Added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 19, 2023

Standing outside the Higgins Building on the southwest corner of 2nd and Main Streets, you can see LA City Hall (completed in 1928) just a block north, and the former LA Times headquarters (1935) a block west. Years before either of these landmarks was in the blueprint stage, the Higgins Building towered over the neighborhood, a 10-story behemoth in a part of downtown where there weren’t too many high-rises (yet). The downtown LA skyline has since filled in with taller skyscrapers, with more daring rooflines. But the Higgins Building helped LA to literally grow up, thanks to its pioneering use of reinforced concrete. And even if you’re unmoved by construction histories, you’ll appreciate the many notable tenants that have called the Higgins home over the years.

There is something extremely satisfying about a well-composed beaux-arts high-rise like the Higgins Building. That classic (and classical) base-shaft-capital composition feels regimented, solid. Its rectangular proportions are neither too skinny nor too squat; they’re just right. And there’s that perfect balance of order and ornamentation on the outside, with simple stringcourses separating the three sections, some decorative pilasters on the second floor and a cornice overhanging the main three sides. 

Inside, the double-height lobby is clad in Italian marble, and square black and white mosaic tiles cover the floor, just as they always have. Marble wainscoting covers the bottom half of most of the hallways. There are railings and elevator doors of ornamental metal, and a light well brings natural light flooding through the interior of the building. The offices were originally equipped with “hot and cold water, steam heat, alternating and direct currents, compressed air and gas,” according to a 1909 LA Times story. It was the kind of place where any white collar worker would be proud to clock in every day. Dignified enough to make you feel dignified, but not oppressively so. 

The namesake of the Higgins Building was Thomas Patrick Higgins, an Irishman who had made his fortune in the copper mines of Bisbee, Arizona, just north of the Mexican border. Higgins moved to LA in 1902, and started investing in real estate. He first built the Bisbee Inn on the corner of East 3rd Street and Spring Street. Initially marketed as a “headquarters for Arizona folks,” the Bisbee Inn now offers subsidized housing to unhoused people in its current incarnation, the St. George Hotel. 

While the Bisbee Inn was under construction in 1903, Higgins bought the southwest corner of 2nd and Main Streets for $200,000, with promises to make major improvements. It was a savvy, timely move: the main hub for the Pacific Electric Railway opened up just a few blocks away in 1905, so there was plenty of foot traffic. Higgins may have also anticipated that the office building boom that was turning Spring Street into the “Wall Street of the West” would soon expand eastwards to Main Street. 

By 1908, the LA Times was reporting that plans were underway for a $500,000 high rise made of reinforced concrete, fireproof down to the closets in each office, with 35 offices per floor. There would be a power plant in the basement and even a water well on premises, so that the building could generate its own utilities. 

There was a lot of “new” in this description. Almost no businesses had private electrical generators back in 1908 – keep in mind, this was several years before the city was offering electricity as a municipal utility. The idea of an entirely fireproof building was fairly novel in the early 1900s too, and the Higgins Building was extra fireproof. Aside from the windows, nearly everything in this building was concrete, stone or metal. Wooden doors and window frames were clad in zinc sheeting, finished to look like hardwood, to make them less flammable. The only exposed wood was in the thin tack strips that lined the edges of the hallways, to attach the carpet.

Another novelty was the reinforced concrete construction, still relatively untested in LA for tall buildings. It wasn’t until 1905 that LA’s first fully reinforced-concrete building – the annex to the Homer Laughlin Building, home to Grand Central Market – went up. In fact the material was a source of controversy among builders at the time. In the fall of 1905 a group of contractors specializing in brick, steel and stone petitioned the LA City Council to outlaw reinforced concrete, arguing that the material resulted in flimsy structures and its growing popularity threatened their business. While an outright ban never happened, City Council did adopt an ordinance in 1906 that limited concrete buildings to 120 feet, and prohibited the use of hollow concrete blocks on exposed walls. 

To carry out his vision, Thomas Higgins hired Arthur L. Haley, the same architect who designed his Bisbee Inn in 1903. Haley had already given us the residence of LA City Council president Pomeroy Powers (part of the Alvarado Terrace Historic District), and would later design an innovative craftsman-style home for the Lanterman family in La Cañada-Flintridge, a rare residence made of reinforced concrete.

Also on board was structural engineer AC Martin, the founder of a three-generation architecture and engineering firm that’s still around today. Martin’s firm was just three years old in 1910, and would go on to contribute to many of the most significant LA buildings in the first half of the 20th century, including LA City Hall, the Million Dollar Theater, the Richfield Oil Company Building and the old May Company Building on Wilshire and Fairfax (now the Academy Museum). Built just four years after AC Martin founded his firm, the Higgins Building helped to solidify Martin’s reputation as an innovative engineer. And for 35 years, the Higgins was also where he went to work every day. 

In March of 1910, with the initial eight stories of the Higgins Building nearing completion, a new permit was filed to increase it to 10 stories. According to the LA Times, Thomas Higgins didn’t want to be outdone by a 10-story high-rise about to go up at 2nd and Broadway. To support the extra weight, AC Martin had to strengthen the walls from the fourth story upwards.

For his part, architect Arthur L. Haley had to petition the LA City Council to raise the height limit for reinforced concrete buildings from 120 feet (where it had been since the revised 1906 ordinance) to 133 feet, to accommodate those extra two stories. Haley’s proposal generated some serious debate within the architectural community. No less than Octavius Morgan, a principal of the firm Morgan, Walls & Clements (El Capitan, the Wiltern and the Adamson House), opined in the LA Times in April of 1910 that “eight stories is a safe and profitable limit for reënforced concrete structures.”

Haley himself was frequently in the press defending the strength and efficiency of reinforced concrete.

“Reinforced concrete construction is made economical from the fact that the material can be obtained from the local market, while the best structural steel can be manufactured at the present time only by the heavy rolling mills of the East. There is also a great time saving in this kind of building. The fourth and fifth floors of the Higgins building, for example, were built complete within a period of twenty-eight days.”

-Arthur L. Haley in the Los Angeles Times, January 2, 1910

In the end it all worked out, and Higgins got his extra two stories. Haley scored an 18-page spread in The Architect and Engineer of California magazine, with an essay written by Haley, detailing all the construction details of his latest achievement. 

In its early years, the Higgins Building played host to stock brokers, attorneys, real estate firms, and a wide variety of organizations. The Chess and Checker Club of Southern California was founded here, and the Women’s Progressive League had Higgins headquarters. The Association of Liquor Dealers found a home here, even during the Prohibition era. On the opposite end of the moral spectrum: starting in 1917 the Catholic Diocese of LA and Monterey kept their Chancery Office on the eighth floor of the Higgins (must have been nice to look out at St. Vibiana’s while you were flipping through old receipts for barrels of holy water). They were joined in 1920 by C.F. Horan and Co., a “pioneer L.A. ecclesiastical supply firm,” according to the Catholic newspaper The Tidings. Gotta imagine the latter two tenants got to know each other quite well. 

All the while, a steady flow of retail shops occupied the streetside storefronts of the Higgins Buildings. Period photos show a clothing store, a shoe shop and a branch of the popular pharmacy The Owl Drug Co.

Probably the most renowned occupant of the Higgins Building was attorney and civil libertarian Clarence Darrow. In the early 1900s Darrow was a well known labor attorney, with high-profile cases representing Wisconsin woodworkers, the United Mine Workers of America and Eugene Debs, president of the Industrial Workers of the World. In 1911, the American Federation of Labor convinced Darrow to move from Chicago to LA to defend James and John McNamara. They were accused of placing the dynamite that blew up the Los Angeles Times building on October 1, 1910, killing 21 people. The bombing was allegedly carried out at the behest of the Iron Workers Union, as a message to the Times’ staunchly anti-union ownership. During his time in LA, Darrow worked out the details of the case from an office in the Higgins Building, just two blocks from where the bombing took place.  

While Darrow was able to spare the McNamaras the death penalty, it came at a great personal cost. He was accused of bribing two jurors to help the defense’s case, and ended up a defendant himself in two trials in 1912 and 1913. He was acquitted in the first trial, and the second ended in a hung jury; several sources say that the DA agreed not to retry him, if he promised never to practice law again in California. Darrow would end up repairing his reputation; today he’s best remembered for arguing the case for teaching evolution in school, in the famous Scopes “Monkey” Trial of 1925.

Lawyer Job Harriman was already working in the Higgins Building when Darrow came to town, and joined the McNamaras’ defense team as co-counsel. He was an outspoken socialist, the Socialist Labor Party’s candidate in the 1898 California gubernatorial election, and Eugene Debs’s running mate for his failed presidential bid in 1900. Harriman ran two tight races for Mayor of Los Angeles in 1911 and 1913 while he was working out of the Higgins. And this was also where Harriman hatched the idea for Llano del Rio, the utopian socialist commune he founded in 1914 in the Antelope Valley. 

The longest-lasting tenant of the Higgins Building was likely the General Petroleum Co., a precursor to Mobil. The company started in a single office in 1911, then metastasized to the entire 10th floor, and eventually took over nearly the whole building. A photo from 1939 shows the “Mobiloil” brand name and the company’s pegasus logo on a banner hanging from the top floor. General Petroleum moved out in 1949, and into its own building at 6th and Flower, which is also listed on the National Register. 

This part of downtown LA had changed a lot in the 40 years since the Higgins Building first opened its doors. The commercial districts that Thomas Higgins hoped would move east, instead moved west. Theaters abounded on Broadway, many of them incorporated into new high rise office buildings that shifted downtown’s center of gravity further and further away. As LA became more of a car town, there were fewer folks heading north from the Pacific Electric terminal nearby; especially after Union Station opened in 1939 further north, commuters and tourists might never need to pass through Main Street.

The character of the neighborhood was changing, too. The Union Rescue Mission opened a new Main Street location in 1926, right across the street from the Higgins Building, and the area became a magnet for the hungry and the unhoused – a transition that was only accelerated by the Great Depression. With fewer tourists and traveling businesspeople, many local hotels converted into “single room occupancy” facilities that were more affordable for transients and low-income folks. By the end of the 1930s, the corner of 2nd and Main Streets had changed from prime real estate to the outskirts of Skid Row. Eventually Main Street’s clothing boutiques turned to pawnshops; the old vaudeville theaters on Main Street turned to porn. 

In 1949, the same year that General Petroleum Co. moved out, Thomas Higgins’s estate decided to liquidate its real estate holdings, including the Higgins Building. They sold it to the County of Los Angeles’s Road Department (later consolidated into the Department of Public Works), who in turn sold it piecemeal to the Board of Supervisors, as a new home for its Bureau of Engineering. For the next 28 years the County’s construction experts oversaw projects from inside a building that was itself an engineering landmark. You can still see the department’s name embedded in mosaic tiles under the front entrance. 

After the Bureau of Engineering relocated to a more modern home in 1977, the Higgins Building was auctioned off to Barry Bruk and Jay Markoff, co-owners of the Associated Sewing Machine Co. They bought it as a real estate investment for just $275,100, just $100 more than the minimum bid – and less than half as much as it had cost Thomas Higgins to build it. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times Magazine in 1997, Bruk described the Higgins as “Beautiful inside!” and “Gorgeous!” when he and Markoff bought it. But they had no luck finding new tenants, despite pouring money into modernizing the building. Within a few years they were waging a constant battle with squatters and thieves. The invaders punched through interior windows, lit fires, severed massive heaters from the walls, stole doorknobs to be melted down for scrap metal. They broke through so many locks that Bruk had to weld the gate shut. 

Even AC Martin’s sons, who worked at their dad’s firm when it was located in the Higgins Building, had given up on the old place by the 1990s.

Albert C. Martin, 83, A.C.’s namesake and the firm’s partner emeritus, views the Higgins Building without wistfulness. He can see no future for it, since neither its stairways nor lobby could conform to current codes. “I always felt it was a good building and it did its job,” Martin says. “When we left it–well, finally the county moved in, and they didn’t do anything for the building.”

J. Edward Martin, 80, Al’s brother and also a retired partner, is more demonstrative. “Oh, it was first class,” he marvels. “It was as good a building as there was in Los Angeles, if not the best.” But he, too, can find no prospects for renewal. “Let’s suppose you’ve got a 1922 Ford Model T,” he conjectures. “You could fix it up, but you’d do better to start with a whole new car.” So it is with the Higgins Building. “Today,” he says, “I’d classify it as a clunker.”

–Ed Leibovitz: “The Building Time Forget [sic],” Los Angeles Times Magazine, August 17, 1997

Finally in 1998, the Higgins found a buyer in Andrew Meieran – the same guy who bought Clifton’s in 2010. Meieran’s company Albion Pacific Properties paid a bit over $1 million for the Higgins, and in 2001 started the long process of rehabbing it, and converting the 230-odd office spaces into 135 apartments. Meieran & Co. were part of a wave of designers and developers who invested in exciting adaptive reuse projects in the early 2000s. There were a few years there where it seemed like every stodgy old building in the historic core was being converted into artist lofts or condos, and a new mixology bar was popping up every week. 

One of the hipper cocktail spots to spring up in that era was The Edison, located in the basement of the Higgins Building. Meieran partnered with nightlife impresario Marc Smith to conceive of this industrial-chic nightclub, where you could sip an expensive libation right next to the electrical generators that used to power the entire building. Meieran & Smith preserved the Higgins’s private power plant as part of the decor. 

The Edison closed down during the pandemic. Most of the street-level storefronts are currently empty, with just Badmaash (a terrific Indian restaurant) hanging on; look through the dirty windows of the former Bok Bok Mediterranean space, closed in 2022 with its signage still visible, and you’ll see some of the same black and white mosaic tiles from the lobby.

But there’s still life in the upstairs floors of the Higgins Building. The apartments are now condos (see the insides of unit 202, 313, 415 and 707). When I visited, a sandwich board right outside the entrance advertised one 800-square foot option with a “City Hall View” for $539,000. Actual people were walking in and out. 

Mounted in the front lobby is a series of placards documenting the Higgins Building’s history up through 2023, when it was added to the National Register. It’s a strange thing to have to face the entire history of a building whenever you enter…but also a beautiful thing that the owners of these condos take such pride in the heritage of the place where they live that they wanted to put its history front and center. The placards are attached to a band of mirrors, just above the mailboxes. You literally reflect on the building’s history, every time you get your mail. 

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ “14 ½% at Once” (AD – Morning Tribune, July 28, 1912 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Albert C. Martin Sr., 80, Noted Architect, Dies” (Los Angeles Times, April 10, 1960 – via ProQuest)

+ “Are Buildings to Go Higher?” (Los Angeles Times, April 3, 1910 – via ProQuest)

+ “Arthur L. Haley: Buildings and Structures” (lantermanhouse.org)

+ “Believes in North End” (Los Angeles Times, January 16, 1910 – via ProQuest)

+ “Blundering, waste charged county officials by jury” (Los Angeles Daily News, December 18, 1951 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Building Laws Criticised” (Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1910 – via ProQuest)

+ “C.F. Horan Co. Opens New Headquarters” (The Tidings, November 2, 1962 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Chaiken, Stacie and Joan Springhetti, Higgins Loft Homeowners Association: Higgins Building Historic-Cultural Monument Application (PDF – via LA City Planning) 

+ “Concrete Favored.” (Los Angeles Times, January 2, 1910 – via ProQuest)

+ Counter, Bill: “Downtown: Main Street and theatres farther east” (Los Angeles Theatres Blog)

+ Cowan, Geoffrey: “The Trials of Clarence Darrow” (Los Angeles Times, May 16, 1993 – via ProQuest)

+ “Death Reveals Benefactions” (Los Angeles TImes, March 19, 1920 – via ProQuest)

+ Feldman, Jack J.: “Electricity in Early Los Angeles” (waterandpower.org)

+ Gelt, Jessica: “Beyond the Velvet Rope” (Los Angeles Times, May 3, 2007 – via ProQuest)

+ “Going Higher” (Los Angeles Times, March 2, 1910 – via ProQuest)

+ Haley, A.L.: “A Ten Story Monolithic Reinforced Concrete Building” (PDF – The Architect and Engineer of California, April 1910 – via USModernist.org)

+ “Half-Million-Dollar Block at Second and Main Streets.” (Los Angeles Times, June 23, 1909 – via ProQuest)

+ “Half Million Investment” (Los Angeles Times, March 31, 1908 – via ProQuest)

+ Harper, Franklin, ed: Who’s Who on the Pacific Coast: A Biographical Compilation of Notable Living Contemporaries West of the Rocky Mountains (Harper Publishing Co., 1913 – via Library of Congress)

+ “Higgins Mine” (Bisbee Mining & Minerals website)

+ “History of Downtown Los Angeles’ “Skid Row”” (PDF – LA Chamber of Commerce website)

+ “Hollow Block Men Agitated” (Los Angeles Times, October 30, 1906)

+ Johnson, Reed: “It’s finally happening” (Los Angeles Times, October 16, 2003 – via ProQuest)

+ LA County Public Works Department: “FAQ: When was the original Road Department established? Thanks.” (https://pw.lacounty.gov)

+ Leibowitz, Ed: “The Building Time Forget [sic]” (Los Angeles Times Magazine, August 17, 1997)

+ “Mail Here by Aerial Post” (Los Angeles Times, September 29, 1911 – via ProQuest)

+ Masters, Nathan: “L.A.’s Changing Skyline: A Brief History of Skyscrapers in the City of Angels” (PBSSoCal.org, May 23, 2012)

+ Meares, Hadley: “Llano del Rio: The ruins of LA’s socialist colony” (Curbed LA, May 1, 2017)

+ “New Chancery Office Opens” (The Tidings, August 31, 1951 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Pearson, Will: “The Edison Downtown, Los Angeles” (www.willpearson.co.uk)

+ Rasmussen, Cecilia: “A Socialist Who Almost Was Mayor” (Los Angeles Times, October 31, 1999 – via ProQuest)

+ Rasmussen, Cecilia: “Higgins Building was a shining showpiece” (Los Angeles Times, November 19, 2006)

+ Sanchez, Jesus: “Higgins Building to Become Loft Apartments” (Los Angeles Times, March 13, 2001)

+ “Second and Main Street Corner Sold.” (Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1903 – via ProQuest)

+ “Supervisors Agree to Buy Building on a Piecemeal Basis” (Los Angeles Evening Citizen News, March 29, 1949 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Thomas Higgins Seriously Sick” (Los Angeles Times, April 4, 1916 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Would Prohibit Concrete Buildings” (Los Angeles Times, October 23, 1905 – via ProQuest)