A silent movie palace, a televangelist’s pulpit, and now, a boutique hotel: the 13-story tower on South Broadway in downtown Los Angeles has worn many faces in its 87 year history. The newest and loveliest is the Ace Hotel, whose doors swung open this week after roughly two years of renovations.
As a tour on Monday revealed, the new Ace has preserved and played up its location's quirky history, right down to the Jesus Saves sign, installed in 1989 by the evangelical minister who then occupied the building. (And yes, the famous neon is now yours to savor up close should you rent certain of the hotel's finer rooms.) “We wanted [the hotel] to be quintessentially LA, and I think at the heart of it is eclecticism,” explained Pamela Shamshiri, partner at the design firm Commune. Commune, responsible for the new Ace's interiors, also worked on Ace's existing Palm Springs hotel and Opening Ceremony's Tokyo store.
LA's history––and its weirdness––will literally be painted on the walls of the lobby, where hand-drawn murals of everyone from James Dean to a raging bald Britney Spears are underway. Should you fancy channeling Britney yourself, several of the hotel's rooms are equipped with recording equipment and record players, and the hotel has amassed an arsenal of vintage vinyl for guests. Yet for all its quirks, the hotel is also imminently comfortable. LA Chapter, its restaurant, is run by the team behind Brooklyn favorite Five Leaves; a rooftop pool nestled on a terrace is surrounded by hand-carved wooden tables from Joshua Tree.
Britney murals aside, though, Hollywood eclecticism is in the stone and steel that hold the building up. When it first opened, the United Artists building was an early indie movie theater, the brainchild of silent screen starlet Mary Pickford who founded United Artists in 1919 along with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith. The group hoped to serve as an alternative to the studio strongholds who controlled every aspect of entertainment at the time, from scripts to actors to theaters. The Spanish Gothic structure, erected in 1927, was a testament to the art form they wanted to prove cinema was: an extravagant tower with soaring, frescoed ceilings and ornamented columns, inspired in Part by the Segovia Cathedral in Spain. A set of phone booths tucked away next to what was once Pickford’s private screening room offer a literal interpretation of the source material—the booths are replicas of Catholic confessionals.
Even after the building changed ownership several times in the twentieth century, it retained its religious flavor: In 1989, the theater was taken over by evangelical minister Dr. Gene Scott who preached, shot, and broadcast his television sermons from the location. ("Nuke 'em in the name of Jesus!" he once urged the first president Bush.)
Ace has kept Pickford's confessional phone booths as well as Dr. Scott's sign, both relics not only of the building's history but of downtown LA's transformation over the past 80 years. In the decades after the theater opened, wealthier populations gradually moved to the suburbs, leaving Broadway in a state of disrepair. But over the past ten years, this process has reversed, in part because of projects like the Ace. Restoration efforts are repurposing many of the vacant and neglected theate
As a tour on Monday revealed, the new Ace has preserved and played up its location's quirky history, right down to the Jesus Saves sign, installed in 1989 by the evangelical minister who then occupied the building. (And yes, the famous neon is now yours to savor up close should you rent certain of the hotel's finer rooms.) “We wanted [the hotel] to be quintessentially LA, and I think at the heart of it is eclecticism,” explained Pamela Shamshiri, partner at the design firm Commune. Commune, responsible for the new Ace's interiors, also worked on Ace's existing Palm Springs hotel and Opening Ceremony's Tokyo store.
LA's history––and its weirdness––will literally be painted on the walls of the lobby, where hand-drawn murals of everyone from James Dean to a raging bald Britney Spears are underway. Should you fancy channeling Britney yourself, several of the hotel's rooms are equipped with recording equipment and record players, and the hotel has amassed an arsenal of vintage vinyl for guests. Yet for all its quirks, the hotel is also imminently comfortable. LA Chapter, its restaurant, is run by the team behind Brooklyn favorite Five Leaves; a rooftop pool nestled on a terrace is surrounded by hand-carved wooden tables from Joshua Tree.
Britney murals aside, though, Hollywood eclecticism is in the stone and steel that hold the building up. When it first opened, the United Artists building was an early indie movie theater, the brainchild of silent screen starlet Mary Pickford who founded United Artists in 1919 along with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith. The group hoped to serve as an alternative to the studio strongholds who controlled every aspect of entertainment at the time, from scripts to actors to theaters. The Spanish Gothic structure, erected in 1927, was a testament to the art form they wanted to prove cinema was: an extravagant tower with soaring, frescoed ceilings and ornamented columns, inspired in Part by the Segovia Cathedral in Spain. A set of phone booths tucked away next to what was once Pickford’s private screening room offer a literal interpretation of the source material—the booths are replicas of Catholic confessionals.
Even after the building changed ownership several times in the twentieth century, it retained its religious flavor: In 1989, the theater was taken over by evangelical minister Dr. Gene Scott who preached, shot, and broadcast his television sermons from the location. ("Nuke 'em in the name of Jesus!" he once urged the first president Bush.)
Ace has kept Pickford's confessional phone booths as well as Dr. Scott's sign, both relics not only of the building's history but of downtown LA's transformation over the past 80 years. In the decades after the theater opened, wealthier populations gradually moved to the suburbs, leaving Broadway in a state of disrepair. But over the past ten years, this process has reversed, in part because of projects like the Ace. Restoration efforts are repurposing many of the vacant and neglected theate