More Days of Summer

I mentioned the Continental Building last night, the movie (500) Days of Summer finishes at another very famous downtown LA building. The Bradbury building has been featured in everything from Blade Runner to Pushing Daisies. Here's a photo I took when I visited the building a few years ago.

This building was built in 1893, Broadway at 3rd St (so New York sounding). Lewis Bradbury was a mining millionaire, as an office building. Bradbury didn't live to see it completed, but man is it special. The wrought-iron seems very of the period, like something that might have been on the Titanic. It makes the building feel really fancy. The elevators are super boss too, cage elevators, which have a doohickey at the top which spins to raise the lift. 

Combine that with the glass roof, and it really makes the Bradbury Building feel magical inside. 

As a bonus, here's the Million Dollar Theater, where Tom and Summer go to see the Graduate, and then Tom sees the idiosyncratic French Film. 

The million dollar theater is one of the first movie palaces, built in 1918. It was the first built by Sid Grauman, most famous for the Chinese Theater in Hollywood, as well as the Egyptian Theater. When it was built, downtown was still the entertainment destination in Los Angeles, but later Grauman's theaters moved it to Hollywood. 

Of course, this was followed by the building of suburban movie houses, with Hollywood mostly used for premiers. And even that wasn't to last, as the practice of slow outward distribution of movies was scrapped for pre-sold Blockbusters that open simultaneously across the country.