At the corner of Olympic Boulevard and Hope Street in downtown Los Angeles — the intersection that, in 1911, was Tenth and Hope, before the 1932 Summer Olympics gave the boulevard its more familiar name — stands a low, four-square commercial building topped by a blue neon sign in the curling script of the Packard Motor Car Company. The sign reads, in a single word: PACKARD. It has been there, in one form or another, for most of a century. Beneath it, the building has been many things over time: a flagship Packard dealership, the rooftop transmitter site of the radio station KFI, a bank branch, and — since 2006 — a residential building called the Packard Lofts. What it was, originally and most importantly, was the Los Angeles showroom of Earle C. Anthony, sole California distributor for Packard, designed in 1911 by Greene & Greene.
The architectural authorship of 1000 South Hope Street is, on close reading, more layered than most Greene & Greene commissions. The multi-story building shell was the work of Parkinson and Bergstrom, the prolific Los Angeles firm responsible for many of the city’s signature commercial buildings of the period. The showroom interior, the entrance, and the exterior details — the architecture that customers actually saw and walked through — were the work of Charles Sumner Greene, working from the Greene & Greene office in Pasadena. The drawings survive in the firm’s archive: fifteen sheets, in ink and pencil, labeled “Show room, service building for Earle C. Anthony, Esq., Los Angeles, Calif.” They include reflected ceiling plans, interior elevations, detail drawings, and orthographic studies of columns, pilasters, and canopies. They are the documentary record of one of the firm’s most important commercial commissions.
A Different Kind of Commission
Through most of the Greene & Greene canon, the firm served as architect of record — designing the entire building from foundation to ridge, from site plan to door hardware. The Anthony showroom was not that kind of commission. It was a hybrid: a base building by a major Los Angeles commercial firm, with the public-facing architectural elements designed by Greene & Greene. The arrangement made commercial sense. Parkinson and Bergstrom had the experience to handle a multi-story commercial building with service bays and upper floors at the scale Anthony needed. Greene & Greene had the reputation to handle the showroom — the part of the building where customers would meet the most expensive automobile in America.
The arrangement also fit Earle C. Anthony’s particular sensibility about architecture. Anthony — engineer by training, mechanical entrepreneur by temperament — understood architecture as a marketing medium. He commissioned distinguished architects throughout his career: Greene & Greene for this showroom and for his own house in Beverly Hills (1909); Bernard Maybeck for showrooms on Van Ness in San Francisco (1927) and on Harrison in Oakland (1928), and for his Los Angeles house. He understood that the building in which one bought a Packard ought to feel like the Packard. He hired the best architects he could engage and gave them the commissions that mattered.
For the Hope Street building, that meant Greene & Greene where it counted: where the Packards were displayed.
The Showroom
Of the original Greene & Greene showroom, very little survives in physical form. The interior was substantially remodeled in the mid-1960s — the spreadsheet record of the firm’s commissions notes the building as having been “enveloped by bank in 1964,” and while the building shell was preserved, the showroom architecture that Charles Greene had designed inside it did not survive that bank-era remodeling. What we know of the showroom comes from drawings, period photographs, and the surviving Greene & Greene specifications.
The drawings indicate a generous interior space organized around the architectural elements characteristic of Charles Greene’s commercial work of the period: columns and pilasters carrying restrained capitals; canopies sheltering the entrance and key interior thresholds; reflected ceiling plans showing carefully composed coffered or paneled overheads; entrance details rendered with the firm’s characteristic attention to material and joint. The showroom was not a Craftsman showroom in the bungalow sense — there was no shingle, no exposed timber bracket, no Japanese influence carried over from the residential Ultimate Bungalows. It was, instead, a commercial interior of dignified classical and Beaux-Arts inspiration, executed at the level of detail and finish that defined Greene & Greene work.
The entrance — the threshold through which customers passed from Hope Street into the company of the Packard — was specifically designed by Charles Greene and is documented in the Greene & Greene drawings as one of the principal subjects of the commission. It was the firm’s hand at the public face of one of America’s most prestigious automobile brands, in the city that would, within a generation, become the automobile capital of the country.
Earle C. Anthony
Earle C. Anthony was thirty-one years old when the Hope Street showroom was built. He had been born in 1880, trained as an engineer, and had reportedly built a working electric automobile at the age of seventeen. In 1904, with his father, he had founded the Western Motor Car Company in Los Angeles, an early multi-brand dealership. By 1905 he had been appointed Southern California distributor for Packard. Within a decade he would be the sole California distributor for the brand.
His ambitions, however, ranged far beyond Packard. In the early 1920s he traveled to France and brought back what he believed — correctly, as it turned out — to be the first neon signs ever seen in the United States: two Packard signs in script, one for his Los Angeles showroom and one for his San Francisco operation. The Hope Street sign, mounted on the roof of the building, became one of the most recognizable architectural artifacts in downtown Los Angeles. It is, in its current form, still there. The Museum of Neon Art is now located across the street, and the building itself is still topped by Anthony’s blue neon Packard.
Anthony was also a pioneer of American radio. On April 16, 1922 — eleven years after the Hope Street showroom opened — he installed a thirty-watt transmitter on a breadboard at the dealership and began broadcasting under the call letters KFI. The station occupied roughly ten thousand five hundred square feet on the roof of the Packard building, beneath a pair of massive radio towers connected by guy wires; period photographs of the building show the towers prominently. KFI was among the first “clear channel” stations in the United States and became one of Los Angeles’s signature broadcasting institutions, identified in its station ID as “the Radio Central Superstation of Earle C. Anthony, Incorporated, California Packard Distributors.” Anthony continued to run the station until late in his life. By 1939, KFI and its sister station KECA had moved to a purpose-built broadcasting facility on Vermont Avenue, but the original transmitter — the breadboard from the Hope Street roof — was preserved in a display case in the lobby of the new building.
He had, in addition, helped pioneer the gasoline service station as a building type in Los Angeles, opening one of the city’s first at Washington Boulevard and Grand Avenue. The chain he built, branded with a red, white, and blue chevron, was eventually sold to Standard Oil of California — the chevron logo passing into the new owner’s identity. He was a founding member of the Los Angeles Motorcar Dealers Association in 1905. He helped organize the first Los Angeles Automobile Show in 1907. He was, in short, one of the indispensable figures in the rise of automotive Los Angeles.
He died in 1961, at the age of eighty, two years before the building that had housed his radio station and his showroom was substantially remodeled into a bank.
A Hundred-Plus Years on Hope Street
The Hope Street building has lived several lives. As the Packard showroom and service facility, it operated from its 1911 opening through the long postwar decline of the Packard brand. Packard merged with Studebaker in the mid-1950s and was effectively discontinued as a marque shortly thereafter; the Anthony dealership wound down with the brand. By the early 1960s, the building was no longer a Packard dealership.
The mid-1960s remodeling, in which the building shell was preserved but the original Greene & Greene interior was effectively absorbed into a bank-era reconfiguration, is the moment at which the Charles Greene showroom — the architectural reason the building belongs in the Greene & Greene record — was lost in any meaningful physical sense. The building itself remained: the multi-story Parkinson and Bergstrom shell, the famous Anthony neon sign, the entrance that thousands of Angelenos had walked through to look at Packards. The interior architecture that Charles Greene had designed inside it — the columns, pilasters, canopies, ceilings, entrance details — did not.
In 2006, the building was acquired by Venice Investments and converted, through the city of Los Angeles’s Adaptive Reuse process, into a residential building called the Packard Lofts. The conversion preserved the building shell and restored the Anthony Packard sign. The interior was reorganized into one hundred sixteen residential units arranged as studios, one-bedrooms, and two-bedrooms, with retail at the ground level. The building remains in this configuration today.
The Greene & Greene interior is, in the most direct sense, gone. The Greene & Greene drawings — the fifteen sheets in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library archive at Columbia — survive. The building itself, shell and all, survives. The neon Packard sign, Anthony’s contribution to the streetscape, survives. What does not survive is the actual Charles Greene–designed showroom architecture that sat behind that entrance for half a century.
The Building’s Place in the Greene & Greene Story
The Earle C. Anthony Automobile Showroom is, in some respects, the Greene & Greene commission that asks the most of its viewer. The visitor who walks past 1000 South Hope Street today sees the building. The building still stands. By the spreadsheet’s reckoning, the commission is “Existing.” But the architecture that Charles Greene actually drew — the part of the project that placed it in the Greene & Greene canon — was destroyed in a 1960s remodeling and has not been restored.
The commission also represents Charles Greene’s first documented engagement with Earle C. Anthony, a client who would shape the firm’s commercial portfolio across more than a decade. Anthony had already commissioned Greene & Greene in 1909 for his Beverly Hills house. The 1911 showroom commission deepened the relationship. In 1922, Anthony would relocate his Beverly Hills house to a new lot on Bedford Drive, with Greene & Greene-related drawings for the relocation associated with the Mrs. Norman Kerry commission of that year. Across these commissions, Anthony established himself as the firm’s most consequential commercial client of the late Peak Period and the closing years of the formal partnership.
And the commission belongs, finally, to the broader Charles Greene story. Charles, in 1911, was at the height of his Pasadena practice. Within four years he would relocate to Carmel-by-the-Sea, and the commercial commissions in his post-1915 career would be considerably fewer. The Anthony showroom is one of the few major commercial works he executed during the Peak Period — and the commission that situated his work in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, on a building topped, eventually, by the most famous neon sign in the city.
Quick Reference
- Location: 1000 South Hope Street, Los Angeles, California (corner of Olympic Boulevard, formerly Tenth Street)
- Date: Designed and built 1911; opened 1911–1912
- Architect of building shell: Parkinson and Bergstrom (Los Angeles)
- Architect of showroom interior, entrance, and exterior details: Charles Sumner Greene, Greene & Greene (Pasadena)
- Greene & Greene drawings: 15 sheets in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University
- Original use: flagship Packard Motor Car Company showroom and service facility for Earle C. Anthony, sole California Packard distributor
- Significant later use: rooftop transmitter and studios for KFI radio (April 16, 1922 onward), one of the first clear-channel stations in the United States
- Distinctive surviving feature: the neon Packard sign on the roof — among the first neon signs in the United States, originally installed in the early 1920s
- Current status: Existing as Packard Lofts (residential conversion completed 2006 by Venice Investments under Los Angeles’s Adaptive Reuse process). The building shell survives; the original Greene & Greene showroom interior was lost in a mid-1960s remodeling.
Closing Reflection
There is a particular kind of architectural survival in which the building outlasts its architecture. The Anthony showroom is one of those cases. The shell stands. The famous sign still glows blue at night above downtown Los Angeles. The building is occupied and useful and recognizably itself.
What is gone is the part Charles Greene actually drew.
It is worth holding both things in mind: the building’s continued presence on Hope Street is real, and its loss as a Greene & Greene interior is also real. The two facts are not in contradiction. The Packard Lofts of 2026 are not the Anthony showroom of 1911, but they occupy the same shell, beneath the same sign, and they are visible evidence that the building Earle C. Anthony commissioned — the building Charles Greene helped design — found a way to outlast the dealership it was built for, the bank that absorbed it, and the architect himself.
Charles Sumner Greene died in 1957. His Anthony showroom interior had not yet been remodeled. He died believing the work was extant. By 1964 it was not. The drawings remain. The sign remains. The building, transformed and reused, remains. From the firm’s full commercial output of the Peak Period, this is the commission that, more than any other, asks how we ought to count what is left when most of what made it Greene & Greene is gone — and how a building that no longer holds the architecture inside it can still be, by its address and its memory and its continued existence, part of the story.