Added to the National Register of Historic Places, November 17, 1978

Plug “185 Pier Avenue” into Google Maps, activate satellite view, and you’re treated to an adorable sight. With its south and east facades and domed top covered in red clay tiles, the Parkhurst Building from 1927 looks like it’s giving the entire block a big hug.

And why not? This is perhaps the most playful historic building in Ocean Park, one of Santa Monica’s oldest neighborhoods. Here you’ll find seahorse friezes, gargoyle pediments and horse mosaics, delicate lattices of wrought iron and some superb masonry with protruding bricks in elaborate patterns. Looming above the corner of Pier Avenue & Main Street, where the building’s two facades meet, there’s an octagonal tower surmounted by a lantern-like cupola, in turn surrounded by bulbous finials.  

What was that dramatic tower for? Was this once a lighthouse, warning ships as they approached the beach just a few blocks away? Or a minaret, with a muezzin who scaled the tower five times daily to call his fellow Santa Monica Muslims to prayer? Nope, the Parkhurst Building was always intended for business. Its commissioner and namesake, Clinton Gordon Parkhurst, envisioned retail shops on the bottom with offices for “professionals” up top. And so it remains today.

While other boys are playing tag and drop the handkerchief and other kissing games with the girls, Clinton Parkhurst is gathering in the nickels.

– “14-Year-Old Is Money Magnate,” Los Angeles Evening Express, February 23, 1907

Clinton Parkhurst was a big-time westside realtor in the 1920s, and one of Venice’s earliest residents. His obituary from 1931 has him moving to the Santa Monica Bay area as a boy in the late 1890s, years before Abbot Kinney dug Venice’s famous canals. As a teenager, Parkhurst used to sell newspapers on Venice’s main drag Windward Avenue before and after school; his exploits even earned him a photo in the Los Angeles Evening Express. One T.H. Dudley recognized his business acumen, and taught him the realty ropes when he was barely in his twenties. From then on it wasn’t uncommon to find stories in the local papers about Parkhurst’s property wheelings and dealings. In 1924, he was selected as Venice’s mayor, just a year before the city was annexed by Los Angeles. Parkhurst was just 32 years old when he took office, making him California’s youngest mayor at the time.

When it came time for his new development at Pier Avenue & Main Street, the “boy mayor” didn’t have to search too hard to find the right architect. Norman F. Marsh had designed a good chunk of the Venice business district along with his partner Clarence Russell. Their work included the Venetian renaissance-style buildings and colonnades that lined Windward Avenue, where Parkhurst used to hock papers. You can still see traces of their work if you visit today.

Marsh had just begun a partnership with engineer David Smith and architect Herbert Powell when he got the commission for the Parkhurst Building. In the new firm, Marsh took a more administrative role and Powell took the lead on design. It’s impossible to know how much oversight (if any) Marsh had over Powell’s work, but we can safely say that the Parkhurst more than upholds the legacy of high quality, period revival design that built Marsh’s reputation. 

+ See pictures of the Parkhurst Building’s interior at the Coldwell Banker Commercial site

This is more than a good example of Spanish colonial revival architecture. It’s a unique one, too, with elements you’d find separately in Spanish churches, castles and haciendas, intertwining into one thing. Powell found just the right balance between flatness and ornamentation. The stone and brickwork are baroque for sure, but not haughtily so. The Parkhurst catches attention as much through its grace as its decorative flair. It’s the elegant elder with the flowing white hair and eye-catching brooch that you want to be like when you get to be its age. Nothing else on the block can compare. 

The retail space on the bottom floor of the Parkhurst Building was designed for versatility. A 1929 photo shows the entire floor occupied by Van de Kamp’s Bakery, its signature windmill mounted above the corner entrance. Two decades later, the space had been divided up into three small storefronts and one large one. Later downstairs tenants included an automobile showroom, the interior design boutique Bowen & Company, and clothing retailers Planet Blue and Armani Exchange. These days it’s a fitness studio called Aviator Nation RIDE. 

Upstairs, the building has witnessed politicians, artists and computer hardware designers cycle through its offices, in addition to doctors and dentists. In the ‘60s, the legal firm of Tim McFlynn, Esq. had the tower suite. Probably my favorite upstairs tenant was “physiotherapist” Dr. McLvern T. Barsam, based out of room 7 of the Parkhurst. He’s got an ad in the March 12, 1948 issue of the West Los Angeles Independent, advertising his services with the slogan “Massage for Health – Health is Wealth.” 

For a building of its age, the Parkhurst has gone through remarkably few alterations. The old plate glass windows that used to cover each bay were all replaced with glass doors and windows in other configurations, and the separate entrance on Main Street that you can see in the Van de Kamp’s photo above has been filled in. These days, you can peer into Aviator Nation RIDE’s colorful displays through floor-to-ceiling glass windows that slide up vertically in three parts. Building permits show few adjustments – a new staircase from office #8, a replacement sink in office #11, all minor stuff. 

In contrast, Ocean Park itself has changed a lot since the 1920s. The old Pacific Electric right of way that once ran trains just a block away from the Parkhurst Building was paved over in the 1950s, and turned into the four-lane street Neilson Way. A huge redevelopment project in the ‘60s tore down hundreds of houses and businesses just blocks from the main business district to make way for high-rise condos and apartment complexes. So it’s extra special to have this fantastic example of its style and its era, still in use. And lucky you, there is currently space for lease upstairs. Any of you physiotherapists looking for a new office?

Resources & Recommended Reading

+ “14-Year-Old Is Money Magnate” (Los Angeles Evening Express, February 23, 1907 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “1981 Inventory of Pacific Electric Routes” (PDF – Caltrans, 1982 – via Metro Library Archives)

+ “Architect Broadens Scope” (PDF – Architect and Engineer 88, no. 3, March, 1927 – via USModernist.org)

+ “C.G. Parkhurst, Former Mayor of Venice, Succumbs” (Evening Vanguard, December 28, 1931 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Gebhard, David and Robert Winter: Los Angeles: An Architectural Guide (Gibbs Smith Publisher, 1994)

+ “Happy Days Are Here Again” (AD – Evening Vanguard, February 18, 1930 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Historic Resources Group: “SurveyLA – Historic Resources Survey Report: Venice Community Plan Area” (PDF – LA City Planning, March 2015)

+ Hurtado, Albert: Parkhurst Building’s NRHP nomination form

+ Kines, Mark Tapio: “Neilson Way” (LAStreetNames.com)

+ Kines, Mark Tapio: “Trolleyway” (LAStreetNames.com)

+ “Norman Foote Marsh 1871-1955” (Misterdangerous blog, August 11, 2020)

+ “Notice of Sale of Property” (Evening Vanguard, February 28, 1913 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Ocean Park Redevelopment Project (Ocean Park California Blog)

+ “Ocean Park Time Line” (Ocean Park California blog)

+ Paonessa, Laurie: “Parkhurst Building” (Clio: Your Guide to History, July 7, 2023)

+ “Physiotherapy” (AD – West Los Angeles Independent, March 12, 1948 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Plan Parkhurst Rites Thursday” (Venice Evening Vanguard, December 29, 1931 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Sanborn Map Company: “Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Long Beach, 1918” (via Library of Congress)

+ Sanborn Map Company: “Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Long Beach, 1950” (via Library of Congress)

+ Santa Monica Conservancy: “Parkhurst Building” (SMConservancy.org)

+ “The Work of Norman F. Marsh” (The Architect and Engineer of California Pacific Coast States, vol XXXI, no. 2, December 1912 – via USModernist.org)

+ “Thorton Kinney Buys Three Beach Theaters” (Los Angeles Evening Express, November 15, 1920 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Weinberg, Joan: “Redifice Resurrected: Main Street reflects its turn-of-the-century heritage” (LA Weekly, April 12-18, 1991 – via UC Riverside’s California Digital Newspaper Collection)

+ “What Some Wish for in Their Stockings” (Evening Vanguard, December 23, 1919 – via Newspapers.com)