Ambulance|Times Mirror Square — The Bank That Never Existed

Stand on the corner of 1st and Broadway and look up at the black glass box on the northwest edge of Times Mirror Square. For a few weeks in early 2021 that facade wore the words LA FEDERAL BANK & TRUST. There is no such bank. Screenwriter Chris Fedak invented it, and Michael Bay hung the name on a building that has never held a vault in its life.

What it held instead was a newspaper. Times Mirror Square is four buildings grown together between 1935 and 1973 — Gordon Kaufmann's Art Deco headquarters on 1st Street, Rowland Crawford's 1948 addition, and the sheer 1973 slab by William L. Pereira that stood in for the bank. More than 700,000 square feet of newsroom, presses, and executive offices, emptied out when the Los Angeles Times moved to El Segundo in 2018.

That vacancy is exactly why Bay could take it. A robbery goes wrong here, a patrol officer knocks on the glass at the wrong moment, and two brothers run into the worst day of their lives.

The complex is a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument and is being redeveloped, so the interiors are closed. The sidewalk is not. Walk the full block — 1st to 2nd, Broadway to Spring — and the eagle-topped Deco corner and Pereira's flat dark curtain wall are both yours to read for free.

Photo: "Los Angeles Times Building, Los Angeles, California" by Ken Lund, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.