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A bronze plaque at street level on the corner of Broadway and 3rd gets the building wrong twice on the same wall. It gives the year of construction as 1895. The federal nomination that put the place on the National Register says 1894. The plaque also opens by declaring the building listed on that register. The plaque went up in 1991. The listing came in 2002.
Nothing else in the paperwork lines up either. The University of Washington's architecture database dates the building 1895 to 1896. The street number is given as 249, as 249-51, as 253 and as 249-259, because there are five shopfronts along Broadway and the numbers run across them. The record that carries The Replacement Killers' credit calls the place eight storeys. It has five.
The inside burned on 16 February 1911. The Los Angeles Daily Journal reported the next morning that the building had been swept out and firemen hurt. It was the first big call for the newly built Fire Station No. 23 and took ten hours to put down. Willis Polk came from San Francisco to repair it.
What these productions wanted was the emptiness. Faith No More shot Ashes to Ashes in the upper floors in 1997, Tim Royes directing, the band playing in what the credit calls a supernatural mansion. The Replacement Killers began shooting in February 1997 and built three sets inside the one building: a police station, a hotel room and Meg Coburn's office. Se7en had the vacant penthouse two years earlier, and Blade Runner made the corner a hotel in 1982.
A Long Beach developer then spent $20 million turning the place into flats. The front was kept and the inside came out; rows of offices became lofts with ceilings twelve to seventeen feet high. None of the rooms those crews used is in there now. The shell is, and the raised letters over the arch reading Pan American Building, and the plaque, which is still wrong.