There were a lot of insults you could hurl at William Randolph Hearst, but you can’t fault his love of architecture. We’re looking north up Broadway from 12th St in downtown Los Angeles, and building on the left was the headquarters of his Los Angeles Examiner newspaper. It was designed by Julia Morgan who built Hearst Castle in San Simeon for him. According to a source cited on Wikipedia, the 7,800-square-foot building was the largest structure in the US devoted solely to the publication of a newspaper. It was also where Louella Parsons had an office. This photo was taken in 1938, which is the year that the L.A. Times gave Hedda Hopper her own gossip column in the hopes of checking Louella’s power, but ended up unleashing a second monster on Hollywood. Talk about unintended consequences.
** UPDATE ** This website which has a lot of info about the refurbishment puts the square footage at 100,000: http://heraldexaminerbuilding.com/
I’m glad to report that the Examiner building is still around. In fact, it’s been recently renovated and now serves as the LA campus of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication for Arizona State University. This image is from September 2021.
Being that this is indeed now the home of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication for Arizona State University, this is surprising : 1) that Arizona State can have such distinguished name on one its buildings especially since Walter Cronkite attended the School of Journalism at the University of Austin and wrote for the Daily Texan– but did not graduate. and he did not attend ASU. (2) and that the PBS New Hour is currently being produced in that building in LA.–not New York or Arizona.