100 Years of Art Deco

By Julie Jaskol | July 30 2025 | Photography by Christopher Gonzalez

They don’t call it the Roaring 20s for nothing. The automobile, radio, telephones, silent movies, indoor plumbing, electricity, penicillin – all came roaring into daily life during the 1920s. Women gained the right to vote, bobbed their hair, and ditched their corsets. Young people danced the Charleston, listened to jazz, and drank bathtub gin in speakeasies.

“It was a turning point,” Margot Gerber, executive director of the Art Deco Society of Los Angeles, said. “There was social change. Women were more in control of their lives; they were working. People were moving into cities.”

Architecture, style, fashion, and design reflected the change. In 1925 Paris hosted the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Moderne, highlighting the latest design from around the world and attracting 16 million visitors who immersed themselves in the thoroughly modern aesthetic that would later be called Art Deco.

The style burst with sleek, gleaming optimism. It referenced avant-garde art movements like Cubism, Fauvism, and Futurism as well as ancient Egypt and the Maya and Aztec empires.

New streamlined fashions reflected Art Deco, as did jewelry, household appliances, and furniture. Audiences thrilled to lavish Art Deco interiors in movies like “Our Dancing Daughters” (1928) with Joan Crawford and “Grand Hotel” (1932) with Great Garbo.

“It penetrated every aspect of culture,” Gerber said. “You lived in an Art Deco world.”

Perhaps its most lasting impact was on architecture, especially in rapidly growing Los Angeles, which more than doubled in population during the 1920s. The rise of Art Deco corresponded with the growth of Los Angeles as it became the nation’s center of aviation and movie production, and among the country’s top oil producers and shipping centers.

“Incredible growth hit Los Angeles in the 1920s, coinciding with a new style of architecture. LA’s embrace of Art Deco was inevitable,” Bruce Scottow said. He was a volunteer and then staff member of the LA Conservancy, who led tours of Art Deco buildings in downtown Los Angeles.

“World War I [which ended in 1918] signaled a failure of mankind. Old things were distrusted, including Beaux Arts architecture, which was considered ‘your father’s architecture,’” he said. “Along comes Art Deco and LA was ripe for it. Right city, right time, right style.”

Unlike the classically influenced, square, heavily ornamented Beaux Arts style, which had previously dominated civic and commercial architecture, Art Deco buildings reached for the sky, with vertical lines, spires, and upper stories set back from the ground floors. Its ornamentation was frequently angular and stylized, complete with lightning bolts, sunbursts, zigzags, chevrons, and depictions of the latest technological advances like zeppelins, oil rigs, and airplanes.

In addition to the plaster, granite, and marble buildings themselves, Art Deco designs were executed in terrazzo on sidewalks in front of theaters and restaurants; etched in glass on windows; welded into decorative metal gates, plaques, and grilles; cemented in tile on fountains, walls, and floors; woven into rugs and furnishings; and painted in dramatic murals in lobbies.

Art Deco influenced hundreds of commercial, government, and, to a lesser-extent, residential buildings built in Los Angeles from the late 1920s well into the 1940s, not just in Downtown but throughout the city as it grew.

Scottow particularly likes the Bullocks Wilshire building (1929), the first department store to be built west of Downtown. “It epitomizes Art Deco,” he said. “It’s a five-story building with a huge tower serving as a beacon to let motorists know where it is. You could see it from anywhere at the time. Its main entrance wasn’t on Wilshire Boulevard but through a glorious porte-cochere at the rear of the store adjacent to a large parking lot. This was because most shoppers were now arriving by automobile.“

Further west, developer A.W. Ross sought to create an entire shopping street catering to motorists rather than pedestrians. He lined Wilshire Boulevard with big, bold Art Deco buildings with enormous display windows easily visible through the windshields of passing cars. He called it Miracle Mile and anchored it on the east at La Brea Avenue with the E. Clem Wilson Building (1929), then Los Angeles's tallest commercial building, and on the west with the imposing black and gold May Company Department Store at Fairfax (1939).

The May Company building expressed the drama, vibrancy, and modernism of Los Angeles and Art Deco, as did the teal terra cotta-covered Eastern Columbia Building (1930) on Broadway Downtown; the turquoise Pelissier Building and Wiltern Theater (1931) at the corner of Wilshire and Western; and the iconic Hollywood Bowl (1922) and Griffith Observatory (1935) in the Hollywood Hills.

Others, like the Mayan Theater (1926) on Hill Street Downtown, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre (1927), and the Egyptian Theater (1922), both on Hollywood Boulevard, reflected Art Deco’s flirtation with exoticism.

And countless post offices, fire and police stations, schools, hospitals, power stations, and banks built throughout Southern California from the 1920s through the 1940s offered a more restrained and muscular angularity in the Streamline Moderne style. Notable among them are Venice (1935) and Hollywood (1935) high schools and Los Angeles General Medical Center (1933) in Lincoln Heights (most famous from the opening credits of daytime soap opera “General Hospital.”)

Although relatively few single-family homes were built in the style, some notable apartment buildings offered glamorous Art Deco living. Mae West, Clark Gable, and Ava Gardner lived at The Ravenswood Apartments on Rossmore Avenue at various times. The building, with its Assyrian-inspired plaster detailing, was built by Paramount Pictures in 1930.

Not only could you live the Art Deco life, you could enjoy it in death, too. The Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard, final resting spot for celebrities including Rudolph Valentino and Tyrone Power, features some of LA’s most distinctive Art Deco architecture among its tombs and monuments.

The Art Deco Society offers annual tours of the cemetery, as well as regular events in historic settings where members dress in 1920s fashion, dance to period music, and sip vintage cocktails. They recently celebrated the 100th anniversary of Art Deco at the Oviatt Building, one of the last Art Deco interiors in LA. They also gather each year for the Avalon Ball, a vintage dance at the Avalon Casino Ballroom on Catalina Island, built in 1929 by chewing gum mogul William Wrigley, Jr.

More than most other periods of design, Art Deco is not just a style but a way of living. “Our members have a shared love of the history and aesthetics of Art Deco,” Gerber said. “They collect vintage clothes, they love the music and the everyday objects.”

And as they celebrate Art Deco’s 100th anniversary, they advocate to save buildings at risk. LA’s Art Deco heritage may be pervasive, but it’s not impervious to threats. Architecture fans still mourn the demolition of Downtown’s Atlantic Richfield Building (1928) in the 1960s, now considered one of LA’s greatest historic losses. Similarly, the Pan Pacific Auditorium (1935) on Beverly Boulevard was lost to fire in 1989.

The news isn’t all bad, though. Bullocks Wilshire now houses Southwestern Law School. The May Company Department Store celebrates the history of cinema as the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. The Eastern Columbia Building has been converted into condos, five of which were once owned by actor Johnny Depp. And not long ago, the Firestone Tire store on La Brea Avenue reopened as a brewery and taqueria, winning a preservation award from the LA Conservancy for its adaptive reuse of a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument.

Gerber thinks it’s critical to continue using and celebrating these distinctive landmarks. “We Art Deco enthusiasts consider these buildings to be public works of art. We drive by them as if we were in a drive-through art gallery, whereas a developer sees them as something to tear down to make space for something bigger and more modern,” she said. “These buildings are really intricate; you can’t replace or recreate that. They outlast humans. They’re our cultural heritage and they tell our story.”