(500) Days of Summer|Eastern Columbia Building — the turquoise tower Tom actually loved

Before the film is about a girl, it is about a man who wanted to be an architect and settled for writing sympathy cards. The proof is in the way he talks about buildings. Summer asks what he likes, and he starts naming towers along Broadway and Seventh with the specificity of someone who used to draw them.

The greenest of them is the Eastern Columbia Building at 849 South Broadway, thirteen storeys of glazed terra cotta in deep turquoise trimmed with gold, finished in 1930 by Claud Beelman for a furniture and clothing retailer, and topped by a four-sided clock that reads EASTERN in letters you can see from the freeway. It went up in nine months. The colour is not paint — it is fired glaze, which is why ninety-odd years of Los Angeles sun has not dulled it.

The building is private now, converted to lofts in 2006, so there is no lobby tour. This one is looked at rather than entered, and that is enough: the corner of Ninth and Broadway gives you the full elevation, best in late afternoon when the low sun brings the gold out of the setbacks. The Fine Arts Building on Seventh and the white-crowned Continental on Spring, the other two Tom points out, are a fifteen-minute walk in either direction.

Notice what it does to your reading of him. Every building he loves is one somebody built with enormous confidence and then lost. Tom's taste was never really about Summer.

Location photo: Wikimedia Commons, free licence.