I was recently sent this photo asking if I could confirm it was Hamburger’s department store at 801 S. Broadway in downtown Los Angeles in 1909. Using Google image search and TinEye, I could find it posted nowhere else. Hamburger’s at Broadway and 8th St didn’t have seven towers on its roof. (It did, however, have the first escalator west of the Mississippi River!) That tower in the foreground has the letters “BPOE” which are the initials for the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, as well as the BPOE logo. Fraternal conventions were a very big deal back then, so maybe those seven towers were put up temporarily because there was an Elks convention in town. Whatever its origin story, it’s a very striking image.
** UPDATE ** – These two postcards are courtesy of David G. The first one shows the temporary light installation that show it stood at ground level on the sidewalk and surrounded the store. The second one shows what the store looked in the daylight.
** UPDATE ** – @ZambranaML on Twitter/X told me: “The 1909 Elks convention was held in Los Angeles, California, from July 11, 1909. The convention was hosted by Elks Lodge No. 99.” and posted this photo of the Elks’ LA headquarters at Franklin and Spring Streets in downtown Los Angeles, dated July 1909, the same week as the convention:
While Hamburger’s is technically “in” the picture, the actual department store is in the darkness behind the towers.Those towers were essentially temporary, possibly advertising and promotional adornments on the sidewalk perimeter surrounding the routine, cube-shaped building, the roofline of which is seen as the bright diagonal line at the top center of the picture.
Ah, I see. So the towers were at ground level?
The LA Public Library leased space in the Hamburger’s building for a temporary, 5-year long stint.
“Have you ever visited a library in the middle of a department store? If you lived in Los Angeles in the early twentieth century, you could have done just that.”
Lots of pictures and details about both the store and the library space at the link below:
https://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/blogs/lapl/library-and-department-store-hamburger-building-1908-1914