The Fine Arts Building, Los Angeles
By Kate Flannery
If you’re walking around downtown Los Angeles and ask anyone where the Fine Arts Building is, they’ll just stare at you — waiting for a clue. 811 West 7th Street. Romanesque Revival, with a hint of Italian Renaissance palace. Large reclining nudes on the 4th story look coyly down at the passers-by. Other decorative touches at the 10th and top floors (foliage, animal heads, columns, and arches) and a few human figures with biblical overtones accompany the nudes.
My daughter and I are 20 minutes early to our appointment at the expedited-passport office at 811 West 6th Street. Thinking we were on the right street, we are let into the Fine Arts Building by the uniformed security guard who didn’t have that much to do that day. Standing in the dark, two-story lobby, and without asking us what office we wanted, he begins to explain the place: Batchelder tiles cover the lobby floor and walls, and a delicately shaped reflecting pool holding sculptures of small children playing in the center catch a thin shaft of sunlight from an upper window. The walls are decorated with relief panels, small sculptural inserts, alongside larger showcases for displays of artwork. Things are gilded and gleaming in the dim light coming from elaborate chandeliers.
The guard begins to tell the stories. He brings out a spiral notebook from his desk and shows us the drawing he’d made of the lobby, with lines drawn to link up those relief panels and sculptural inserts that were identical. The result in his notebook is a series of pentagrams and interlocking lines that form black webs on the notebook paper.
He is the only one who has figured out this pattern, he says. “The owners and tenants have come and gone over the years. Nobody stays too long here. Artists, shopkeepers, professionals. Some people say the place is haunted by the souls of the babies who were aborted here,” he adds. “In the thirties. When things were different.”
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Kate Flannery is an Editor-at-Large for The Journal of Radical Wonder where she writes the bi-weekly column, “Interludes”. She lives in a small college town where she also practices law. Her essays, poetry and fiction have been published in Chiron Review, Emerge, Shark Reef, Ekphrastic Review, and Pure Slush as well as other literary journals. She works regularly with the Sasse Museum, in Pomona California and has contributed to exhibition catalogs for the museum as well as writing ekphrastic poetry to the artwork on display there. She was a finalist in Bellingham Review’s 2022 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction and is currently working on a curated volume about Palmer Canyon after the Grand Prix Fire of 2003.
