Winged ‘army’ kept watch over L.A. tower
No one knew what to call the sculptural figures that made the Richfield Building, razed in 1969, distinct.
For years the Richfield Building dominated the downtown Los Angeles skyline, an art-deco neontopped masterpiece that is considered one of the city’s most beloved buildings.
But in 1969, the new downtown — with its modern high-rises — meant the end for the Richfield Building. It was torn down to make way for the Arco twin towers.
In April 1969, The Times wrote about some of the unlikely refugees of the Richfield Building’s demise:
For 40 years they stood guard over the black-gold fortress at Flower and 6th Sts. that was the Richfield Building.
From 15 floors they watched Los Angeles around them grow from simple order to smoggy complexity. They saw the gaudiness of their own building turn to art.
Now they lie strewn about a Cleveland Wrecking Co. yard like a defeated army.
Soldiers? Is that what these mysterious creatures were supposed to be? Soldiers with golden wings?
Maybe angels. But angels with Roman helmets and breastplates?
“I don’t know what the heck they’re called,” an employee at Cleveland Wrecking said Wednesday while poring over invoices.
“I know we’re selling ’em for a hundred bucks each. It cost us that to tear ’em down.”
He said they were hauled into the yard at 3170 E. Washington Blvd. about a month ago. There are 40 of them.
Workmen arranged them in several rows, some sitting straight up like a Harvard crew, some lying on their backs. A few have fallen forward, their gold-colored Roman noses buried in asphalt.
Other than being ripped from the building at waist level, the figures suffered few casualties — a broken nose here, a clipped wing there. Two were decapitated
After 40 years in sun and rain their brilliant gold glaze remains only in recesses, their eye sockets, their navels, the insides of their wings.
During all that time they faced only one real test as guardians of the Richfield Building. And they blew it.
The Cleveland Wreckers picked them off easily, one by one.
“It took about two weeks,” said Dick Laws, superintendent of the job. “We put a choke around the neck and one around the waist and just cut away the concrete.
“I’ll say this, they came down a lot harder than they went up.”
Laws didn’t know what the figures were supposed to be called. “They usually call those things gargoyles, don’t they? At least they served that purpose,” he said.
Neither did Mickey Parr, a public relations man at Atlantic Richfield.
“I guess nobody around here has ever bothered to ask,” he explained. However, he dug out a 1930 copy of Arts and Architecture and read the following caption:
“Heroic in size, impressive in conception, are the sculptural figures designed by Haig Patigian which crown the main walls with a fairly regal procession of silhouetted torsos.
“This figure is a highly conventionalized suggestion of motive power.”
“I don’t know what it means either,” said Parr.
“Perhaps the oil executives of the day considered them merely expansive hood ornaments.”
A few of the guards have survived. In 2010, The Times wrote about one man who snagged a piece of the building for himself:
For his first 40 years he looked down on 6th Street in downtown Los Angeles. For the next 40 years he looked down on a frontyard in Santa Ana.
Now the stone-faced figure wearing a Roman soldier's helmet and breastplate and angel's wings is gazing upon the polished concrete floor of Eric Lynxwiler's Los Angeles loft.
The 1½-ton terra cotta sculpture is one of the few surviving remnants of the Richfield Building, a blacksided, gold-trimmed landmark that was topped by an oil-derrick tower and served as a monument to petroleum.
Ornate elevator doors from the Richfield are on display in the courtyard between the twin towers.
scott.harrison @latimes.com
From 15 floors they watched Los Angeles around them grow from simple order to smoggy complexity.