Southern Californians have a reputation for frequently changing residences. But the same can't be said of the Los Angeles Police Department, which has dwelt in only two headquarters in the last 113 years. That number will rise to three in November when the LAPD opens its new building just south of City Hall.
Its current home, Parker Center, is 54 years old and showing its age. As novelist Michael Connelly observed in his 2006 L.A. cop novel "The Overlook," so much planning has gone into the new building that little was "done to keep the current headquarters from sliding into decrepitude."
Of course, the department didn't have much in the way of snazzy accommodations in L.A.'s early days either. In the 1850s, the department was housed in a crude adobe jailhouse near Olvera Street. Later, the first paid force of six officers worked out of a wing of the old City Hall on 2nd Street.
In 1896, the LAPD was finally given its own home at 1st and Hill streets. The Times reported that a couple dozen police officers, "dressed in their oldest clothes, began the work of moving the furniture" into the station, along with such seized evidence as "roulette wheels, faro layouts and thousands of poker chips."
The first individual to land in the new jail at Central Headquarters, as it was known, was a drunk "lying prostrate on First Street," The Times said. He was loaded into a patrol wagon pulled by a horse named Grover, but he "could not adapt himself to the new order of things and started for the old station. It took a good deal of persuasion on the part of driver Cox to convince him that he must go up First instead of Second Street."
Security was so low-key that one Carl Warr, wearing a bizarre mask and a contraption filled with 60 sticks of dynamite, barged into the office of Police Chief Charles Sebastian in 1912 and threatened to blow up the neighborhood unless wages were raised for transit workers, including himself.
After an hourlong standoff, two brave officers jumped him, grabbed the bomb and ripped it apart as they ran out to the street. It did not detonate.
By the 1920s, Grover and his four-legged colleagues were being phased out, their horsepower inadequate. It was an era, veteran newsman Spud Corliss wrote, when "the police reporter used to strap on a gun, jump into the 'hot-shot' [lead] car with the detectives and, with siren screaming, ride to the scene." Sometimes the reporter even hand-cranked the old-fashioned siren.
