The Eastern Columbia Building is a thirteen-story building located at 849 S. Broadway in the Broadway Theater District of downtown Los Angeles, and is considered by many to be the most beautiful of Los Angeles' historic buildings, as well as its finest surviving example of Art Deco architecture following the 1969 destruction of Richfield Tower. It is easily spotted from Interstate 10 due to its bright turquoise color.
The building sits just across the street from the restored Orpheum Theatre.
Developer Kor Group turned the property into condominiums that opened in fall 2006.
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The Eastern Columbia Building was designed by Claud Beelman and opened on September 12, 1930, after just nine months of construction. It was built as the new headquarters of the Eastern Outfitting Company and the Columbia Outfitting Company, furniture and clothing stores. With the construction of this lavish structure, the companies could also boast one of the largest buildings constructed in the 1930s.
It is built of steel-reinforced concrete and clad in glossy turquoise terra cotta trimmed with deep blue and gold trim.[1] The building's vertical emphasis is accentuated by deeply recessed bands of paired windows and spandrels with copper panels separated by vertical columns. The façade is decorated with a wealth of motifs—sunburst patterns, geometric shapes, zigzags, chevrons and stylized animal and plant forms. The building is capped with a four-sided clock tower emblazoned with the name "Eastern" in neon and crowned with a central smokestack surrounded by four stylized flying buttresses. The sidewalks surrounding the Broadway and Ninth Street sides of the building are of multi-colored terrazzo laid in a dynamic pattern of zigzags and chevrons. The central main entrance has a spectacular recessed two-story vestibule adorned with a blue and gold terra cotta sunburst. The vestibule originally led to a pedestrian retail arcade running through the center of the building.
The 1985 pilot episode of the popular television series, Moonlighting, featured a daredevil climax that took place on one of the Eastern Columbia Building's enormous clock faces.
The exterior of the building can also be seen regularly in the Nickelodeon sitcom iCarly where it represents Bushwell Plaza, the fictional apartment building in which most of the characters live.
It also made brief appearances in Predator 2 and (500) Days of Summer.
Season 8 of Fox Television's action series "24" is supposedly set in New York, but the iconic Eastern Columbia building makes an obvious appearance in the first episode when an escape is foiled on a parking structure's rooftop.
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