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From Broadway it is a brown brick corner block, easy to walk past. The lobby is low, narrow and dark. Then it opens: a court rising almost fifty feet to a glass roof, Italian marble stairs, open cage lifts to the fifth floor in wrought iron made in France and shown at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair before it came here.
Lewis Bradbury, a mining millionaire, paid $500,000 for it, three times the estimate of $175,000, and died a few months before it opened in 1893. Its authorship is still argued. Sumner Hunt handed in a design, Bradbury judged it too small, and the job went to Hunt's draftsman: George Wyman, 32, no architectural training, $5 a week. Owners and federal paperwork both repeat that he took it only after a seance in which his dead brother promised it would make him famous. He never built anything important again.
It is an office building still: coworking on the second floor, a Blue Bottle cafe downstairs. Since 1996 the LAPD's internal affairs division has had space upstairs, which officers call the Ovens, the place they get burned. Whether they are still there, the owners do not say.
Blade Runner put the genetic designer J. F. Sebastian's apartment here and staged its final confrontation on the stairs and galleries. The rooftop the film ends on was built on a studio backlot. What Blade Runner took from the Bradbury, it took from indoors.