This hotel came up earlier when e_r was looking for the Van Nuys building:
http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/assets...1F4F887E9?v=hr
http://www.csulb.edu/~odinthor/VanNuyLg.jpg
http://www.csulb.edu/~odinthor/VanNuys.jpg
http://www.csulb.edu/~odinthor/VanNCafe.jpg
http://www.csulb.edu/~odinthor/Main4SW.jpg
"The large roof sign calling folks to the Hotel Van Nuys on Main Street is "aimed" at the train stations east towards the river."
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5149/...ba7a758e_o.jpg
Today it is known as the Barclay Hotel.
http://you-are-here.com/downtown/van_nuys.jpg
http://www.publicartinla.com/neon_si...rclay_neon.jpg
Historic locations from the 2009 Fox Searchlight film “
(500) Days of Summer.”
103 West Fourth Street
*Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument #288
In the film, the Barclay lobby serves as the hangout for Tom and his buddies.
Built by Morgan and Walls in 1896. Designed in the Beaux-Arts style with Romanesque features (which are less detailed and ornate than the more formal Beaux-Arts style). Look up to the top of the building to see “The Van Nuys” Commercial venture by Isaac Newton Van Nuys, one of L.A.’s wealthiest businessmen and landowners.
Opened in 1897 as the Van Nuys Hotel, one of the finest in the city with the latest amenities. First hotel to provide telephone and electric service in every room; “a neat device for the electrical heating of curling irons in each room is a new feature of special interest to the ladies” (Los Angeles Times). Fourth Street lobby has many original elements, including ceiling decorations, columns, arched doorways, stained-glass windows with old-fashioned scenes, and a crest with “V. N.” held up by sea horses. The oldest continuously operating hotel in Los Angeles, now a low income residential hotel.
Barclay Hotel,103 West Fourth Street, was transformed into the coffee bar in which Tom and his mates hang out. You’ve probably seen the Barclay dozens of times without noticing – remember the ‘New York’ meteor shower at the beginning of
Armageddon? the monster stomping past it in
Godzilla? Or the ‘Manhattan’ cafe where Jack Nicholson annoys Helen Hunt in
As Good As It Gets?
http://a.blogdowntown.com/i/fa0052a4...jpg?1313581179
Firefighters tear apart a smoldering mattress inside the Barclay Hotel while fighting a fire on March 15, 1972. A second blaze broke out in September.
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — Around 2am on August 21, 1972, guest Harry Roche smelled smoke from his bed in room 532 of the Barclay Hotel at 4th and Main. Finding his room phone dead, he ran downstairs to alert the hotel manager.
No one was killed or seriously injured in the blaze that night, but just over five months earlier a similar fire had left three guests dead and seven others injured.
Blame for that March 15 blaze was placed on a guest who was smoking in bed on the hotel's sixth floor. Two women and a man were burned to death on that floor.
The September fire broke out on the same floor -- something a little odd given that the hotel had not even returned the rooms to use. Guests were evacuated from the 4th and 5th floors of the hotel and waited in the lobby while fire crews fought the flames above.
Fire again broke out at the hotel on September 11, 1974. This time, though, a new fire-alarm system and fire-resistant doors. The devices had been installed the year previous in response to new city rules that required residential buildings be brought up to current fire codes.
A curious side-note to the March 15 blaze: While fire crews were still at work, Harvey Lynn Beagle II, a resident of the Cecil Hotel, approached a police officer and claimed to have set the fire. He pulled out a newspaper clipping from his wallet that showed him to be a convicted arsonist. Police took Beagle into custody, but released him a few days later when it became clear he could not have been responsible.
This website has numerous
screenshots of movies set at the Barclay.