Click to enlarge. Harold Lloyd’s Speedy (1928) looking south down Witmer towards the Mayfair Hotel. Dwight, Erin, and Holly from The Office, shown below, stood by the stop sign on the right. (C) 2011 Google Inc.
What do the television show The Office, the 1950 film noir drama Edge of Doom, and Harold Lloyd’s final silent comedy Speedy (1928) have in common? They all filmed scenes looking southwest down Witmer Street towards the front of the Mayfair Hotel, at 1256 W. 7th Street, just west of downtown Los Angeles.
The Office (2011) – Erin, Holly, and Dwight on Witmer Street beside the Prince Rupert Apartments. (C) 2011 Google Inc.
In a prior post I write all about the pivotal 2011 episode from The Office where characters Michael Scott and Holly Flax meet on the roof of the Mayfair Hotel, and declare their love for each other. Prior to that scene, Holly meets with characters Dwight Schrute and Erin Kemper on the street to devise a plan for locating Michael, who had wandered off dazed without his cell phone. The scene, shown above, was filmed at the NW corner of Witmer and Ingraham, beside what was once called the Prince Rupert Apartments. Notice the steep slope of the street.
Click to enlarge. The prominent entrance to the Kensington Apartments, 668 Witmer Street, now lost, appears in Edge of Doom – left, and in Speedy – right. The Mayfair Hotel stands at the end in both shots. The Burton Arms Apartments, with the vertical white corner detail, still stands at 680 Witmer.
Harold Lloyd used the slope of Witmer Street to good advantage during an early scene in Speedy, where Harold recovers his idle taxi cab that had accidentally been towed away by a moving van. As Harold speaks with the truck driver, the taxi breaks loose and rolls down hill running over a traffic cop.
The unusual setting intrigued me, as it featured a downhill slope pointing towards a “T” intersection, capped by an uncommonly tall building, on which a trolley ran along the cross street. Although Speedy was filmed primarily on location in Manhattan, I also knew many taxi sequences were filmed on Flower Street in downtown Los Angeles. So I first checked the few trolley-line “T” intersections to be found along Bunker Hill, and in the downtown LA Historic Core, but nothing matched up. Since other scenes from this sequence were filmed in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I checked nearby locales there as well to see if I could find this setting in New York, but it was another dead end.
From Speedy – a cop about to be flattened by Harold’s taxi, and perhaps the only extant photo record showing the front of the lost Kensington Apartments.
My first break came when I noticed the Mayfair Hotel appeared at back during a scene in Edge of Doom (see above, left), as a troubled youth played by Farely Granger steps into the Kensington Apartments once located at 668 Witmer. With the Mayfair as a reference point, I now knew what the Kensington looked like, as it appeared on film, even though it is no longer standing. My second break was my realization (as discussed in my prior post about The Office) that in the 1920s there were tall buildings, such as the Mayfair, located just west of downtown Los Angeles, beyond the Historic Core. Then, while searching for a file, I somehow come upon the two above images from Edge of Doom and Speedy, and got a hunch to compare them side by side, making the match.
The Burton Arms Apartments, 680 Witmer, as it appears in Speedy, 1928, and today. (C) 2011 Google Inc.
I find it fascinating how this one setting reappears over the decades. My sense is that “T” intersections are popular when filming for a number of reasons. First, it cuts down on traffic disruption, as through traffic can be more easily diverted. Next, it seems to be less visually distracting. Instead of the lines of the street stretching far off into the distance, drawing the viewer’s eye towards the vanishing point on the horizon, the cross street cuts across the view, creating a backdrop that contains the viewer’s eye.
California Historical Society, Title Insurance and Trust Photo Collection, Department of Special Collections, University of Southern California. (c) 2012 Microsoft Corporation, Pictometry Bird’s Eye (c) 2010 Pictometry International Corp.
The aerial views above look to the north. The yellow arrow points SW down Witmer towards the Mayfair Hotel on 7th Street (yellow boxes), and the red ovals mark the corner stop sign where Dwight, Erin, and Holly stood (far above). The pin to the upper right shows the site of the lost Kensington Apartments, now a parking lot.
You can read about how Lloyd filmed Speedy all over Manhattan and Brooklyn, at Coney Island, and in Los Angeles, in my Harold Lloyd location book Silent Visions.
HAROLD LLOYD images and the names of Mr. Lloyd’s films are all trademarks and/or service marks of Harold Lloyd Entertainment Inc. Images and movie frame images reproduced courtesy of The Harold Lloyd Trust and Harold Lloyd Entertainment Inc. The Office copyright (c) 2011 NBCUniversal Media, LLC. Edge of Doom Copyright 1950 The Samuel Goldwyn Company.
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John,
Great detective work as usual again. I’ll have to check out Witmer Street the next time I go downtown. There was a big fire on Witmer Street in the late 70s early 80s just after I moved to Los Angeles. I think it was an apartment building and several people were killed. I wonder if it could have been the Kensington.
Gregg
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Thanks Gregg – there was a big fire reported November 1, 1982, on the corner of Witmer and Ingraham. Remarkably the story does not say which of the four corner apartments it was, but from the high contrast photograph it appears to have been the extant Witmer Apartment building, at 685 Witmer, across from the Burton Arms. A boy playing with matches started a fire at 335 Witmer in Dec. 1976 that killed ten people.
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Thanks, John. Yes, it must be that 1976 fire that I remembered. That’s why after all these years Witmer Street stuck in my mind.
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Hello, do you remember more of that area? I used to live there as a child in the 2010s and I would to learn more about the history here.
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I am actually a survivor of the 1976 fire on Witmer st ,I am just so curious to know how it all unfolded due to the fact that the court records are sealed .
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Hello, do you remember more of that area? I used to live there as a child in the 2010s and I would to learn more about the history here.
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This is more for R. Westlake, but if anyone else is interested in the movie history of the area, 1992’s Unlawful Entry (available on peacock app now) features a chase scene at 1:09:00 into the movie. Suspect runs down 7th street toward downtown/Mayfair hotel and turns left into an alley that is now the Domino’s pizza at 7th & Witmer. Behind him was “Jason Drive-In #3” Mexican-American restaurant, which is now an apartment complex (1304 w 7th). The scene ends inside and outside of one of those old apartment buildings on Witmer.
As mentioned, where Jason Drive-in #3 was, there is now a mixed-use apartment complex (this is to the right of the Mayfair) and there’s a liquor store that was featured for a quick scene in 2016’s People vs. OJ Simpson. I believe it showed people waiting in line and watching the trial on a tv in a corner. They made it look all 90s inside.
Of course, in Training Day you see Denzel crossing 7th street and the Mayfair in the background (dialogue from the movie: “there’s a coffee shop on 7th and Witmer”).
In 1999’s Blue Streak there was a robbery with Dave Chappelle in what is now the Bombay Beach Indian restaurant (the building/liquor store in the movie was torn down in the early 2000s.
Finally, there was a 90s Van Damme movie filmed on Witmer in that area. I believe it was Lion Heart.
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This is more for R. Westlake, but if anyone else is interested in the movie history of the area, 1992’s Unlawful Entry (available on peacock app now) features a chase scene at 1:09:00 into the movie. Suspect runs down 7th street toward downtown/Mayfair hotel and turns left into an alley that is now the Domino’s pizza at 7th & Witmer. Behind him was “Jason Drive-In #3” Mexican-American restaurant, which is now an apartment complex (1304 w 7th). The scene ends inside and outside of one of those old apartment buildings on Witmer.
As mentioned, where Jason Drive-in #3 was, there is now a mixed-use apartment complex (this is to the right of the Mayfair) and there’s a liquor store that was featured for a quick scene in 2016’s People vs. OJ Simpson. I believe it showed people waiting in line and watching the trial on a tv in a corner. They made it look all 90s inside.
Of course, in Training Day you see Denzel crossing 7th street and the Mayfair in the background (dialogue from the movie: “there’s a coffee shop on 7th and Witmer”).
In 1999’s Blue Streak there was a robbery with Dave Chappelle in what is now the Bombay Beach Indian restaurant (the building/liquor store in the movie was torn down in the early 2000s.
Finally, there was a 90s Van Damme movie filmed on Witmer in that area. I believe it was Lion Heart.
LikeLike
This is more for R. Westlake, but if anyone else is interested in the movie history of the area, 1992’s Unlawful Entry (available on peacock app now) features a chase scene at 1:09:00 into the movie. Suspect runs down 7th street toward downtown/Mayfair hotel and turns left into an alley that is now the Domino’s pizza at 7th & Witmer. Behind him was “Jason Drive-In #3” Mexican-American restaurant, which is now an apartment complex (1304 w 7th). The scene ends inside and outside of one of those old apartment buildings on Witmer.
As mentioned, where Jason Drive-in #3 was, there is now a mixed-use apartment complex (this is to the right of the Mayfair) and there’s a liquor store that was featured for a quick scene in 2016’s People vs. OJ Simpson. I believe it showed people waiting in line and watching the trial on a tv in a corner. They made it look all 90s inside.
Of course, in Training Day you see Denzel crossing 7th street and the Mayfair in the background (dialogue from the movie: “there’s a coffee shop on 7th and Witmer”).
In 1999’s Blue Streak there was a robbery with Dave Chappelle in what is now the Bombay Beach Indian restaurant (the building/liquor store in the movie was torn down in the early 2000s.
Finally, there was a 90s Van Damme movie filmed on Witmer in that area. I believe it was Lion Heart.
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