We were put in touch with the owner of this building. It’s a historic landmark, but she wants to also live in it, which we think is a great idea. As anyone in the historic preservation field knows all too well, that the worst thing that can happen to a historic building is for it to sit empty. Fire gutted the building in the 80s, and a quickie restoration of the windows back then left future owners with gigantic wood windows that do not operate. They are too large to allow for weight boxes. But what is this brick behemoth in the bungalow neighborhood?
On Sunday, May 20th 1906, the Los Angeles Herald Announced that a permit had been filed with the Department of Building and safety for a “one- story, one room sub-station” at 2642 (not 2640, as listed) Huron Street by Los Angeles Railway Company and the Pioneer Construction Company for the cost $3500. The purpose of the building was to do what your power adapter does for your computer; convert ac to dc. To our bedraggled modern eyes, this transformer housing looks like a house of God. Two great wars and their aftermath took all good humor out of building, but these pre-war buildings remind us that there is the possibility for all things in public view to look the part of being in public view.
Just take a look at what happened to the Division 3 car barns a few blocks away. This yard was powered by the Huron Substation which was adjacent.
In 1906 one heard the whizz of futuristic electric motors, or maybe the whinnying and snorting of horses carrying a broken carriage down the track to be worked on. Today, we hear the groan of countless idling busses, and the beep beep beep, as they back up into their stalls. Just another dreary addition to the din of the freeway punctuated by the periodic chainsaw of a revving motorcycle with no muffler, or a ghetto cruiser with a fart can (literally the opposite of a muffler) fastened to the exhaust.
Much like how Los Angeles once enviable rail system was lost to greed or stupidity, the substation’s original windows were lost to fire in the 1980s. The replacements were made cheaply without weight-boxes as non-functional, fixed windows. This being the case they need to be replaced with functioning, historically accurate windows. As the circa 1918 picture shows, it had a mix of wood double hung and hopper windows with hopefully non-fixed windows in the clerestory.