#233: Highland Park Masonic Temple

Added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 18, 1990

My first time inside Highland Park’s Lodge Room was to see Swans, an experimental rock band known for music that sounds like incantations, and live performances that feel like ritual purgings. It was the perfect show for a venue that once hosted countless rituals over its nearly 60-year history as the Highland Park Masonic Temple, the one-time home of Masonic Lodge #382.

By the time this Temple was built, Freemasonry had been around in California for about 75 years. According to historian Adam Kendall, it first came west during the Gold Rush of the late 1840s and early 1850s, right as California was transitioning into American statehood. Kendall describes the Freemasons, and other fraternal organizations like the Oddfellows, as responding to “a need for a sort of secular moral force” and community during the chaos and violence of those years. The first Masonic lodge in Los Angeles was #42, built in 1853 just south of the Plaza. It still stands today, shoulder-to-shoulder with the Merced Theater on Main Street.

Masonic Lodge #382 was formed in the fall of 1906 by a group of 13 Master Masons from Highland Park, Garvanza and surrounding areas. They first leased a space at Wood’s Hall, just up the street, and would spend the next 13 years meeting in various temporary locations around town. But as their ranks swelled, they decided to build a permanent home.

And so the Highland Park Masonic Association bought a tract of land at the southwest corner of Avenue 56 & Pasadena Avenue (later renamed North Figueroa) in 1919. Lodge member Elmore R. Jeffery drew up the plans on behalf of his architecture firm, Jeffery and Schaefer; he also designed the original Benjamin Franklin High School a few blocks away, a Carnegie library in Watts, and churches throughout Southern California. The cornerstone of the Highland Park Masonic Temple was laid on December 16, 1922, and Lodge #382 had its first meeting there the following July, attracting some 600 members.

Highland Park Masonic Temple in the 1920s (Security Pacific National Bank Collection / Los Angeles Public Library) and in 2024

Highland Park Masonic Temple - corner — Highland Park Masonic Temple in the 1920s (Security Pacific National Bank Collection / Los Angeles Public Library) and in 2024

Jeffery’s (mostly) two-story building is peak Italian Renaissance revival, all stately elegance and balanced proportions. The facing is mottled red brick, with terracotta embellishments framing the windows, and two platoons of red clay barrel tiles stationed at a slant along the otherwise flat roof. A five-bay colonnade dominates the second floor exterior on the Figueroa Street side, and an impressive terracotta cornice crowns both of the street-facing sides. You can find Masonic symbols everywhere – square and compasses dominate the pediment above the main door, just above the “Highland Park F&AM” lettering, and alternate with stars on a frieze below the cornice.

Entrance on Avenue 56
Cornerstone, laid in 1922
Soffit below the cornice

Built right in the center of Highland Park’s historic commercial core, the Highland Park Masonic Temple was always intended as a mixed-use institutional/commercial building – a handy income-generating arrangement for the Masons. From the beginning the ground floor was dedicated to retail space. A photo from the ‘20s shows a sign advertising Hall’s Dry Goods and Men’s Furnishing Goods Store on the Figueroa side. Other tenants over the years have included barbershops, cafes, the offices of local politicians, clothing stores and restaurants; currently Delicias Bakery and Le Labo Fragrances lease out the space on the Figueroa Street side, with Avalon Vintage and Burgerlords on the Avenue 56 side. Stand on the corner on a day when they’re all open, and you might catch the smell of fresh-baked telera rolls, perfume, old leather and sizzling beef, all congealing into one meta-smell.

Enter the Temple through the main door on Avenue 56, and you immediately walk up a checkered staircase (no doubt a reference to the traditional Masonic checkerboard floor, whose alternating black and white tiles reflect the good and evil inherent in all mankind) to the second floor lobby. Round the corner and you’re in the windowless grand lodge room. It’s quite a spectacle, especially late at night with the lights low. Wood floors and oak walls, punctuated with rare Victorian anaglyph panels; a dais on each side, three of them cradling a mural of some ancient vista. Masonic symbology is all over the place here, too. A giant five-point star hangs at the center of the ceiling, calling back to the blazing star symbol and the Order of the Eastern Star, a related Masonic organization.

Entrance area to the Lodge Room, 2018 (Laure Joliet / Design, Bitches)
Upstairs lobby of the Lodge Room, 2018 (Laure Joliet / Design, Bitches)
Main Hall of the Lodge Room, 2018 (Laure Joliet / Design, Bitches)
After the Swans show, April 28, 2024

Down the hall from the lobby, the banquet hall has been transformed into a restaurant and bar called Checker Hall – another Masonic “checker” reference. And wouldn’t you know it, the four-sided bar is in the shape of the square and compasses 😉

Checker Hall, 2018 (Laure Joliet / Design, Bitches)

I couldn’t tell you who was a member of Lodge #382 in the 1920s, aside from the silent film actor John Aasen, one of the tallest men in the world (Aasen’s New York Times obituary claimed he was 8’ 9” and once weighed over 500 pounds). What I do know is that the Lodge was active in civic and business affairs around Northeast Los Angeles. Their members were bankers and attorneys, teachers and real estate brokers. In the words of the Highland Park Masonic Temple’s Historic Structure Report, these men were “building and sustaining social capital and fostering a sense of civic pride, especially in an era where face-to-face interaction constituted the vast majority, if not the entirety of one’s social encounters.”

For about 60 years the Masons of Lodge #382 held their meetings and rituals here, heard lectures and coordinated philanthropic giving. They also loaned out the Temple to other organizations including the Garvanza Lodge #492, an Eastern Star chapter and a few youth organizations. The local papers in the 1920s and ‘30s frequently ran stories of sorority balls, and celebrations by the ROTC and New Deal Democratic Club, all held at the Temple.

Alleyway on the west elevation
Small parking lot behind the Lodge Room

The Highland Park Masonic Temple thrived in the years just after WWII, as veterans moved back home, put down roots and lodged themselves into their communities. Beginning in the ’60s though, the popularity of fraternal organizations like the Masons began to decline. You can see how a highly-structured social institution like Freemasonry, built on high moral ideals, might seem too “square” for a young man raised in the ‘60s counterculture.

Figueroa Street, Highland Park, 1925. Masonic Temple is at left. (Security Pacific National Bank Collection / Los Angeles Public Library)
View across the street from outside the Lodge Room

There was also the problem of the building itself. It was built of unreinforced masonry (a little bit ironic, don’t you think?), at a time when Los Angeles was issuing seismic safety mandates. Lodge #382 couldn’t afford the required repairs, so in 1982, they sold the building to a couple of restoration-minded investors, and joined up with a Masonic chapter in Lincoln Heights as the new Fellowship Lodge #290.

The new owners, Glendale stepbrothers Jerry Manpearl and Jerry Sullivan, spent three years and $400,000 (offset by historic tax credits) on retrofitting the building and bringing it back to its mostly-original appearance, according to the Secretary of the Interior’s standards. They shored up the brick walls with steel reinforcement beams, then painstakingly reattached the molding by hand; they restored the original plate glass storefronts, and uncovered a system of transom windows over the retail shops. New chandeliers were hung in the main hall, but most of the symbol-laden door hardware is original.

Cross-section of the Highland Park Masonic Temple (Design, Bitches)

In 1988 the Highland Park Masonic Temple reopened as the Highland Hall Cultural Center, and spent years as a rentable social hall and event space. Weddings, community meetings, quinceañeras, film shoots…according to a 1990 LA Times article, Playboy even scheduled a photo shoot there once.

Back in 2015 the Masonic Temple building was once again solid to developer Hugh Horne, who took a couple years to renovate the original meeting and banquet halls into the Lodge Room and Checker Hall that you see today. The current design comes courtesy of Design, Bitches, who gave the spaces a swanky, playful overhaul that preserves all the historic goodies while also making it way more fun to explore. I wonder what the original Masons of Lodge #382 would make of the teal and purple paint job (I love it). And I wonder what they would think of Swans. You don’t have to see a band as spiritually and viscerally as intense to appreciate the vibe of the room; they’ve got plenty of great acts playing all the time at the Lodge Room. But it sure helps.