THE BUILDING TIME FORGET

For the past two decades, the grand entrance to the wretched Higgins Building at 2nd and Main streets has served the people of downtown Los Angeles largely as a garbage can. Behind its rusted security gate, beneath the tarnished gilded ceiling, lie a dozen Styrofoam cups, a baby bottle deprived of its nipple, a filthy straw basket with a matted handle of twisted rope, a disposable syringe and about 700 smashed cigarette butts.

Once, when L.A.’s population numbered no more than 320,000, when Main Street spilled forth with fine hotels and moneyed tourists and boasted the city’s best social clubs and theaters and the terminus to the world’s most elaborate trolley system, the Higgins Building towered above all. Dwarfing a dozen lesser brick edifices, impervious to conflagrations and earthquakes, it seemed to challenge the very sky in all its reinforced concrete splendor--a monument to some endlessly confident future in a city that bulldozes the past. Now it has seen its own oblivion.

The 10-story beaux-arts building retains a strange dignity, an almost ridiculous pride in this state of near-total annihilation. Blackened streaks ooze onto its sandstone-finished facade; skeletal blinds flap against cracked panes in the breeze. From the street, you can just make out the ancient fluorescent fixtures suspended from the sagging ceiling tiles. A two-tone portable toilet, shoved against the Main Street side to discourage people from urinating against the building, has been only a partial success.

After too many vandals broke too many padlocks, after the brass doorknobs were stolen and all the copper wiring was torn away, the owners welded the security gate shut, sealing the entrance to the building like the muzzle of some cruel dog. Two oblong gashes are large enough to throw cups, cigarette butts and a baby bottle through but are too small to permit them to be removed. Not 10 feet behind the gate, the lobby is enveloped in darkness.

Most passersby bound for the Los Angeles Times, one block to the west, or City Hall, two blocks to the north, don’t stop to wonder how the majestic building came to be so thoroughly thrashed and beaten. There is no shortage of these tragedies in what used to be L.A.’s vital core, and, besides, the foul odor is enough to make the knees wobble. So they quicken their pace, they suck in their breath, they avert their eyes toward the dusty sidewalk or the sluggish traffic, never taking in the building’s facade, its smudged windows like hundreds of aghast mouths, its crumbling columns and naked flagpole on the roof proclaiming its vanished self-importance.

As a garbage can, the Higgins Building has formidable competition at the intersection of 2nd and Main. Across the street, trash has been strewn about the once-consecrated steps of St. Vibiana’s Cathedral, in plain view of its fractured cupola. A concrete barrier, deployed past the sidewalk to prevent the homeless from sleeping beside the forsaken house of worship, is a breakwater for sodden cardboard and clothes. Even the enormous crater where the Union Rescue Mission once stood has become a grassy landfill.

The Higgins Building is not the most expensive garbage can on the market. The latest L.A. County assessment values the land it squats on at $397,902--a suspiciously low amount that can be explained by Proposition 13 limits on property-tax increases. More resistant to explanation is the appraisal of the building itself at a mere $136. That’s a steep decline from the $400,000 (about $6.4 million in 1997 dollars) that it cost copper magnate Thomas Higgins to erect it in 1910. The assessment might baffle its current owners: two downtown sewing machine businessmen and the embattled attorney for Death Row Records mogul Marion “Suge” Knight.

On this summer afternoon, only the pigeons have privileged access to the building’s upper floors. They pace nervously along its sills and lintels, wheel wildly around its heroic Renaissance-style cornice, brush wings against its concrete bunches of ornamental fruit. The pigeons have no need for telephone or elevator service, potable water or working flush toilets or electricity. They can inflict no more willful damage here than they would upon any other nesting place. Is it any wonder that the Higgins Building, so violated for so long, has welcomed them as its sole tenants?

*

A photograph of the Higgins Building shows it under construction during the summer of 1910. The candy-cane striped awnings are not yet hung over its windows; the four-story sign has not yet been affixed to its northwest corner. Shielding her head with a frilly parasol, the lady in the floor-length Victorian dress and high collar trails dust as she strolls across Main Street. Men in bowler hats observe the workers applying the finishing touches to the building’s 2nd Street entrance. A pair of mules are parked at the curb, content at no longer having to haul a load of marble slabs or L.A. River sand.

“Absolutely fire and earthquake proof throughout,” trumpeted the pre-opening brochure. The Higgins Building would contain “every approved modern device for the comfort and safety of tenants.” Its “wholesome and healthful” water would be shunted through purification filters in its sub-basement. Even the conflicting technologies of the early 1900s would be taken into account: Higgins would provide his tenants both AC and DC electrical currents and wiring for Home and Sunset telephone systems, as well as soon-to-be-obsolete telegraph service.

The grand entrance was swathed in marble. Three passenger elevators of the hydraulic-plunger variety, “the safest type known to the ablest engineers of today,” sped to upper floors. In a time before air conditioning and cheap artificial light, the building was designed around a monumental open-air shaft that allowed sunshine and ventilation to pierce the offices of its inner core.

With the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe rail terminals five minutes away at 5th and Central, Main Street had established itself as the first major thoroughfare tourists and immigrants reached as they arrived in Los Angeles. Hotels like the Van Nuys, the Rosslyn and the New Denizen already presided over Main, while most new office construction had settled on Spring Street, the “Wall Street of the West,” so that even in 1910, Main Street was not an ideal site for such a colossal office building. But the owner of the Higgins Building had always been inclined to take risks.

*

Thomas Higgins Seriously Sick,” the Times’ front-page headline warned in April of 1916: “Aged founder of great estate is confined to his bed.” By that date, the multimillionaire miner and real estate developer had accumulated such enormous wealth and property that he was paying the third-largest tax assessment in California. Higgins recovered from his unidentified illness to live another four years. Leaving his sick bed, he decided to write a long-lost cousin a letter about “my chequered life.”

He was born in Ireland in 1846, “raised up as a child during the years of the awful famine in that ill-fated country.” Immigrating through New York, he drifted to Chicago. Devoid of education or connections, he worked at the docks but found the work “heavy and laborious.” Higgins roamed aimlessly through Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana, then took to mining on the frontier. When he reached Bisbee, Ariz., in 1879, only five other prospectors had staked claims. Unlike gold, copper could not be extracted by panning in a river. Higgins couldn’t afford mechanical drilling equipment, so he drove a tunnel 650 feet into a hill by hand. Finally, after the panic of 1893, he found some investors, and, as he modestly put it, “my achievements exceeded my most sanguine expectations. After a long and tedious struggle, I won.”

Higgins sold his mining property for $750,000 and left for Los Angeles in August of 1902. “My homeless wanderings,” he wrote, “were now at an end.” In L.A., he gambled some of his fortune on downtown real estate. By 1905, he had finished the brick and mortar Hotel Bisbee on East 3rd Street, between Main and Los Angeles streets, now a ramshackle $65-a-week rooming house called the St. George. Around that time, he also secured a sprawling tract on the southwest corner of 2nd and Main and commissioned architect A. L. Haley to begin work on the enormous office building that would bear his name.

According to John Crandell, a downtown-L.A. historian, Higgins may have counted on an expansion of the Spring Street office district eastward onto Main Street. “It didn’t happen,” Crandell says. “The combination of theaters and office buildings paralleled over to Broadway, rather than onto Main.” The elaborate cinemas slated for Broadway starting in 1910 would not only eclipse Main’s smaller theaters and vaudeville stages but their incorporation into large office buildings would pull the downtown’s center ever westward. The Higgins Building would mark the end of Main’s truncated 20th century construction boom.

*

Although there is no evidence that any windows were blown out of the Higgins Building on Oct. 1, 1910, the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building at 1st Street and Broadway would lure to town its most famous tenant. “We rented a whole floor,” Clarence Darrow recalled tersely in his autobiography, “in one of the large office buildings.” Darrow may have been too preoccupied with the defense of alleged dynamiters James and John McNamara to take notice of the marble-lined hallways or wholesome filtered water. His co-counsel, Job Harriman, had already leased space; the Higgins Building would serve as Harriman’s headquarters when he won the 1911 L.A. mayoral primary as the Socialist-Labor nominee and lost the general election in the wake of Darrow’s plea bargain with prosecutors.

Capitalists and church bureaucrats also moved in. In August 1911, General Petroleum rented Room 402, when Fords and Arrows still jostled with horse-drawn wagons and streetcars at the corner of 2nd and Main; over the next three decades, it would expand to take over most of the building. The Catholic archdiocese put its administrative offices and its lawyer in the building, which afforded such a fine view of St. Vibiana’s. Grand chains such as Karl’s Shoes and the Owl Drug Co. leased retail space, catering to the throngs that spilled out of trolleys bound for the Pacific Electric Building down the street.

But in 1926, the Union Rescue Mission began providing faith, food and emergency lodging on Main between 2nd and 3rd. By the late 1930s, Main Street was sliding toward Skid Row. With the construction of the new Union Station opposite Olvera Street in 1939--well to the north of the Higgins Building--the boulevard was permanently stripped of its tourist trade. The formerly grand hotels were a ready housing stock for the homeless. By 1949, the Red Cars were well on their way to extinction.

*

That spring of 1949 was a thrill-packed season for the General Petroleum Popularity Queens, with jaunts to Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo Club in Las Vegas and an all-day cruise to Catalina. The seven smiling ladies also toured the company’s steaming Torrance oil refinery and its spotless Wilmington pipeline station.

But none of these diversions could compare to the culmination of their goodwill mission--on a roof high above South Flower Street. The plumes of their fashionable hats jutting to attention or curling into mischievous corkscrews, the Queens were joined not only by General Petroleum president R. L. Minckler, but by L.A. Mayor Fletcher Bowron and California Gov. Earl Warren. They were all standing on the largest office building constructed in Southern California to that date, a custom-built 504,000 square-foot behemoth occupying a full city block. High above the traffic, the company’s flying red horse--a precursor to the Mobil Pega- sus--galloped and flapped its neon wings.

From Room 402, General Petroleum had conquered almost the entire 10 floors of the Higgins Building, but even that had not been enough. “The family kept growing,” Minckler said, “until the old home just wouldn’t hold all of us.”

The week before the dedication, the Higgins Building disgorged its contents. Every night, a deluge of desks, file cabinets and water coolers spilled out of the yawning front doors. Over a stack of shipping crates, the keys were ceremonially handed over to Albert L. Ott, who represented L.A. County, the building’s next owner and occupant--and possibly the last occupant the building will ever have.

Reminiscing from her Chico home, Marian Black, 89, savors the glory of that day. “We were so thrilled to get into the building,” says the former General Petroleum secretary. “We loved every bit about it and everyone was as happy as they could be.”

She was equally excited about getting out of the Higgins Building. “The area,” she says, “was kind of bad.” Each morning, she’d see the people sprawled on Main Street sidewalks. “They even had a dead cat here and there.” After work, she’d turn her back on Main’s squalor, bound for the Broadway bus or for shopping at the May Co. or Bullocks downtown. Built less than 40 years before, the building already struck her as a dinosaur. “Well, it seemed to me,” she says, “it was pretty old then.”

As Main Street declined, as its fashionable stores became pawnshops and its modest movie houses opted for porn, the Higgins Building continued to live its charmed life. L.A. County had purchased the building to serve as the headquarters of its Bureau of Engineers. For a quarter-century of tremendous expansion, every county geological survey, every property improvement and real estate appraisal was either conceived in the renamed County Engineers Building or passed through it.

Not until 1977 was the building finally deprived of tenants. A probable bureaucratic explanation is offered by Don Simpson, L.A. County management analyst. “My understanding,” Simpson says, “was that after the earthquake in 1971 there was a seismic safety survey of major office buildings.” All offices built prior to 1933 or 1934 would be jettisoned, including the county’s engineering headquarters.

*

Sentimentality for the Higgins Building is in short supply. A. C. Martin, the building’s structural engineer, also leased offices there starting in 1910. From 2nd and Main, he emerged as one of the most successful architects in Southern California. Designs for St. Vincent de Paul’s Church, the Edison Building and portions of City Hall were spawned in his Higgins headquarters. In 1946, the firm, seeking more convenient parking, fled the building.

Despite his father’s association with the building and the fact that his own formidable architectural career began there, Albert C. Martin, 83, A. C.’s namesake and the firm’s partner emeritus, views the Higgins Building without wistfulness. He can see no future for it, since neither its stairways nor lobby could conform to current codes. “I always felt it was a good building and it did its job,” Martin says. “When we left it--well, finally the county moved in, and they didn’t do anything for the building.”

J. Edward Martin, 80, Al’s brother and also a retired partner, is more demonstrative. “Oh, it was first class,” he marvels. “It was as good a building as there was in Los Angeles, if not the best.” But he, too, can find no prospects for renewal. “Let’s suppose you’ve got a 1922 Ford Model T,” he conjectures. “You could fix it up, but you’d do better to start with a whole new car.” So it is with the Higgins Building. “Today,” he says, “I’d classify it as a clunker.”

From his office in the Bradbury Building, Robert Harris, USC professor of architecture, voices a dissenting view. “For small businesses, this is just great,” he enthuses, tracing out a three-room chunk from an ancient Higgins floor plan. He sees the division of the lower levels into modest suites, and maybe housing for the upper floors--a conversion made easier by the massive central shaft that gives the interior rooms access to the open air.

When Harris served as co-chair of the city’s 1994 Downtown Strategic Plan, he had conversations with Cardinal Roger Mahony, church representatives, government bureaucrats, architects and business leaders about a revitalized St. Vibiana Plaza, which might have served as a catalyst for all upper Main Street. Harris was disappointed by the cardinal’s final decision to abandon the quake-beleaguered 1876 landmark for a new site on a county parking lot. “Two years later,” the professor rues, “he was convinced that the cathedral was the least valuable building in the history of humankind.”

Not that a restored St. Vibiana’s would have necessarily granted salvation for the hulking eyesore across the street. “Most everybody in those meetings,” Harris recalls disconsolately, “thought that one of the really great things to happen if the cathedral went forward on that site was that the Higgins Building would be torn down.”

*

“Don’t go in,” Barry Bruk warns. “It’s a mess.” Bruk himself has avoided the Higgins Building for some time.

But only a journey inside the building will reveal the degree of the devastation, traces of its former grandeur and some sense of how it must have felt to be a part of the building in its boom years. Barry Bruk is in a unique position to sanction these explorations.

Bruk and his partner, Jay Markoff, have run their Associated Sewing Machine Co. for 40 years. Each owns 25% of the Higgins Building. They once owned all of it, but some years ago they sold a 50% stake to the late Lou Kenner and his son David Kenner, the attorney for Suge Knight.

The 67-year-old Bruk wears blue slacks this afternoon and a short-sleeved shirt smartly embroidered with tiny “BB” initials. His eyes sometimes get weary behind their bulky frames as he reflects on his disappointing investment.

Bruk remembers the inspection tour he took when it was still the County Engineers Building. All the marble was intact; polished brass handrails crowned every banister. The executive offices were redone in mahogany. “Beautiful inside!” he says. “Gorgeous!”

The Higgins Building would not launch a bidding war. At the auction, 20 years ago this past June, minimum bids were set at $275,000. Markoff and Bruk upped the ante to $275,100, and the building was theirs. After the county’s mass exodus, the partners were suddenly left to figure out how to fill 10 floors--196,105 square feet--of empty office space.

In 1980, vandals and squatters began breaking in. “They made a fire.” Bruk says. “They broke everything. It’s a mess like you have never seen. Like it would be after the Russian Revolution.” The invaders bent the iron bars over the entrance, so Bruk plastered them over with steel mesh. They broke the chain locks so many times that he welded the gate shut. When metal security screens were fastened on the second floor, they climbed the drainpipe up to the third.

A New Orleans investor once offered $5 million for the building, but the deal fizzled. With an architect, Bruk and his partners came up with a sensible rehab to attract new tenants. Lawyers from Beverly Hills or Century City, forced to come downtown to file motions or try a case in the county or federal courts, could rent out modest satellite offices; the building owners might have furnished them with a communal law library. “We made some plans and spent a lot of money,” Bruk recalls, “and we scrapped it because nobody would have gone in with a tank over there.”

The homeless population around the building thinned out in 1994 after the Union Rescue Mission was torn down, and Bruk got some promising inquries when it looked like the archdiocese would tear down St. Vibiana’s and build a new cathedral in its place, but nothing came of that either.

Bruk thinks there still might be a future for the building, but he won’t be the one to take it there. “It’s a good place,” he assures, but says he lacks the ambition to go through with it. “I would like to sell it. If I get a reasonable offer, I’ll sell it. I don’t--do you understand Yiddish?--I don’t have the koyach. The health.”

*

The blue flame of Alvaro Gamino Garcia’s blowtorch eats away at the weld; two other workmen from the Associated Sewing Machine Co. are yanking at the steel mesh. None of the racket seems to have disturbed the lone woman in the floppy knit cap, asleep on a cardboard box not five feet away. The rusted gate groans open. Reluctantly, the Higgins Building accepts a visitor.

The demolished candy stand near the lobby is a depository of dust, newspapers and old clothes. Below the marble staircase, the cavernous drugstore of the 1930s is frozen in its last incarnation--the “Cou_ty of Los Angel_s Depart_ent _f Public Social Ser_ices,” circa 1977.

The Higgins Building is bleeding from a million wounds--a flood in its sub-basement, fire damage on its top floor. Every copper conduit along every stretch of hallway has been ripped out for resale. The brass handrails have been unscrewed from the ornate iron banisters; a rough hole bored through each door tells you where the knobs used to be. There have been wanton acts of violence without any profit motive: 200-pound heaters pried away from the walls, a fist or brick thrown through every other glass door, eviscerated rotary telephones splayed on floor after floor of fallen ceiling tiles.

Room 402, where General Petroleum had begun so modestly in 1911, is a haven from the filth. A pink blanket has been placed upon a bed-sized square of paneling. A pair of hoop earrings and a Spanish translation of the New Testament rest on a makeshift shelf. Someone even took the trouble to decorate the walls with photographs of shirtless men and a tiny Mexican flag. There are a handful of other living quarters like these. Crumpled 1994 newspapers indicate when they might have been abandoned.

Despite the devastation, a certain peace descends upon the Higgins Building. The afternoon sunshine pierces its hollow core, spreads light through every room and spills out onto the street. Fresh air is pumped in on a cross-breeze through scads of cracked windows. No one has thought yet to tear out the gorgeous black and white mosaic floors, still incredibly solid; there seems only a slight buckling of the plaster after a near-century of earthquakes.

Somewhere deep within the abandoned County Engineer’s Design Department, a miracle has occurred. At Room 811, a lone exterior doorknob survives where 305 others have been wrenched out and melted down for scrap metal. A tarnished flower bursts at either end of the otherwise simple plate; on the circle of the knob itself, an elegant, interlocking script that owes more to a prospector’s era than ours spells out the initials “HB.” Perhaps, the imagination strains, from this one survivor, a new mold could be cast; maybe a stray bit of brass banister can be found for cloning. In that way, every forlorn door, every demolished window, every trashed bathroom in the building might somehow begin to recover what now seems so irretrievably lost.

The ninth-floor pigeons interrupt this reverie. After so many seasons as the building’s sole tenants, strange footsteps send them into a panic. They burst from their perches in dung-streaked closets, explode from nests built inside blown fluorescent light fixtures, materializing as instantly as if a magician had conjured them in mid-flight. In its terror to escape, one pigeon careens with all its might toward a broad window and bumps against still-intact glass. Calmed by the impact, no longer afraid, the tenant returns to its fluorescent nest.