Los Angeles Demolished Its Black-and-Gold Oil Tower

Richfield Tower looked as if an oil company had commissioned a cathedral and then put a derrick on top. Its walls were clad in black and midnight-blue terra cotta, with gold ornament climbing the setbacks. Sculpted figures stood near the roofline. Above them, a 125-foot open steel tower glowed in neon, turning the machinery of oil extraction into the building's illuminated crown.

The headquarters opened at 555 South Flower Street in 1929. Los Angeles was becoming an oil capital, an automobile city, and a place where a corporation could make its office building into a skyline advertisement. Stiles O. Clements of Morgan, Walls & Clements led the design. Sculptor Haig Patigian supplied figures representing aviation, mail, navigation, and industry. The complete ensemble cost about $1.75 million.

Black was a spectacularly impractical choice for a conventional office facade in sunny Los Angeles, which was the point. The glazed surface suggested petroleum without having to spell it out. Gold terra cotta caught the light around windows and spandrels. The rooftop derrick made the company visible at night from far beyond Flower Street. Richfield did not rent a generic tower and hang a logo on it. The building itself performed the brand.

Most downtown towers competed through height or historical costume. Richfield used color, sheen, and a piece of industrial equipment scaled into a beacon.

Inside, the performance continued in stranger directions. The twelfth floor included an employee amusement room with a stage, kitchen, and cafeteria. The building also had barber shops, a lounge, three basement levels, and elaborate custom finishes. Architecture, sculpture, color, light, and corporate life were treated as parts of one project. Even the elevator doors participated.

That level of specificity could not save the building from the company it advertised. Richfield merged with Atlantic Refining in 1966 to form Atlantic Richfield, soon known as ARCO. The combined corporation wanted a larger headquarters complex. Richfield Tower occupied valuable downtown land but represented a smaller company and an older idea of prestige. Demolition began in November 1968, less than 40 years after the building opened.

The replacement was ARCO Plaza: two sober glass-and-steel towers on a large superblock. The complex provided the scale and floor area a modern corporation wanted. It also exchanged a building that could only have belonged to one industry, company, and city for a headquarters that expressed corporate power through size and repetition. Richfield Tower had been extravagant advertising. ARCO Plaza was efficient anonymity.

Before the old tower disappeared, photographer Marvin Rand documented it for the Historic American Buildings Survey. The federal record is unusually complete: 59 photographs, 17 measured drawings, and nine pages of architectural data preserved by the Library of Congress. Rand's images show facade panels, sculptures, interiors, and the full tower looming over Flower Street. Documentation saved the design as evidence. It did not save the building.

Los Angeles had already lost major landmarks by 1968, but Richfield's destruction became especially useful to preservationists because the trade was so legible. A beloved black-and-gold tower vanished for a corporate plaza that looked current and expensive but much less like Los Angeles. Municipal historical records describe the demolition as one of the losses that angered residents and strengthened the city's emerging preservation movement.

The loss also arrived before Los Angeles had a mature system for treating recent commercial architecture as heritage. Forty years looked disposable because it had not yet learned to look ancient.

There is an uncomfortable symmetry here. Richfield Tower celebrated an extractive industry with almost irrational material abundance. Its replacement extracted value from the site by clearing away the difficult old object. Neither building offered a modest environmental lesson. The first made petroleum glamorous; the second made demolition look like progress.

The surviving survey photographs still win the comparison. The building is excessive, theatrical, and easy to picture even in black and white. That does not make every old tower sacred. It shows what was actually surrendered: custom terra cotta, integrated sculpture, strange employee rooms, a glowing derrick, and a piece of skyline that explained who built it. Los Angeles got more office space. It lost a building with no interest in being mistaken for anywhere else.