Los Angeles was a backwater with a population of barely 50,000 people when John Parkinson arrived in 1894. He had no formal education, no contacts, and just a few dollars and a tool box to call his own. By the time of his death he had designed many of the city's iconic buildings, including the city's first skyscraper, the first luxury hotel, the Homer Laughlin Building (now home to the Grand Central Market), high-end department store Bullocks Wilshire, the Memorial Coliseum, which hosted the 1932 and 1984 Olympics, and Los Angeles' City Hall. What City Hall may lack in iconic recognizability it makes up for with an almost subconscious symbolic power. Though few Angelenos could draw the building from memory, they have seen it over and over again, and so, at this point, has much of the rest of the world. Every LAPD badge has borne its image since 1940, and the building began playing its series of major roles in television shows like “Dragnet,” “Perry Mason,” and “The Adventures of Superman.” A 1953 adaptation of H.G. Wells' “The War of the Worlds” even blew it up, at least in scale model, setting off a cinematic tradition of felling the large buildings of Los Angeles. Parkinson’s story sounds like the classic American Dream, with a British twist - he was the son of a millworker and born in Scorton, Lancashire. He is virtually unknown in his native land, and all but forgotten in the city he came to call home. Others from the British Isles who left their mark in early Los Angeles history are better remembered - Belfast-born William Mulholland, whose life inspired the movie, Chinatown, oversaw the huge engineering project that controversially brought water to the city in 1913 and was memorialized with Mulholland Drive. And Welshman Griffith J Griffith (not to be confused with American film director D.W. Griffith) gave most of his vast lands to what became the 4,310-acre Griffith Park, which is home to the Griffith Observatory and Greek Theatre, projects he both funded. As for Parkinson's legacy, more than 50 of his buildings still stand in downtown alone, and the Coliseum will certainly feature again during the 2028 Olympics.
London-born architect Robert Stacy-Judd moved to Los Angeles in 1922. His most famous commission was not a residence but a commercial building—the Aztec Hotel, built in the city of Monrovia on a stretch of road that was once the famous Route 66. Designed in a Mayan Revival style, the 1925 hotel was built in the context of a generalized taste for architectural exoticism that flourished in Southern California at this time. The mid-to-late 1920s were the heyday of interest in Meso-American archeology and the idea that Native American styles could be the basis for a new all-American architecture. Proponents of the Meso-American (or pre-Columbian) style viewed it as a welcome return to the folk-like and primitive, and Stacy-Judd became a prominent exponent of the Meso-American idiom. A flamboyant publicist and showman as well as an architect, Stacy-Judd wrote and lectured about Mayan architecture and traveled to the Yucatan jungles to explore Mayan pyramids. By 1930, public interest in both Meso-American architecture and Stacy-Judd had waned. But his writings and lectures, and his Aztec Hotel in particular, had captured Dr. Atwater’s fancy, and the dentist commissioned him to build two Hopi-inspired homes perched atop a hill next to Elysian Park. Robert Stacy-Judd’s Atwater Bungalows combine the features of a Pueblo Indian kiva with the fantasy of a Hollywood stage set. The multiple contradictions of Stacy-Judd's cross-cultural transvestism–an Englishman in search of an "All-American" architectural style–reveals much about Pan-Americanism, appropriation, and the diverse contemporary uses of architectural styles lifted from Ancient America. Former architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times Christopher Hawthorne, now L.A.’s design tzar, has written that “To wander through Robert Stacy-Judd’s neo-adobe Atwater Bungalows …is to be convinced that you are, first, completely isolated from city life and, second, that you are in a place that could only be Los Angeles.”