

What They're Building Now

AVA Apartments is leasing now as they put the finishing touches on this development at 2nd and Los Angeles Streets in Little Tokyo.  I wondered who Ava was and learned that its Avalon Bay Communities, a big developer with a lot of buildings in the states of the East, West and Gulf Coasts, but none in Wisconsin, Nebraska or Missouri.  It looks just like a lot of what is being built these days.  According to AVAs website, currently available 1 bedroom apartments cost from $2,180 to 2,864 per month.

I wondered what these sculptural doodads were.

In my perverse mind, I thought of canine urinary stations.

 However, neither Buddy, the Golden Retriever about to cross the street, nor the two Corgis I saw earlier were interested.  I'll go there one evening, because there real function seems to be as light reflectors.  

Dogs are welcome at the AVA, and their owners are provided with conveniences.

They say they have a dog spa, whatever that is.  

Here's another view of the project.

It's not completely gray, and might even be a nice place to live. It got good reviews on Yelp.

It's just too bad the people on the sidewalk in front of Baba Perfumes, next door, can't afford to live there.  I don't think the man sitting on the fire hydrant in the first picture can either, and I know I can't.

I went back one evening in January to see those "sculptural things" after dark.

Although the AVA opened in December 2014, the lower floor, where the retail is supposed to be, is still empty, according to this Curbed L.A. article.