Added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 28, 2021

South Broadway in downtown Los Angeles is filthy with beautiful old buildings, many of which have undergone top-to-bottom renovations and reimaginings in recent years. We’ve got a luxurious new music venue and hotel housed in a classic movie palace, a new Arizona State University campus in a former newspaper headquarters, and the most awe-inspiring Apple Store in the world (I’m just guessing, I haven’t visited them all).

2022 was the Commercial Club building’s turn. After nearly a decade of vacancy, the 13-story building on the corner of 11th Street and South Broadway emerged from its development chrysalis as the downtown LA outpost of Proper Hotels, a chain of luxury hotels with a design focus. According to Proper’s website, their locations are intended as “a home base for today’s creative nomads and modern globetrotters” with money to burn. On any given weekend, you can spend $500 to $5000 a night for a suite, depending on whether you want a regular room, or the one with the original basketball court floor in it, or the one with the pool in it (more on those later).  

The upscale clientele that stays in this building today would probably have felt right at home in the ‘20s and ‘30s when its original tenant, the Commercial Club of Southern California, occupied the top 11 floors. Founded in 1923, the Commercial Club was a consortium of SoCal businessmen from different industries, all interested in promoting the general commercial welfare and growth of Los Angeles. At its peak the Commercial Club counted 2500+ high rollers including oilman J. Ward Cohen (the Club’s organizer), film industry moguls Cecil B. Demille, Harry Warner and Michael Gore, department store owner Moses Hamburger and banker Irving Hellman. In addition to swapping sales tips with each other, the members of the Commercial Club promoted the southland to out-of-state business interests, lobbied for lower shipping rates, and helped bring the 1932 Olympic Games to Los Angeles. They were a busy lot in the early days.

The Commercial Club leased the building from its original deed holder, the Citizens Mortgage Company, before it was completed in 1926.

This dirt-eater of the twentieth century appeared yesterday morning at Broadway and Eleventh street and before noon had consumed hundreds of tons of the valuable soil at that location. 

Members of the Commercial Club of Southern California succeeded in taming the iron-molared monster and guaranteed him a free feed every day until he had eaten out enough dirt for the foundation of the $1,500,000 Commercial Club building, a class A highlight-limit structure which is to be completed within the next ten months. 

-Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1925

When it comes to stately high rises, you don’t get much better than the architecture firm of Curlett & Beelman. They played a big role in transforming the downtown skyline in the 1920s, designing the Wholesale Jewelry Mart, the Roosevelt Building, the Board of Trade Building, the Foreman & Clark Building and more; on his own, Beelman designed the magnificent Eastern Columbia Building just a few blocks up from the Commercial Club. 

Curlett & Beelman gave the Commercial Club a delicious renaissance revival headquarters. On a macro scale, the thing is all classical proportions and balance. It’s got the classical tripartite form, with the top two and bottom two floors surrounded by terracotta and cast stone, and mostly brick in between. There’re so many details to ogle on the facade, from the arches and spiral columns that cover the third and fourth floors, to the lion heads leering down at you from below the second floor. The whole building is perfectly framed by the offset quoins (the stone siding that covers the exterior corners of the building), extending from the third floor all the way to the cornice on the top floor. 

The inside was tricked out too. There was office space, a lounge and a billiard room on the third floor, and a private dining room and kitchen on the fourth. The members’ wives had a floor to themselves, colloquially called “Cercle des Dames.” A gym, racquetball court and bathhouse took up floor six; you could take a swim or get a haircut on the seventh floor, and then retire to one of the 126 rooms reserved for guests on floors eight through 11. The bottom two floors were rented out as   commercial storefronts, which over the years included a lampshade manufacturer, a print shop and the Los Angeles Press Club.

The Great Depression hit the Commercial Club hard, even harder than other social clubs that weren’t so business-focused. By 1932 the Club had folded, and the building was purchased by the Cabrillo Club of Southern California. It operated as the Cabrillo Hotel in the ‘40s, then the Case Hotel from 1947 through 1965, at which point the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) bought the building and began 40+ years of tenancy, running a jobs training program and rehab center in addition to providing short-term housing.

In 2013 the YWCA sold the building to KOR Group and Alma Development, who brought in the architecture firm Omgivning and interior designer Kelly Wearstler to transform the building, while preserving some of its historic fabric. Esotouric claims that the property owner “illegally buffed out the character defining ghost signs [old hand-painted advertisements] and put an illegal beer billboard on the south facade.” But Omgivning et al. also made conscious efforts to incorporate parts of the original design into their renovation work. So yes, if you can afford a night in the 2,777-square-foot Pool Suite, you can swim in the original seventh floor plunge (reduced to about four feet deep for safety reasons). And the Basketball Suite (just $2800 per night this weekend!) retains the double-height ceiling and wooden floors from the original court. The original hoop’s gone, but there’s a small leather version affixed to the wall and the room comes with a soft leather ball too, so you and your partner can pretend you’re Cecil B. DeMille and Harry Warner playing horse without annoying the guests below you with your dribbling.

Even if you’re not staying overnight, it’s worth checking out the publicly-viewable parts of the new Proper Hotel. There’s a stylish Portuguese-Spanish restaurant (Caldo Verde) on the ground floor, a brand new cocktail bar called Dahlia, and a rooftop restaurant called Cara Cara, all from restaurateur Suzanne Goin. The hotel lobby is colorful and charming, with animal murals to gawk at above the intact marble floor from the early days. If the old stuff is more your thing, take the elevator to the rooftop for a terrific view of Julia Morgan’s Herald Examiner Building, just across Broadway. Or walk across the street, turn around and give Curlett & Beelman’s renaissance revival facade the ol’ elevator eyes. Classic. Perfect.

Thanks to Katherine Kerr of KK Communications for the contemporary photos of the Proper Hotel.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ “Beautiful Clubhouses, Features of City’s Building, Near Completion” (Los Angeles Times, August 30, 1925 – accessed via ProQuest)

+ “Clubhouse Excavation Under Way” (Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1925 – accessed via ProQuest)

+ Downtown L.A. Proper Hotel (Los Angeles Conservancy)

+ Downtown LA Proper Hotel (Omgivning.com)

+ Hamacher, Tara J. & Roger Brevoort: Commercial Club’s NRHP nomination form

+ Southard, John & Wendy L. Tinsley Becker: “Evaluation of Significance: Commercial Club Building” (2014)

+ Vincent, Roger: “A new downtown L.A. hotel is going all in on amenities. Guess where they put the pool” (Yahoo.com, March 15, 2022)

+ Warnick, Ron: “Commercial Club building in downtown Los Angeles designated to National Register” (Route 66 News, January 4, 2004)