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Gaylord Apartments

3355 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles

Introduction

When the Gaylord Apartments opened its doors on April 9, 1924, it introduced Los Angeles to something new: high-rise urban living designed as a permanent home. Built directly across Wilshire Boulevard from the Ambassador Hotel, the 13-story Renaissance Revival tower brought New York-style apartment house living to a city still defining itself. Its architects, Walker and Eisen, gave the building a scale and dignity that made it one of the most recognizable structures along the boulevard from the day it was completed.

The Gaylord was conceived as a cooperative community, one of the first of its kind in Los Angeles, where residents could own their units and share in the management of a building that offered the full amenities of a first-class hotel. That experiment in ownership ultimately ran into serious difficulty, but the building endured. The address at 3355 Wilshire has remained a landmark on one of the city's most storied corridors for more than a century.

The banner captures a pivotal moment in the building's history. After its cooperative ownership model faltered in the mid-1920s, the Gaylord repositioned itself to attract buyers seeking both luxury and stability on one of the city's most fashionable streets. The offer reflected a bold early attempt to combine apartment living with ownership, an idea well ahead of its time in Los Angeles. Units were marketed with large kitchens and a central refrigeration system, among the first in the city to allow tenants to freeze their own ice cubes.

By the mid-1920s, this stretch of Wilshire Boulevard was beginning its transformation into one of Los Angeles’s most desirable residential corridors. Large apartment buildings like the Gaylord rose alongside established landmarks such as the Ambassador Hotel, signaling a shift from low-density development to a more urban, upscale character.

In the years that followed, the corridor would gain additional prominence with the arrival of destinations such as the Brown Derby (1926) and Bullocks Wilshire (1929), helping to solidify Wilshire’s reputation as both a fashionable address and a major commercial thoroughfare. Even at this earlier date, the Gaylord stood prominently along the boulevard, directly across from the Ambassador’s broad front lawn.

The Man Behind the Name

Henry Gaylord Wilshire was one of the more unusual figures in the history of Los Angeles real estate. An outspoken socialist who declared that all men could be classified as either fools or socialists, he was also a land speculator of considerable ambition. In 1895, Wilshire began developing 35 acres west of Westlake Park as an exclusive residential subdivision. He donated a strip of land to the city for a boulevard on two conditions: it would carry his name, and it would be permanently closed to railroad lines and commercial trucking.

Wilshire left Los Angeles in 1900 after being arrested for speaking in a public park, a charge that was dismissed but that prompted him to relocate to New York. He returned later, trading on his connection to the now-famous boulevard even as its expansion proceeded without him. His fortunes rose and fell several times. He died destitute in New York on September 7, 1927, just as the street he had named was becoming one of the most fashionable addresses in the American West.

Whether the Gaylord Apartments was formally named in his honor is a matter of some discussion. The Los Angeles Conservancy notes that the connection is claimed but not conclusively established. What is clear is that his name already carried enough civic weight in 1924 that using it on a building was good business.

Builders, Architects, and a Grand Opening

In 1923, developers J.B. Lilly and Paul Fletcher purchased land on the northwest corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Kenmore Avenue, directly across from the Ambassador Hotel, which had opened in 1921 and quickly become the social center of both Hollywood society and old-money Los Angeles. Construction of the Gaylord began in January 1923.

Lilly and Fletcher hired the firm of Walker and Eisen, already regarded as one of the leading architectural partnerships in the city. Albert Raymond Walker and Percy Augustus Eisen had formed their association in 1919 and would go on to design many of the most distinctive buildings in Los Angeles over the following two decades, including the Fine Arts Building, the Pellissier Building, and the United Artists Theatre. For the Gaylord, they produced a 13-story early Renaissance-inspired tower whose proportions and classical detailing gave Wilshire Boulevard a new sense of urban permanence. General contractors were Lange and Bergstrom.

At the grand opening on April 29, 1924, more than 2,000 people attended a public reception to tour the completed building. What they found was remarkable for Los Angeles at the time: marble floors, mahogany finishes, custom tapestries and furnishings, views of the mountains and the Ambassador gardens, and what many observers called one of the most beautiful lobbies in the city. The basement held a steam plant, laundry facilities, an incinerator, and servants' quarters. A commissary, barber shop, ballroom, and retail spaces completed the picture of a self-contained urban world.

A Cooperative That Did Not Hold

The Gaylord was conceived as one of Los Angeles's first cooperative apartment buildings. Buyers were offered the chance to elect their own board of governors and shape the community as co-owners rather than renters. A sales agent promoted the arrangement as a democratic and progressive way to live, and some buyers paid mortgages of $14,250 or more for their units.

The experiment ran into trouble almost immediately. By the mid-1920s, co-op members had filed suit against the building's owners, claiming that only about 20 of the 163 apartments had actually been sold as intended, while the remaining units were being rented out. The lawsuits, combined with struggling sales and irregular changes in ownership, eventually forced the Gaylord into receivership.

The building reorganized as a conventional rental property, a configuration it would maintain through the rest of the century. The 1929 banner image seen above reflects that transition: a renewed effort, under new terms, to persuade Angelenos that owning a piece of the Gaylord was still worth their investment.

Architects Walker and Eisen designed the Gaylord in a Renaissance Revival style that set the tone for the residential towers that followed along Wilshire through the late 1920s and into the 1930s. The six-story Evanston Apartments, visible east of the Gaylord, was located at 630 South Kenmore Avenue and built in the late 1920s. It was later demolished, and its site is now occupied by the 1967 Wilshire Square building designed by Langdon and Wilson. The surrounding corridor, which also included the Asbury, Langham, Fox Normandie, Piccadilly, and Windsor apartment houses, drew comparisons at the time to the great residential avenues of New York.

This eastward view captures Wilshire Boulevard at a notable moment in the Ambassador's own history. In 1938, the firm of Walker and Eisen, the same architects who designed the Gaylord, was engaged to add a new entrance pylon to the Ambassador Hotel at 3400 Wilshire Boulevard. The Cocoanut Grove nightclub addition to the hotel was also completed around this time. By 1938, the Ambassador had already hosted six Academy Awards ceremonies and established the Cocoanut Grove as one of the premier entertainment venues in the country. The view from the Gaylord's side of the boulevard captures two buildings whose fates were intertwined from the beginning — designed by the same firm, built across the street from one another, and together anchoring the most fashionable residential and entertainment corridor in Los Angeles.

These street-level views document Wilshire Boulevard at the height of its prestige as a residential corridor. The density of institutional and cultural landmarks visible from the Gaylord's block, including two major houses of worship and a professional office tower, illustrates how rapidly the corridor had matured since the days when Henry Gaylord Wilshire first donated a strip of barley field to the city.

A Notable Address

From its earliest years, the Gaylord attracted prominent residents. Silent film actress May Allison lived at the building from 1925 to 1928, appearing in several features including Flapper Wives and Her Indiscretion and marrying Photoplay magazine editor James Quirk while a resident. Richard Nixon reportedly maintained an apartment at the Gaylord during his 1962 campaign for governor of California.

The building also housed silent-era film stars, East Coast transplants, and members of the industrial and professional classes who arrived in Los Angeles during the westward migrations of the 1920s. The Los Angeles Times called it one of the largest and most pretentious apartment houses in the country, using the word in its older sense of impressive and aspirational.

By the 1940s, the Gaylord had settled into a stable existence as one of Wilshire's enduring institutions. The ground floor restaurant space underwent several transformations over the decades. It operated first as the Gay Room, then became the Secret Harbor in 1951, run by brothers Seymour and Harold Dimsdale, who were among the leading restaurateurs on Wilshire during that era. The Secret Harbor gave way briefly to the Golden Anchor before the space was reinvented in 1962 as the HMS Bounty, a nautical-themed bar and restaurant that became one of the best-known gathering places on the boulevard and remains in operation today.

Beginning in the 1970s, an influx of Latino and Korean immigrants reshaped the area now known as Koreatown, bringing new commercial and cultural energy to a corridor that had grown quieter since its 1920s peak. When the Ambassador Hotel was demolished in 2006 to make way for the Robert F. Kennedy Community School, a gathering of longtime patrons and neighborhood figures was held at the Gaylord and the HMS Bounty to mark the occasion.

The building its neighbor had once overshadowed had outlasted it by nearly two decades.
In 2024, the Los Angeles City Planning Department received a nomination to designate the Gaylord Apartments as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, a formal recognition that the building's architectural and historical significance merits permanent protection. The building continues to function as a residential apartment community with the HMS Bounty anchoring its ground floor as it has since 1962.

The Gaylord Apartments stands today as one of the few surviving examples of the grand residential towers that once lined Wilshire Boulevard. It is a record of how the city imagined itself in the 1920s, a place where ambition, architecture, and urban life came together in a form that has proven, against considerable odds, to endure.

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