So we're all familiar with the Old Central No 1, as seen in the image above and below:
mine
It stands out in lots of images taken from the Hill near Court looking toward Broadway...largely because of its striking two-tone character:
americanfilmnoir
heavy rusticated stone at the bottom, and what appears to be stucco above. Which always kind of
bugged me, so I did a little digging...
...and I was right, it was a solidly Romanesque building of all wrought stone. Here's an image from the
Times in 1896, accompanying a blurb about the new jail.
Here's a shot from the
Los Angeles Herald, September 1908 (folk are gathered at the station to hear word of
Captain Auble) --
-- A bit about the jail: the front of the first floor was for the officers and detectives offices. The back of the first floor was all jail, a 10x30 corridor lined with 24 cells on either side. Attached was a receiving hospital, basically a white tiled room with a big skylight. The courts, judges chambers, witness and jury rooms, clerks offices and the like were on the second floor. There was a second floor jail area for the high-security inmates, a female ward (with special accommodations for insane female prisoners) and a juvie ward.
I was shocked that, in my investigations, I found that while I'd deduced the building to be Caukin & Haas (they famously of the City Hall and first Times building, etc.) it was in fact a Charles L. Strange. Strange was the City Superintendent of Buildings, and an architect, known for the red sandstone courthouse (not ours --
theirs), & much of Pasadena's Castle Green.
Love to know when it got modernized -- I would've assumed that the pointed parapet came down after the '49 ordinance but it was obviously gone when they shot
Shockproof in '48. I'm guessing it's a late-30s remodel but more digging needs to be done...