The color stops you first: a turquoise so vivid it seems impossible for a building, as if the Pacific had been glazed onto terracotta and hung on Broadway. Then the details emerge—golden sunbursts exploding from window frames, zigzag chevrons racing up thirteen stories, and crowning it all, a four-faced clock tower spelling EASTERN in vertical neon. Claud Beelman's Eastern Columbia Building, completed in 1930, is not just the finest Art Deco structure in Los Angeles—it may be the most exuberantly decorative commercial building ever erected in America.
The Eastern Outfitting Company and Columbia Outfitting Company—furniture and appliance retailers serving working-class Los Angeles—merged in 1929 and commissioned Beelman to build them a headquarters worthy of Broadway's golden era. The location was strategic: Broadway between 8th and 9th Streets was the city's premier shopping corridor, anchored by the ornate movie palaces that made Los Angeles the entertainment capital of the world. Beelman, already established through his work on the nearby Garfield Building, understood the assignment. He would build not merely a store but a beacon—a building that could compete for attention with the Million Dollar Theatre across the street.
The facade is constructed of approximately 7,000 pieces of glazed terracotta, each piece custom-molded and fired in that distinctive turquoise with gold and blue accents. Beelman drew on Mayan, Egyptian, and Moderne influences, combining them into a vocabulary uniquely suited to Southern California's bright light and theatrical sensibility. The sunburst motif—radiating lines suggesting both sunrise and mechanical energy—appears on nearly every floor, multiplied and varied until the entire facade seems to pulse outward. At the base, storefront windows framed in ornate bronze give way to a lobby of marble and gilded plaster that rivals any downtown theater.
The clock tower was designed for visibility from blocks away. Four clock faces, illuminated from within, sit below vertical 'EASTERN' signage that originally glowed in neon. During World War II, the lights were dimmed for blackout regulations; they returned in the 1950s but fell dark again as Broadway declined. The building was converted to residential lofts in 2006, bringing new life to the structure and new residents to a neighborhood still finding its footing. Johnny Depp owned a penthouse here; the building has appeared in countless films and photographs. But its real function is simpler: to make everyone who walks Broadway look up and gasp.
"The Eastern Columbia Building is the crown jewel of Broadway, the most exuberant Art Deco commercial building in the American West."
— Los Angeles Conservancy
Walk Broadway from 9th Street and let the turquoise draw you north. Stand beneath the clock tower at twilight when the gold accents catch the last sun. Consider that this building—so theatrical, so chromatic, so shamelessly decorative—was designed to sell furniture to working families during the Great Depression. Then understand what Art Deco meant in 1930s Los Angeles: not austerity but abundance, not restraint but celebration, the belief that even commerce could be transformed into spectacle. The store is gone; the lofts are expensive; but the building still glows, still stops traffic, still makes Broadway feel like the center of the world.