312 N Spring St
Los Angeles, CA 90012, USA

US Court House and Post Office - National Register of Historic Places

Statement of Significance

The U.S. Court House and Post Office in Los Angeles appears to be eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places (National Register) under Criterion A (Events) as an intentional symbol of Federal authority in the Los Angeles Civic Center. The historical significance of the United States Court House resides in its embodiment of Federal presence in Los Angeles. Since 1910, this site has been associated with the Federal government and has remained a visible presence within the Los Angeles Civic Center. The decision to construct a major office building in Los Angeles symbolized the Federal Government’s efforts to make its presence known in the fast-growing western city. The decision to construct the building in Los Angeles rather than San Francisco, the undisputed capital of the West during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, testified to the growing influence of the Southern California metopes. The building is an integral part of the Los Angeles Civic Center and it continues to house one of the largest pools of Federal employees outside of Washington, D.C.

The U.S. Court House and Post Office appears to be eligible for National Register listing under Criterion C (Architecture), as a superb example of architecture that embodies the characteristics of “a type and period,” as well as possessing “high artistic values” and as the “the work of master.” The U.S. Court House and Post Office in Los Angeles was the largest building of its type in the western United States when it was completed in 1940. Its design, detailing and use of materials are of the highest quality. The building is also an excellent example of the Public Works Administration (PWA) Modern style, utilized for many important Federal projects during the Depression. The U.S. Court House and Post Office is a major work of Gilbert Stanley Underwood, who along with architects Paul Cret and Louis Simon, was one of the foremost practitioners of the PWA Modern style in the United States.

Historical Background: Federal Presence in Los Angeles
Los Angeles' first Post Office was established near the site of the existing United States Court House on April 9, 1850. A bronze plaque on the Temple Street retaining wall, installed in 1950 by the California Centennial Commission, marks its site. As the United States Postal Service quickly expanded, branch offices began to appear all over Los Angeles.

The existing U.S. Court House, at 312 N. Spring Street, was the third federal courthouse erected in Los Angeles. The first stood at the comer of Main and Winton Streets and was constructed between 1889 and 1892 at a cost of $124,000. The building was a two-and-a-half story, brick and brownstone structure designed in the then-popular Romanesque Revival style. It housed the Postal Service, United States District Court, and various other Federal agencies. Faced with the dramatic growth of the region, the building proved to be inadequate almost immediately. By the mm of the century. Congress authorized a larger building at the comer of Main and Temple Streets. Built between 1906 and 1910 at a cost of $1,213,000, this six-story Classical Revival structure was faced in granite and red sandstone.

Los Angeles' astonishing population growth in the first decades of the twentieth century strained the capacities of the 1910 Federal Building. An article on California’s Federal buildings in the July 1918 issue of Architect Engineer commented on the Los Angeles facility: “For two years this building has proved inadequate for the Post Office requirements, with its ever-increasing services and the parcel post.” It was not until the 1930s, however, that a serious proposal emerged for a new Federal Building in Los Angeles.

Architects John Parkinson, Donald B. Parkinson, John C. Austin and Frederic M. Ashley prepared drawings for a proposed new Federal building in 1932. * By March 1933, final plans for the new Federal Building had been formally approved by the Treasury Department and working drawings were prepared. However, in 1933, the Treasury Department suspended the Federal Buildings program and it was not revived until the following year under the aegis of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The plans for a new Federal Building in Los Angeles were temporarily abandoned.

Historical Background: Construction of the United States Courthouse and Post Office
By 1936, Congress had appropriated nearly $7,000,000 for the construction of a new U.S. Post Office and Court House in Los Angeles. Plans were prepared that year under the supervision of Louis Simon, Chief Architect of the Office of the Supervising Architect of the United States Treasury Department. Gilbert Stanley Underwood was the consulting architect for the project.

Land was acquired at a cost of $886,000. The site was assembled from eleven parcels on three blocks at the northern edge of the Los Angeles Civic Center. Two streets were vacated to create one large “super block.” The structures demolished to clear the site included eight brick commercial buildings fronting North Spring Street and the 1910 Federal Building at the northwest corner of North Main and Temple Streets.

Construction of the new building began in May 1937 but was completed in two distinct stages. As originally designed, the structure was to be fifteen stories. However, the Office ofthe Supervising Architect realized during construction that two additional floors would be needed to meet the space requirements of the agencies to be housed in the building and revised the working drawings accordingly. With no additional funds, the fifteen-story structure was completed in January 1939. After Congress appropriated more funds, construction of the top two stories and two penthouses was carried out by a different contractor between April 1939 and March 1940. Since the original building was designed both structurally and aesthetically to accommodate these additional stories, the finished building represents a completion of the original scheme rather than a modification.

The George P. Fuller Company of Washington, D.C., a nationally renowned construction firm, was awarded the contract for the initial building phase. The Baruch Corporation of Los Angeles constructed the additional two floors and the penthouses. Frank M. Boudreau, a construction engineer for the Procurement Division of the Treasury Department, was the project manager in charge of overseeing the project.

One noteworthy event that occurred during construction was the unprecedented use of a concrete pump to construct a building of this height. Although pumps had been utilized previously to pour concrete in large engineering projects, like the Colorado River Aqueduct, they had never been used to pump concrete to such a high elevation. Regional builders hailed the courthouse construction as a major achievement because of the vertical distance the pumped concrete traveled to the top floors. The vertical Pump rete machine delivered approximately 50,600 cubic yards of structural concrete throughout the construction of the building.

Historical Background: Building Type
The U.S. Court House and Post Office is an example of the combined ‘Post Office and Courthouse” building type. Although it evolved well before Roosevelt’s New Deal era, this building type took off during his administration, as the construction of major public works became a primary means of extending work relief to the legions of unemployed workers. From the late 1930s to the early 1940s, the Federal government constructed hundreds of new office buildings across the nation that consolidated scattered Federal services in one location. Known simply as “Federal Buildings,” these new buildings accommodated the “alphabet soup” of new Depression-era Federal agencies, as well as existing departments such as the Postal Service and the Department of Justice. These combined facilities often placed the Postal Service on the main floor (with sorting and processing taking place in the basement), while Department of Justice offices and courtrooms were on the intermediate floors. Federal buildings in larger communities accommodated other Federal agencies on the upper floors. Ornate public reception and elevator lobbies served as the fulcrum from which visitors would use and experience the building. Federally sponsored public art, including murals and/or sculpture, was often commissioned for the public lobbies. Generally local artists were hired to create the art which typically depicted regional history and culture.

Historical Background: Use
As indicated by its original name, the U.S. Court House and Post Office in Los Angeles was designed to house Federal courts and Postal Service facilities. When it was initially completed in 1940, the Postal Service occupied the ground and first floors, while the United States District Court occupied the second and third floors. The remaining floors were shared by other Federal agencies, including the United States District Attorney’s Office, the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Communications Commission. Over time various agencies have moved in and out in response to changing needs and priorities. The expansion of the Department of Justice and the concomitant need for more office space has pushed many unrelated agencies out of the building. Between 1964 and 1966, the Postal Service vacated the building. The United States District Court expanded to occupy the space vacated by the Post Office and constructed several new courtrooms in the former Post Office space. Numerous Federal agencies continue to occupy offices on the upper floors, including the United States Court of Appeals.

Several notorious cases have been tried by the United States District Court in the U.S. Court House and Post Office. Trials in the 1940s involved stars of the motion picture industry; Charles Chaplin and Clark Gable were defendants in paternity cases and Bette Davis sued Warner Brothers for breach of contract. When the anti-communist crusade of Senator Joseph McCarthy reached Hollywood in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, the House Un-American Activities Committee convened in the building. Other trials which achieved notoriety were the Daniel EUsburg “Pentagon Papers” case of the 1970s and the John DeLorean cocaine sting trial of the 1980s. All of the above events associated with the United States Courthouse in Los Angeles have received national media coverage. In 1992, this building bore the brunt of the fury of rioting Angelenos in the wake of the Rodney King verdict. Few other United States District Courts have been so consistency involved in such far-ranging issues of popular, social and political history.

Historical Background: Gilbert Stanley Underwood and Louis A. Simon
Gilbert Stanley Underwood designed the Los Angeles Courthouse and Post Office in association with the Office of the Supervising Architect of United States Department of the Treasury, which was administered at the time by Louis A. Simon.

Louis A. Simon, the Chief Architect in the Office of the Supervising Architect, joined the office in 1896. Simon was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1867. After graduating from the architecture school at MIT, Simon took a grand tour of Europe. Upon his return to the United States, Simon opened a firm in Baltimore in 1894. Two years later, he was brought into the Office of the Supervising Architect by Edward A. Crane. Simon’s abilities led to his rapid promotion through the ranks and in 1915 he was appointed head of the Engineering and Drafting Division, a position he held until 1933. In 1934, Simon was appointed as the Supervising Architect of the Treasury Department, a position that he retained until his retirement in 1941.'* During his tenure, Simon designed and oversaw hundreds of projects, ranging from major buildings such as the IRS Building in Washington D.C., to small border stations along the Canadian border in Vermont. Simon also designed several courthouse and post office faculties, including buildings in Erie City, Pennsylvania; Columbia, Tennessee; Dublin, Georgia; and Cincinnati, Ohio.

Following the reorganization of the Department of the Treasury’s Office of the Supervising Architect in 1933, it became common practice to hire consulting architects to design federally funded buildings. This became a practical necessity as heavily funded New Deal agencies, such as the Public Works Administration (PWA), flooded the Office with commissions. As a result of this policy, Gilbert Stanley Underwood was retained as consulting architect for the U.S. Post Office and Court House.

Gilbert Stanley Underwood was born in 1890 in Oneida, New York. He moved to Los Angeles around 1910 and worked for several years as a draftsman in the office of Arthur B. Benton, a prominent Southern California architect. Around 1913, Underwood returned to the East Coast and subsequently received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Yale University in 1920 and a Master of Architecture degree from Harvard University in 1923. Underwood was a recipient of the medal of the Société des Architects Diplomas le Government in 1920, and co-winner of the Avery prize of the Architectural League of New York in 1923. The former prize suggests that he may have studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Underwood returned to Los Angeles after graduation from Harvard and stashed the firm of Gilbert Stanley Underwood & Co., Architects and Engineers. In 1934, he moved to Washington, D.C. and served as a consulting architect for the Office of the Supervising Architect. Underwood continued to work on Federal projects until after World War II, when he was appointed Chief Architect of the General Services Administration (GSA) after the agency's formation in 1949. He retired from active practice in 1954 and died in 1961.

Today, G. Stanley Underwood is best known for his large Depression-era public buildings. Prior to 1930, while he was still in private practice, Underwood designed many buildings in the western United States for the Union Pacific Railroad. Between 1924 and 1929, he designed nearly twenty railroad stations for the Union Pacific. He also designed rustic resorts and lodges for the railroad’s hospitality department. Underwood soon parlayed this experience into commissions for lodges and hotels in western National Parks, including Bryce, Zion, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone and Yosemite. After becoming consulting architect to the Treasury Department in the 1930s, Underwood designed a number of public buildings, including over two-dozen post offices, several courthouses and the United States Mint in San Francisco. Departing from the severe Moderna aesthetic he played such a prominent role in developing, Underwood continued to design rustic park lodges, such as Timberline Lodge in Oregon and Sun Valley Lodge in Wyoming. After World War II, he designed several Federal office buildings in Washington, D.C.

Underwood’s architecture is distinguished by a masterful sense of purpose as well as sensitivity to materials in both natural and urban settings. The Ahwahnee Hotel (1926-27) in Yosemite, and Timberline Lodge (1935- 37) on Mount Hood, are both superbly suited to their sites. Their robust scale and generous use of natural materials, coupled with sophisticated planning, make them masterpieces of their type. In urban buildings like the Omaha Union Terminal (1929-30), the United States Mint (1935-37) in San Francisco and the Rincon Annex Post Office (1939-40), also in San Francisco, Underwood produced works of monumental urbanity. The Omaha Union Terminal is a flamboyant Art Deco stmcture, appropriate to its site and function. The United States Mint in San Francisco is an austere fortress-like pile, richly finished in granite on the exterior and marble in the public lobby. The Rincon Annex Post Office combines austere massing and rich ornament. Both the Mint and the Rincon Annex Post Office convey a sumptuous dignity rare in American civic architecture.

The U.S. Court House and Post Office was designed when G. Stanley Underwood was at the height of his powers. It remains one of his masterpieces of monumental public architecture in the West. The building is a powerful composition, combining the symmetrical planning and symmetry of Beaux Arts Classicism with the abstract massing and ornament of the PWA Modemed. The building displays a fastidious attention to detail and a richness of materials. The public lobbies and original courtrooms are superbly treated with lavish materials such as terrazzo, marble, and walnut paneling. The building is at once monumental and meticulous, sumptuous and austere. It achieves architectural excellence of a high order.

Throughout its existence, the U.S. Court House and Post Office has been praised by architectural historians, architects and urbanists alike. David Gebhard and Robert Winter state in their book, A Guide to Architecture in Los Angeles &Southern California (1977), that the courthouse is "P.W.A. stripped 'fascist' Modemed, beautifully and convincingly carried out." Charles Moore, in The City Observed: Tros Angeles (1984), says of the building:

This is the stripped-down P.W.A. Moderne of the Great Depression at its L.A. finest ...The composed dignity of the massive rectangular blocks may have projected a hope that the government’s presence would provide stability in the face of a national economic disaster ... The interior is streamlined, rich and machine-age elegant...Not even half a century has passed, but this building has already become a voice from the past, thrillingly close but irretrievably gone. ®

Criterion A (Patterns and Events): Community Planning/Development: The Los Angeles Civic Center
Properties can be eligible for listing in the National Register if they are associated with “events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of our history.” The U.S. Court House and Post Office appears to be eligible under Criterion A in the “Community Planning and Development” Area of Significance. The period of significance is 1937-1966, encompassing the period spanning from construction until the Post Office was removed from the building. Along with Los Angeles City Hall, the U.S. Court House and Post Office provided one of the most iconographic symbols of the Los Angeles skyline until the skyscraper boom of the late 1960s. Built by the Federal government opposite City Hall, this building visually competes with the latter for mastery over the Los Angeles Civic Center, a locally significant ensemble of municipal, state, federal and cultural buildings dating from the 1890s to the present day.

The Los Angeles Civic Center is located north of downtown Los Angeles in an area bounded by the Hollywood Freeway (U.S. Highway 101) to the north, Figueroa Street to the west. Second Street to the south and Alameda Street to the east. Although surface parking lots and buildings of lesser significance have intended upon the original plan, the basic organization of the Los Angeles Civic Center still embodies the distinctive characteristics common to many early twentieth century civic centers inspired by the precepts of the City Beautiful Movement. The defining characteristics of the City Beautiful Movement that are present in the Los Angeles Civic Center, include symmetrically composed groupings of monumental buildings organized around a landscaped mall, important buildings terminating important visual axes and landscape features such as sculpture and fountains. The placement of individual buildings in a civic center was often used to reinforce hierarchies of power.'"’ For example, in San Francisco, City Hall forms the western boundary of the San Francisco Civic Center, sitting astride Fulton Street and terminating the major vista from the east and west. Its lantern-capped dome, deliberately resembling the United States Capitol Building, was intentionally built slightly taller than the latter building’s dome in Washington D.C., symbolizing the aspiration of San Francisco’s civic and business leaders for the city to become the de facto “capital” of a growing Western and Pacific Empire during the early part of the twentieth century.

The Los Angeles Civic Center, as it evolved during the early part of the twentieth century, represented similar aspirations for the once-diminutive Mexican village known as El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora Reina de Eos Angeles del Rio de Porciuncula. Not long after California achieved statehood in 1850, Los Angeles opened its first City Hall in a small adobe structure located on the west side of Spring Street, between Temple and First Streets.

Known as the Rocha Adobe, this former private residence was acquired by the newly incorporated City of Los Angeles in the early 1850s. Expanded to accommodate courts and a jail, this structure remained the center of municipal government until 1889. The arrival of transcontinental railroads in the 1870s touched off the first major population boom in Los Angeles in the 1880s. The rapid growth of the city’s population soon rendered the old City Hall insufficient to administer a city that had quintupled in population between 1880 and 1890, growing from 11,200 to over 50,000 residents. In response, city fathers built a new City Hall on Fort Hill Street (now Broadway), between Second and Third Streets.

Following the born and bust cycles of the 1880s and 1890s, the twentieth century ushered in a period of sustained population growth in Los Angeles that continues to this day. Between 1900 and 1910, the city’s population grew from a little over 100,000 to 319,198. By 1920, the population had reached 576,673. Although enthusiastically welcomed by the Chamber of Commerce and real estate agents, the sudden influx of new citizens put pressure on the city’s provisional municipal infrastructure. City fathers realized that if Los Angeles was ever to be recognized as an important metropolis, it would have to take steps to look like one. Inspired in part by the City Beautiful planning and design principles on display at the hugely popular 1894 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, leading civic leaders of Los Angeles began lobbying for something similar in Los Angeles. By creating a Civic Center for Los Angeles, civic leaders hoped to tidy up the disorganized and ramshackle city that had grown up around the original Mexican pueblo as well as providing a location for government office buildings, courthouses and cultural buildings.'

Actual planning for a new Civic Center in Los Angeles did not begin until 1905, when the Municipal Arts Commission retained pioneer planner Charles Mulford Robinson. Although Robinson’s plan, published in 1909, did not propose a true City Beautiful scheme, it did establish the ultimate location of the Civic Center in the vicinity of the old Los Angeles County Courthouse, near the intersection of Temple and Main Streets. The City followed Robinson’s recommendation to purchase property in the area and by 1910; even without a formal plan in place, an improvised Civic Center began to take shape. Major government buildings built in the de facto Civic Center included the Los Angeles County Hall of Records on the southwest comer of Temple and Spring Streets. Two years later, plans were moving forward to demolish the old Temple Block on the comer of Temple and Main Streets to construct a new City Hall. At the same time, the new Classical Revival style Federal Building was rising on the lot directly across from the city Hall site on Temple Street.

Los Angeles’ desire to build a grand Civic Center did not occur in a void. Thanks to the work of city planners well versed in the principles of the City Beautiful movement, many municipal governments, including Los Angeles, began to rationalize and beautify their unplanned and often unattractive business, civic and retail districts. Beyond the boundaries of the old Pueblo, most of Los Angeles had hastily evolved during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Like many American cities of the period, it deserved its reputation as a chaotic, dirty and disorganized place. The area north of downtown earmarked as the location of the Civic Center was a rough-and-tumble district of rail yards and flimsy wood-frame shanties and stores, all strong along a tangled network of streets and narrow alleys.

Los Angeles was also motivated by a growing sense of civic pride, inspired in part by the commercial aspirations of its Babbitt-minded business community. Locked in a growing rivalry with San Francisco, Los Angeles was obsessed with surpassing its northern neighbor as the leading city in California and the western United States. Editorials in the Las Angeles Times continually exhorted Angelenos to do better than San Franciscans, whether it be building a major new port out of whole cloth at San Pedro or creating a dignified municipal precinct to best San Francisco’s impressive new Civic Center.

Despite the enthusiasm among Angelenos for a new Civic Center, progress was agonizingly slow, due both to disagreement about where the individual buildings would be sited and a parsimonious electorate not anxious to foot the bill. Between 1912 and the late 1920s, several major plans were drawn up by different architecture and planning firms. The first was published in 1917 by architect and engineers’. Rankin. Following Rankin’s recommendations, a commission was appointed to acquire land and lay out the site. Before this could happen America’s entry into the First World War put a stop to the project. The Civic Center plan was revived in 1919 with a Blue-Ribbon panel chaired by City Engineer William Mulholland. This panel soon fell apart after infighting broke out among its members. Some members did not like the proposed location, preferring instead a location closer to downtown around Pershing Square. Others desired an acropolis-like location atop Bunker Hill."

While controversy raged during the early 1920s over the location of the proposed Los Angeles Civic Center, the region was experiencing the largest population boom in its history. Lured by images of palm trees and cozy bungalows nestled in sun-kissed orange groves, thousands of mainly Midwestern immigrants streamed into Southern California. By 1930, the population of Los Angeles had reached 1,238,048, vastly surpassing San Francisco. With an economy fueled by oil, movies, real estate and agriculture, Los Angeles had become a rich and powerful city. Partially in response to its increased sense of self-importance, the city fathers decided to throw out the Rankin Plan and commission an entirely new Civic Center Plan. Two major plans were submitted: one from the planning and landscape firm of Cook & Hall in 1923; and a second from Allied Architects in 1924. Much more ambitious than the Cook & Hall Plan, Allied Architects’ grandiose Beaux Arts plan envisioned a symmetrical arrangement of government and public buildings constructed on both sides of two huge intersecting landscaped malls. The principal north-south axis would extend nearly a mile from Pershing Square to a proposed Civic Amphitheater on Sunset Boulevard. The western end of the smaller east west mail would terminate at a new City Hall on the comer of Olive and Temple Streets. The Plan incorporated the old Pueblo and erased Chinatown to make way for a new union passenger rail station. Continued infighting over the cost of the Allied Architects plan led to the development of a watered-down compromise, which melded elements of the Allied Architects and Cook & Hall plans.

In 1927, the City Council adopted the compromise plan and placed a bond on the ballot to fund the construction of the new Los Angeles City Hall, the centerpiece of the plan. The monumental twenty-eight story building, designed by John C. Austin and John and Donald Parkinson, was completed in 1928. Built on the site of the old Temple Block, the “Goodhuesque”-style City Hall explicitly proclaimed its authority. Legislation was promptly enacted to prevent the construction of buildings in Los Angeles taller than City Hall. Other major buildings constructed in the new Civic Center included the Los Angeles County Hall of Justice (1926) and the California State Building (1931). In order to facilitate the construction of large civic buildings, the City straightened, widened and extended major boulevards and consolidated small blocks into super blocks. In 1934, anticipating the construction of the U.S. Court House and Post Office, the Los Angeles Department of Public Works extended Spring Street north of Temple Street and eliminated several alleys, creating the block upon which the existing court house now sits.

Not to be outdone by Los Angeles, the Office of the Supervising Architect immediately began developing plans to replace the nineteen-year-old Federal Building in 1929. Initially, the Office of the Supervising Architect retained John C. Austin and John and Donald B. Parkinson, the architects of Los Angeles City Hall, to design a counterpart high rise on the north side of Temple Street. Although the need for additional space for government offices was an issue, the decision to replace the 1910 Federal Building with a modem high rise building was also motivated by more symbolic concerns. Based on its timing (a year after the completion of City Hall) and the Office of the Supervising Architect’s refusal to either enlarge the existing building or construct a new one elsewhere, it seems that there was a desire on the part of the Federal Government to assert its authority in the de facto “capital” of the West.

The decision to place the principle locus of Federal power in Los Angeles reflected the displacement of San Francisco as the primary urban center ofthe West. San Francisco’s Federal Building, designed by Bakewell & Brown in 1936, was underway at roughly the same time as the U.S. Court House and Post Office. Although the Beaux Arts style building harmonized with San Francisco’s remarkable Civic Center, San Francisco’s Federal Building was not very large or conspicuous. Disparity in scale was not the only difference between the San Francisco and Los Angeles Federal buildings. While San Francisco’s new Federal Building was designed in the slightly dated French Renaissance style, the U.S. Court House and Post Office was rendered in the boldly modernistic PWA Modemed style. When it was completed in 1940, the new United States Courthouse and Post Office in Los Angeles was by far the largest Federal building in the West.''* Standing opposite Los Angeles City Hall, the new building held its own and even managed to strike a more fashionable pose. After taking its place on the Los Angeles skyline, the U.S. Court House and Post Office appears to have earned a considerable amount of regard among Angelenos. When the Architectural Record asked citizens of Los Angeles what their favorite building was in 1940, a substantial number named the new U.S. Court House and Post Office.