Storage facilities tend to be unremarkable buildings, spaces built for utility rather than beauty. But one towering Public Storage site in central Los Angeles was erected nearly a century ago with the express purpose of impressing passersby with its architectural bona fides. Much like the ornate former movie palace turned “evil CVS” over in East Los Angeles, this Public Storage building bears impressive art deco architectural hallmarks that were trendy in the 1920s.
This 13-story tower has always operated, more or less, as a storage facility. Yet for a spell, it bore a different distinction: as a Bacchanalian party haunt that was raided many times over during Prohibition.
When the company’s original president, James Bowen, first dreamed up the American Storage Building, he was determined to “have the finest storage warehouse in the West, if not the nation,” as the Los Angeles Times noted that same year. Bowen hired Arthur E. Harvey, an architect who designed various professional buildings and what later became the local Scientology Celebrity Centre in the Art Deco style, to design it. The American Storage Building officially opened its doors in 1928 with a huge ad in the paper, boasting that “The Most Beautiful Storage Building in the World” had finally arrived…