LA’s Most Beautiful Storage Building Was Also a Speakeasy
The work of Los Angeles architect Arthur E. Harvey includes some of the city’s most recognizable and storied buildings (the Scientology Celebrity Centre [originally the Château Élysée], the Villa Carlotta), but he’s also behind what was supposedly hailed on its opening as the most beautiful storage building in the world: the American Storage Company Building. Yes, if you’ve been wondering what awesome purpose the 14-story-tall, Deco/Spanish Revival beauty at Beverly and Virgil was designed for, we’ve got news for you: It was built in 1928 as a glamorous repository for people’s overflow belongings. But it does have some excitement in its past; during prohibition, its top floor housed multiple speakeasies, as Eastsider LA wrote about recently. According to a long-ago Curbed tipster, the freight elevators were used to bring guests secretly to the top floor, and there are some remains of what might have been the bandstand still up there. Here’s a brief roundup of the building’s debaucherous past….