Added to the National Register of Historic Places on August 3, 2005

The historic Long Beach Professional Building has a mundane name, and it was built for mundane reasons: as office space for medical and dental “professionals.” Nobody looks forward to meeting with their dentist. But even if this building is, at its core, an unsexy, eight-story rectangular office building, it is rendered profoundly sexy by its art deco detailing. It’s refined and rhythmic in all the right ways. And it’s a good case study for understanding the growth of downtown Long Beach in the 1920s. 

Like the rest of LA County, Long Beach experienced a rapid growth spurt in the 1920s. Its population between 1920 and 1930 more than doubled, from about 56,000 to just over 142,000. Many of the new transplants were attracted to the oil industry which had sprung up after oil was discovered in Signal Hill in 1921. Real estate prices skyrocketed, and the smell of money brought in new investors and speculators, plus blue collar workers looking for jobs in the oil fields. 

That new influx of people and money brought with it a construction boom – throughout the decade, local papers tallied the value of building permits, often touted as more than “a million dollars a month.” New housing sprung up quickly, from low-rise worker apartments to high-rise apartment buildings and luxury hotels like the Cooper Arms (1923) and Villa Riviera (1928), both listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Commercial construction also soared during the ‘20s, with new banks, shops and restaurants popping up along the business corridor of Pine Avenue. The National Register-listed Security Trust and Savings Building (1924) at 110 Pine Avenue dates from that era. 

Further north on Pine Avenue, the Long Beach Professional Building was one of the city’s major projects from 1929. The Long Beach Press-Telegram from December 31 of that year called it out for “extend(ing) the business district to Eighth Street on Long Beach’s principal business thoroughfare.” It would have been a huge change to the neighborhood in terms of its height. For 20+ years before its construction, the northeast corner of Pine and 8th had a much lower profile; a 1906 story in the Long Beach Press-Telegram lists permits pulled by one W.T. Andrews for a two-story building to be used as a store and apartment house, plus a triplet of detached wood-frame dwellings. Sanborn maps show them there as of 1914, and my guess is that they were all still there until demolition began for the Professional Building.

The Professional Building’s first owner, W. Van Patten Wilson, Inc., commissioned the building on a speculative basis. Unlike many of the other high-rises of the 1920s that had a specific business lined up to occupy it, Wilson had in mind a type of tenant, your private practice doctors, medical lab technicians, dentists and the like. The approach was apparently successful, as the 1935 Long Beach City Directory listed some 40 doctors and 12 dentists in the building, up to 52 doctors and 12 dentists just five years later. 

Think about that: a preponderance of medical folks in a single building that wasn’t a hospital. The fact that this idea got off the ground says a lot about the growth of Long Beach. It was no longer just a resort town for snowbirds and tourists. Long Beach now had a large enough population to require that many doctors and dentists and allied professionals, and enough practitioners to satisfy their needs. 

The architect of the Long Beach Professional Building was William Douglas Lee. He’s best known for designing the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard and the El Royale Apartments in Hancock Park, both famous celebrity haunts, and both also finished in 1929. Lee also collaborated with the visionary developer Florence Casler in reshaping downtown LA’s garment district with a series of high rises in the 1920s. Many years later he would work with his son on the Lee Tower at 5455 Wilshire Boulevard – a 21-story office building, constructed right after LA repealed its 150-foot height restriction.

Lee was accomplished in a variety of period revival styles. For the Long Beach Professional Building he drew on the newly en vogue art deco style, with decorative elements that suggested the sleekness and motion of the machine age. There’s an accent on height here, with the fluting on the piers on the bottom floor sending our eyes up up up to the simply scored extensions that fly up the rest of the building. There’s a frieze above the first floor and a decorative stringcourse just below the roofline, but other than that, this building is really more defined by the subtle rhythm of windows and piers. It feels very modern, and the alternating width of the vertical piers softens the rigidity of its grid-like facade. One wonders whether Lee had originally planned to deck out the facade even further, but had to scale back when the stock market crashed, right in the middle of construction. 

There’s a taste of deco luxury apparent in the entrance lobby, with its multicolored marble and terrazzo floors, black marble wall accents and abstracted geometric patterns painted on the archways. Still visible in current photos of the lobby is an original mailbox and mail chute from the late ‘20s, near the elevator. At least as of 2005, the elevator cabs were also original, lined in wood paneling and brass; according to the National Register application, the elevators were still run by human operators until the 1990s, when they were automated. 

The Long Beach Professional Building made it through the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, one of the few high-rises that both survived intact and still stands today. And it continued its original use for decades. There’s a moving ad in a 1946 issue of the Long Beach Press-Telegram, placed by the Long Beach Physicians Aid Association, which lists all of the names and addresses of local doctors and surgeons who had returned from military service in WWII. Fully 14 out of the 30 names listed were based in the Professional Building. 

Since the very beginning, a variety of types of businesses have leased out the retail space on the ground floor. There were definitely medical-related businesses, including a pharmacy, medical labs and the local branch of the LA County Medical Association (its president, Dr. Ralph B. Eusden, once had an office upstairs). But there’ve also been gift shops, a hardwood flooring store, and as of 2025, a branch of the local Rose Park Roasters coffee chain. My favorite former tenant of the Long Beach Professional Building is surely the Dining Club of Long Beach, which started advertising in 1976. It was a subscription discount program where you could pay $5 for an endless roster of deals on local restaurants, most of which no longer exist (Shakey’s, Carl’s Jr., Pizza Hut, Arby’s and H. Salt Fish & Chips are still with us).  

The building was partially remodeled in 1962 by architect George Vernon Russell, with the fluted piers between storefronts getting a black granite makeover, and the storefront windows shifting to aluminum frames. The thin band of black and white terrazzo that you can see below each window bay on the first floor dates from that same remodel. 

In the early 2000s, the Long Beach Professional Building underwent a major rehabilitation, in preparation for its reopening in 2003 as an assisted living facility called Pine Villa. Many of the features removed during previous renovations were restored, like the terrazzo in the lobby and the steel casement windows and transoms. New stuff from this phase of development included the front door canopy and the green awnings over each of the window bays.

Most recently, the firm KTGY Architecture + Planning renovated the building in 2018 for its debut as Regency Palms, which bills itself as “Luxury Assisted Living and Memory Care.” They turned former office space into residential units with kitchenettes, combined a couple units per floor into common rooms to bring more light into the corridors, and transformed the basement into an activity room, fitness room and salon. The roof became a tree-lined terrace. The Regency Palms re-do took gold in the 2020 National Association of Home Builders’ Best of 55+ Awards in the “Repositioned or Repurposed Project” category, and won a 2019 SAGE Award for “Best 55+ Remodeled Project.” In early 2022 the Long Beach Planning Commission approved KTGY’s plan to expanding Regency Palms with a companion high-rise that would take up the 46-space parking lot just north of the current building. The renderings look cool, and very much in harmony with the art deco original, without directly aping it. At least as of early 2025, when I visited, the proposed new building was still a parking lot. But it’s nice to see that this building that’s witnessed nearly a century of downtown Long Beach’s development is both housing the city’s old-timers, and taking an active part in its future.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ “5 memory care communities with a strong sense of mission” (Building Design + Construction, May 5, 2020)

+ “Building Permits” (Long Beach Press-Telegram, February 10, 1906 – accessed via Newspapers.com)

+ “Building Permits for Year Now Past $10,000,000 Mark” (Long Beach Press-Telegram, May 12, 1929 – accessed via Newspapers.com)

+ “Building Total Pointing to New Record” (Long Beach Press-Telegram, May 5, 1929 – accessed via Newspapers.com)

+ City of Long Beach: “16.52.320 – The Long Beach Professional Building” from  A Republication of the General Ordinances of Long Beach, California (January 6, 2025 version)

+ “The Dining Club of Long Beach” (AD – Long Beach Independent, March 28, 1976 – accessed via Newspapers.com)

+ “Directory of Doctors Returned from Service” (Long Beach Press-Telegram, April 14, 1946 – accessed via Newspapers.com)

+ “General Population by City, Los Angeles County” © 1998-2025 Given Place Media, publishing as Los Angeles Almanac (accessed February 9, 2025)

+ “Gifts for Mother” (AD – Long Beach Independent, May 9, 1976 – accessed via Newspapers.com)

+ “KTGY receives 2019 SAGE honors for Regency Palms in Long Beach and Sun Bay Senior Club in Los Angeles” (PRISM, December 3, 2019)

+ May-Suzuki, Christian: “Despite community pushback, 10-story ‘Regency Palms II’ project approved for Downtown” (Long Beach Business Journal, February 24, 2022)

+ McAvoy, Christy Johnson & Jessica N. Ritz, Historic Resources Group: Long Beach Professional Building’s NRHP application

+ “Regency Palms” (KTGY.com)

+ Sanborn Map Company: “Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Long Beach, 1908” (via Library of Congress)

+ Sanborn Map Company: “Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Long Beach, 1914” (via Library of Congress)

+ Sanborn Map Company: “Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Long Beach, 1949” (via Library of Congress)

+ Sapphos Environmental, Inc.: “City of Long Beach: Historic Context Statement” (PDF – LongBeach.gov, July 10, 2009)

+ Sharp, Steven: “10-story assisted living facility targets 2022 groundbreaking in Long Beach” (Urbanize LA, June 9, 2021)

+ “Six Structures Rise on Pine Avenue” (Long Beach Press-Telegram, December 31, 1929 – accessed via Newspapers.com)