Added to the National Register of Historic Places on February 1, 2021

The intersection of 5th and Los Angeles Streets has that combination of traffic and trash, chintzy gift shops and sidewalk vendors that you see a lot of on the western edge of Skid Row. There’s plenty of stuff happening, but this is a block that people travel through, not a destination itself – especially now that the King Eddy Saloon on the northwest corner has shut down. You’d never guess that there’s a historically significant hotel here, built by one of the primary shapers of LA’s skyline. The story of the King Edward Hotel, and its infamous underground speakeasy, reflects all the changes that this area has undergone, and is still undergoing today. 

Downtown Hotels at the Turn of the 20th Century

Back in 1906, when the King Edward Hotel first welcomed guests, downtown LA was undergoing a construction boom. The previous decade had seen a few luxurious commercial hotels crop up in the historic core (starting with the Van Nuys Hotel, now known as Barclay Hotel), catering to tourists and businessmen arriving at one of the transcontinental railroad depots nearby. But development kicked into overdrive around 1905, when the Pacific Electric (PE) Railway opened its new headquarters and main station at 6th and Main. 

With thousands of passengers passing through the PE station daily, it naturally became a center of gravity downtown, and a fine hotel district cropped up around South Main, 5th and Los Angeles Streets to support travelers coming in via PE and the other local rail services. In 1910, you could get off at the main PE station, walk a block to the King Edward or the Baltimore Hotel right across the street. Or you could take a short carriage ride to the Alexandria Hotel, two blocks away at 5th and Spring. A tourist arriving in 1914 might also choose the just-opened Rosslyn Hotel at 5th and Main, which added an annex across the street in 1923. 

John Parkinson, Architect

All of these hotels, aside from the Baltimore, had one architect in common: John Parkinson. You could argue that Parkinson had a bigger impact on LA’s building history than any other single architect. He designed or co-designed an absurd number of LA’s civic and commercial landmarks, including LA City Hall, Union Station, Bullocks Wilshire, the LA Coliseum and many more.

Parkinson was an Englishman, raised in the mill town of Bolton, near the moors and valleys of Rivington township. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1894, after building his reputation in Napa and Seattle as a draftsman and architect. Parkinson’s big breakthrough came in 1898 with the construction of the Homer Laughlin Building – the first steel-frame, fireproof structure in LA, home to the famous Grand Central Market (and in the early 1920s, the office of Frank Lloyd Wright). Then in 1904 Parkinson gave us the Braly Building, LA’s first skyscraper.

A month before the King Edward Hotel opened to guests, Parkinson and his new partner Edwin Bergstrom celebrated the opening of their Alexandria Hotel just two blocks away, at 5th and Spring. It was an eight-story, 360-room palace with a vast two-story lobby lined in Italian marble, described by the Los Angeles Times as “a hotel building that is without peer on the Coast or in the West.” At the time, it was LA’s most opulent place to stay, and became a hangout spot even for non-guests.

The King Edward was modest in comparison – six stories, just 150 rooms, built for $340,000 compared to the Alexandria’s estimated $2 million. Only half the rooms had private bathrooms. But it was a highly personal project for Parkinson, partly because he owned it (not uncommon for Parkinson, a prolific real estate investor), partly because he put so much of himself into it.

In 1902, Parkinson bought the initial 50 x 100-foot parcel on the NW corner of 5th and Los Angeles Streets. The original plan was to call the hotel The Rivington, after the moors that inspired him in his youth. Eventually, the Alexandria’s developer convinced Parkinson to reconsider, so that the names of their two hotels would mirror the English monarchs of the time, King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. But Parkinson still found ways to pay homage to his homeland, especially in the lobby. The Red Rose of Lancaster, a historic symbol of Parkinson’s home county of Lancashire, adorns the lobby clock, marble columns and staircase. Historians Kate Eggert & Krisy Gosney suggest that the initials “TR,” emblazoned on the clock above the front desk, stand for “The Rivington,” though some believe it stands for “Teddy Roosevelt,” who was President of the United States at the time it opened. 

There’s one last tidbit that cements John Parkinson’s personal connection to the King Edward. A 1925 building permit lists both John Parkinson and his son, Donald as the designers of the mezzanine that stands in the lobby today; the two were partners in an architecture firm from 1920 until John’s death in 1935. And according to Stephen Gee, author of Iconic Vision: John Parkinson, Architect of Los Angeles, John’s grandson Donald W. Parkinson made some upgrades to the King Edward in the ‘50s. Three generations of John Parkinson’s family worked on this one property. It’s the only one on his résumé to hold that distinction.

The Building

On its own merits, the King Edward Hotel is a terrific example of the refined beaux arts style that came to define downtown LA’s historic core. Parkinson & Bergstrom applied a classical rigor to the facade, with its symmetrical rhythm of windows, and the traditional division of floors into three visually distinct layers, like a Greek column. There’s a lot of textural interplay on the surfaces of the facade, with the flatness of the brick masonry interrupted by indentations on the second and sixth floors, and brick protrusions on the middle floors that almost cohere into pilasters, but not quite. Then up at the top you’ve got your very beaux arts cornice, overhanging the roof, with rectangular dentils lining the underside like rows of chattering teeth. A lovely iron and stained glass canopy has ushered guests in since 1914. It was restored in 2021 by Judson Studios. 

The classical vibes continue on into the lobby. Fancy Scagliola marble columns stretch up to the ceiling, and arched wall niches display paintings of foliage. The marble wainscoting and mosaic floor are all original, as is the brass elevator door. Same with the transom windows on the first floor, though much of the original glass has turned a lovely shade of lavender over the years, a peculiar effect of the presence of manganese.

Early writeups and ads for the King Edward Hotel mention that every room had a telephone, steam heat, and hot and cold running water. You also see the point made, over and over again, that the King Edward Hotel was fireproof. That shows up in articles, ads, even in a ghost sign on the north elevation of the hotel. In the January 1906 edition of Fireproof Magazine, Parkinson wrote a feature about his novel approach to fireproofing the King Edward at low costs, by using “hollow, semi-porous tile partitions” as structural elements above the bottom floor, instead of iron and steel. Parkinson had a reputation for indestructible buildings, dating back to the Homer Laughlin Building eight years prior. The fact that the King Edward’s ability to withstand fire was such a selling point for customers says a lot about how common an occurrence it was for buildings to burn in those days. 

An Evolving Downtown

The King Edward Hotel was successful in its early years, but in the 1920s its fortunes began to shift. The ascendance of the automobile meant that a hotel’s proximity to transit stations wasn’t as important to travelers as it used to be. And new hotels like the Biltmore, completed in 1923, set new standards for luxury and amenities. The King Edward, with its shared bathrooms for half of the units, was considered second class in comparison.  

As suburbs and new resorts sprung up further and further away, the number of residents, tourists and businesses downtown declined, and the hotel district suffered. In 1939 Union Station opened, consolidating all the big rail terminals into one station and rendering the district irrelevant for travelers. It’s an ironic twist that John Parkinson (with his son Donald) designed Union Station, the building that effectively ended King Edward’s days as a luxury commercial hotel.

Like many of its neighboring hotels, the King Edward survived the lean years by changing its business model to offer more affordable rooms and longer-term rentals, by the week or month. This put it more in line with the cheaper “Single Room Occupancy” (SRO) hotels that had begun to appear east of Los Angeles Street in the 1920s, to accommodate all the seasonal workers and working-class folks coming in on the rails. 

SROs tended to be simpler, with no elevators or common rooms, and even fewer private bathrooms. Many of them were also unreinforced wood-frame buildings, which became a problem in the 1950s and 1960s, when the City declared over half of the SROs “seismically deficient.” Between the wave of demolitions that resulted, and the destruction of Bunker Hill to the west, downtown lost about half of its low-income housing units between the mid-1960s and early ‘70s. This had a profound impact on the number of people living on the streets of Skid Row.

In the mid-’70s the City created a redevelopment plan to address downtown’s most pressing housing issues. One of its goals was to acquire and rehabilitate the remaining SRO hotels, and either sell them to non-profit organizations or convert them into social services centers. 

The King Edward’s turn came in 2018 – not through City action, but from the non-profit AIDS Healthcare Foundation, who purchased the hotel from previous owner Izek Shomof for $15.25 million through its housing arm, the Healthy Housing Foundation (HHF). Just 35 units were occupied by the end of Shomof’s ownership. HHF renovated the hotel and began leasing the remaining rooms as affordable housing for chronically ill Angelenos and those transitioning out of homelessness. John Parkinson’s Alexandria Hotel and Rosslyn Annex down the street also have low-income units intended for housing the unhoused. 

The Speakeasy

As was common practice for LA’s commercial hotels at the time, the King Edward Hotel reserved space on the bottom floor for retail shops. And since the very beginning, there has been a bar in one of them. Almost immediately after the hotel opened in 1906, liquor wholesaler D.B. Jerrue and his partner W.H. Hevren leased the storefront at 127 East 5th Street for the King Edward Bar. Its adorable motto: “The Whiskies we sell are all very good, and our Anheuser Busch is right from the wood.” 

This first iteration of the King Edward Bar shut down in 1918. It was a casualty of a voter-approved proposition called the Gandier Ordinance which saw Los Angeles abolish saloons, two years before the entire country went dry under Prohibition. It’s quite possible that the basement below the old bar was used to store liquor during the dry years. But for the actual speakeasy on premises, you need to go next door to the shuttered King Eddy Saloon, which has occupied the corner storefront since 1933. 

John Fanté immortalized it in his 1939 roman a clef, Ask the Dust:

Ah well, the hell with you Camilla. I can forget you. I have money. These streets are full of things you cannot give me. So down to Main Street and to Fifth Street, to the long dark bars, to the King Edward Cellar, and there a girl with yellow hair and sickness in her smile. Her name was Jean, she was thin and tubercular, but she was hard too, so anxious to get my money, her languid mouth for my lips, her long fingers at my trousers, her sickly lovely eyes watching every dollar bill.

-John Fanté, Ask the Dust

Down below the King Eddy is a warren of storage rooms, an old service kitchen and a surprise: a windowless barroom with a stage set up on one side, lined with murals of giant beer kegs and foamy pint glasses, Bavarian houses and landscapes. The locals at the King Eddy used to tell stories that during Prohibition, the streetside storefront was a piano store that never really sold pianos. But given the ratskeller theme of the decor, a more likely explanation is that this secret speakeasy was set up by German immigrant Ernest Vierke, the proprietor of a soda parlor that operated upstairs beginning in 1921. There are newspaper clips about similar businesses being raided by the police for illegal booze sales. And while there’s no record that Vierke’s parlor was ever raided, he did pull a permit in 1923 to remove all the plate glass windows and fill in the holes. Could he have been trying to avoid prying eyes?

Even in its current use as a dusty storage space, this basement gives a real, physical sense of what it would have been like to run and frequent a sweaty spot like this, surrounded by 100 drunken revelers. You can still see the ice chest where the beers were kept frosty, and rusty pieces of the freight elevator that once hoisted goods – and maybe some bads – up to the sidewalk. In the back corridors, a concrete post displays wads of century-old gum, stuck there by waitresses (and perhaps sex workers) on their way out to serve their customers. This place feels like it holds secrets. Turn a corner, or lean a little too hard against a wall, and you might find yourself in one of the infamous tunnels beneath downtown LA that helped keep bootleggers in business during the 1920s. Or you might uncover a clue in the case of the phantom fire door that vanished without a trace in 2018.

The King Eddy Saloon

As soon as Prohibition ended in 1933, a restaurant with a beer and wine license opened at 131 E. 5th, and there’s been a bar at that address ever since. It’s changed its name multiple times – always containing “King Edward,” but alternating between “Grill,” “Café” and “Cellar.” Since at least the 1960s it’s been the King Eddy Saloon, operated by the Croick family for half a century. They were on their third generation of family ownership when the King Eddy was sold to the ACME Group in 2012, who remodeled the bar upstairs, but never got around to rehabbing the speakeasy downstairs. ACME didn’t last long; neither did the next couple operators who tried to turn it around.

As of late 2024, the King Eddy Saloon is operator-less and shut down. And that’s a shame, because this was one of those classic dive bars that you don’t see much of in LA anymore, the dingy, neon-soaked, unpretentious spots where you could get a well whiskey or domestic beer for under $5, any time of day (almost literally – they used to open at 6am). 

This place definitely had its seedy years. Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, you’d need to be buzzed into the bathroom, to try and control all the heroin and drug deals that were going down in there. Folks used to smoke in this plexiglass-enclosed area, long after smoking was banned indoors. In other words, it had character, and also characters – Skid Row locals who’d been going there for decades, for conversation, community and a safe place to consume something cheap. 

It may be impossible to substantiate whether Bukowski actually prowled the banquettes of the King Eddy, as many have reported. But it’s the unfamous drinkers that make a dive bar what it is. You can read some of their stories in The Regulars, a self-published photo book by Andreea Teodorescu & Tony Anthony, all about the King Eddy’s most loyal patrons. 

There are no current plans to reopen the King Eddy Saloon, but the Healthy Housing Foundation has shown willingness to lease out their other properties to bar owners recently. So perhaps there’s an opening for YOU.

Do you want to run a historic, windowless dive bar? Got the capital and preservation mindset required to rehab and reactivate the underground speakeasy? Hit up the Healthy Housing Foundation and make it happen. 

Take a virtual tour of the King Edward hotel and speakeasy with this incredible interactive 3-D rendering by Craig Sauer of Reality Capture Experts.

Thanks to 1) Stephen Gee for answering my questions and sending over historic photos and drawings of the King Edward Hotel; 2) Kim Cooper of Esotouric for sharing some insider info about the King Eddy Saloon; 3) Eric Lynxwiler for permitting me to use a postcard of the King Edward from his collection that I didn’t end up using after all.

Sources & Recommended Reading/Viewing

+ “Among Real Estate Owners and Dealers” (Los Angeles Times, December 14, 1902 – via ProQuest)

+ Ariel, Mark: “NEW KID ON THE BLOCK” (The Fight, April 4, 2024)

+ “Ask for Paving on South Los Angeles” (Los Angeles Herald, November 24, 1906 – via UC Riverside California Digital Newspaper Collection)

+ “Cab? Rates Reduced; Stations Conveniently Located” (Los Angeles Times, February 12, 1923 – via ProQuest)

+ Caroline on Crack: “Inside Jeremy Fall’s Retro Revamp of King Eddy Saloon” (LAMag.com, December 17, 2014)

+ Cities of the Underworld: “Land of Manson” (December 8, 2008 – via Internet Archive)

+ Cooper, Kim: “Find the Fire Door! 3-D Tour of Downtown L.A.’s King Eddy Saloon Speakeasy Reveals A Vanished Cultural Treasure” (Esotouric.com, July 10, 2018)

+ Cooper, Kim: “The King Eddy Hotel, Empty No More” (Esotouric.com, May 1, 2018)

+ Cooper, Kim & Richard Schave: “Tomorrow, Skid Row will glow with opalescent stained glass rainbows, as the King Edward Hotel gets his awning back” (Esotouric.substack.com, August 24, 2021)

+ Eggert, Kate & Krisy Gosney: King Edward Hotel’s NRHP nomination form

+ Eggert, Kate & Krisy Gosney: King Edward Hotel’s Historic-Cultural Monument Application form (PDF)

+ Electric Railway Historical Association: “Pacific Electric: Main Street Station” (ERHA.org)

+ Esotouric: “Edwardian Ventilation Infrastructure on the Roof of the King Edward Hotel in old Skid Row” (@Esotouric on YouTube, March 19, 2024)

+ Facebook page for The Regulars (photo book about the King Eddy Saloon)

+ Fanté, John: Ask the Dust (Ecco, 2006 – sample via Amazon)

+ ​​”Gandier Ordinance Carries by Nearly Twenty Thousand” (Los Angeles Times, November 21, 1917 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Gee, Stephen: Iconic Vision: John Parkinson, Architect of Los Angeles (Angel City Press, 2013)

+ Gelt, Jessica: “The last call for a skid row era at King Eddy Saloon” (Los Angeles Times, December 4, 2012)

+ Grimes, Teresa, Allison M. Lyons & Emily Rinaldi, GPA Consulting: “Context: Architecture and Engineering | Theme: Beaux Arts Classicism, Neoclassical, and Italian Renaissance Revival Architecture, 1895-1940” (PDF)

+ “HOTEL CHANGES HANDS” (Los Angeles Times, March 10, 1909 – via ProQuest)

+ “Hotel King Edward Opens Doors to Guests” (LA Herald, March 18, 1906 – via UC Riverside California Digital Newspaper Collection)

+ Kang, Matthew: “King Eddy’s Underground Speakeasy Will Be Reborn” (Eater LA, April 4, 2013)

+ “King Edward Hotel” display ad (Los Angeles Times, January 1, 1925 – via ProQuest)

+ “The King Edward Hotel.: A New Hotel, Magnificently Planned, On the Corner of Los Angeles and Fifth Streets” (Los Angeles Times, February 18, 1906 – via ProQuest)

+ Los Angeles City Historical Society: “Iconic Vision: John Parkinson – Architect of Los Angeles” (@lacityhistory on YouTube, November 22, 2021) 

+ “Los Angeles Eldorado Hotel: It’s Fireproof” (Los Angeles Times, October 11, 1917 – via ProQuest)

+ “Los Angeles Hotels: Eldorado Hotel” (Los Angeles Times, December 18, 1917 – via ProQuest)

+ Masters, Nathan: “Lost LA: A Glimpse of Prohibition-Era L.A. at King Eddy Saloon” (PBSSoCal.org, October 29, 2019)

+ Meares, Hadley: “The tangled history of residential hotels in DTLA” (LAist.com, February 12, 2024)

+ Oddity Odysseys: “Exploring Underground Tunnels of Los Angeles & The King Eddy” (@oddityodysseys on YouTube, June 3, 2017)

+ Parkinson, John: “The Rivington Hotel, Los Angeles, Cal” (Fireproof Magazine, vol. 8, 1906 – via Google Books)

+ PBS SoCal: “The King Eddy Saloon: A Historic Haunt” (@PBSSoCal on YouTube, November 4, 2011)

+ Prosser, David: “Context: Commercial Development, 1859-1980; Theme: Hotels, 1870-1980” (SurveyLA: Los Angeles Historic Resources Survey, 2017) (PDF)

+ Schave, Richard: “Sleuthing A Presidential Mystery in Downtown Los Angeles” (InSROLand.com, November 28, 2012)

+ Shatkin, Elina: “What Happened To The King Eddy’s Magnificent Fire Door Mural?” (LAIst.com, July 10, 2018)

+ Smith, Doug: “Historic King Edward Hotel to get a makeover as single-room occupancy for homeless people” (Los Angeles Times, April 30, 2018)

+ Spivack, Donald R.: “CRA’s role in the history and development of Skid Row Los Angeles.” (CRA, September 15, 1998 – via Scribd)

+ Thomas, Sean P.: “King Edward Hotel to Become Affordable Housing” (LA Downtown News, May 3, 2018) 

+ Vallancourt, Ryan: “With Purchase of Three Hotels, Izek Shomof Tries to Build a Better Block” (LA Downtown News, March 13, 2012)

+ “When You Visit Los Angeles, Stay at King Edward Hotel” (Los Angeles Times, April 30, 1909 – via ProQuest)

+ “The Work of John Parkinson and Edwin Bergstrom” (The Architect and Engineer of California, Volume 22, No 2, September 1910 – via US Modernist) (PDF)