Skip to main content

A Monument to the Earthquake That Made Los Angeles

Support Provided By

| Photo: Gabriel Madrigal Photography| Flickr: Creative Commons License

The PacMutual Insurance building (at 6th and Olive) has been sold to a new team of real estate developers for an undisclosed price (probably about $60 million). They plan to turn the complex of three connected towers into a "marquee lifestyle commercial office space for Class A local, regional and national tenants."

I don't pretend to understand the developer babble of a "marquee lifestyle commercial" building, but the new owners seem nonetheless to have the right focus. (They are Nelson and Christopher Rising, former executives of MGP Office Trust, the city's biggest commercial landlord.)

The new owners see their turn-of-the-century building as both an architectural landmark and a good fit for tenants who aren't looking for generic office space. They expect to remove at least some of the 1980s drywall, dropped ceilings, and carpeting to reveal the building's brick walls, 14-foot ceilings, and concrete floors. Helpfully, the Los Angeles Conservancy is one of the building's current tenants.

Designed by John Parkinson and Edwin Bergstrom, the original, six-story tower of the Pacific Mutual Insurance building opened in 1908 with a heroic sculptural group, designed by Joseph Jacinto Mora, over the entrance.

The artist and the architects are themselves part of Los Angeles history. As a partnership (and later with their own architectural offices), Parkinson and Bergstrom designed many of the iconic buildings of early 20th century Los Angeles. Mora, though less well known today, was an artist, illustrator, and sculptor whose work often celebrated the West and its meld of cultures. In addition to his commission for the Pacific Mutual building, Mora also completed projects for the Herald-Examiner building and the Los Angeles Athletic Club.


Don't Miss This: Jo Mora's Humorously Detailed L.A. History Map from 1942


But there's even more history embedded in the PacMutual building -- the story of a tectonic shift in the state's center of economic power and one of the reasons why downtown Los Angeles is crowded today with 100-year-old office towers that have become the perches of loft dwellers.

The Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company made Los Angeles their headquarters following the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. The company's original building had been dynamited into rubble as a firebreak (hopeless, it turned out) to stop the city from burning. From those ruins, 20th century Los Angeles rose.

When the Pacific Mutual Insurance building opened in 1908, San Francisco lost one of its pioneering businesses, one of many that fled south after 1906. When the Panama Canal opened in 1914, Los Angeles was already the state's largest business hub. By 1924, Los Angeles was the commercial and industrial capitol of California. And for the rest of the century, Los Angeles would beat its old rival in population, volume of business transactions, and economic growth.

The renovated PacMutual Building is a monument of Los Angeles architecture, but even more, it's a monument to the catastrophic moment when earthquake and fire determined the future of two cities.

D. J. Waldie, author, historian, and as the New York Times said in 2007, "a gorgeous distiller of architectural and social history," writes about Los Angeles on KCET's SoCal Focus and 1st and Spring blogs.

Support Provided By
Read More
Gray industrial towers and stacks rise up from behind the pitched roofs of warehouse buildings against a gray-blue sky, with a row of yellow-gold barrels with black lids lined up in the foreground to the right of a portable toilet.

California Isn't on Track To Meet Its Climate Change Mandates. It's Not Even Close.

According to the annual California Green Innovation Index released by Next 10 last week, California is off track from meeting its climate goals for the year 2030, as well as reaching carbon neutrality by 2045.
A row of cows stands in individual cages along a line of light-colored enclosures, placed along a dirt path under a blue sky dotted with white puffy clouds.

A Battle Is Underway Over California’s Lucrative Dairy Biogas Market

California is considering changes to a program that has incentivized dairy biogas, to transform methane emissions into a source of natural gas. Neighbors are pushing for an end to the subsidies because of its impact on air quality and possible water pollution.
A Black woman with long, black brains wears a black Chicago Bulls windbreaker jacket with red and white stripes as she stands at the top of a short staircase in a housing complex and rests her left hand on the metal railing. She smiles slightly while looking directly at the camera.

Los Angeles County Is Testing AI's Ability To Prevent Homelessness

In order to prevent people from becoming homeless before it happens, Los Angeles County officials are using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to predict who in the county is most likely to lose their housing. They would then step in to help those people with their rent, utility bills, car payments and more so they don't become unhoused.