How the internet reshaped Market Street’s Art Deco monolith

The Twitter building, once known as the Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart, got its start as a Depression-era furniture showcase

This is a story about adaptive reuse, unplanned obsolescence, and the way one building can straddle two centuries and come to embody the fickle nature of commerce in a modern American city.

The hulking, Mayan-inspired, Art Deco monolith originally known as the Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart has stood on its Market Street block between Ninth and Tenth streets for 81 years now.

 

Completed in the summer of 1937—the same year as the Golden Gate Bridge—at a cost of $3 million and after just one year of construction, the massive showroom complex for wholesalers and manufacturers of home furnishings, carpets, lighting, drapery, appliances, and radios was never intended to be a public space. It was a space where out-of-town furniture retailers and industry tradespeople came together for seasonal trade shows, and where professionals in the world of home decor could comparison-shop the latest styles and technologies, room by room and floor by floor. A full nine floors of showrooms, to be exact, totaling over 600,000 square feet at the outset.

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Commercial fires are almost certain to make headlines. While structures, alarms, safety equipment and response times are far superior to those of just decades ago, commercial fires are still happen. What are the likely causes of these fires in commercial structures like offices, stores, hotels, warehouses and manufacturing plants?

Arson

Intentional fires, or arson are the fifth leading cause of fires in the United States. Fires of a suspicious nature are not necessarily arson.

Smoking

While tobacco use is down, smoking materials are still a major cause of commercial fires. Businesses should have proper containers in designated smoking areas for cigarettes to be properly extinguished.

Electrical and Lighting

It is somewhat understandable that the amount of electrical wiring and lighting in a commercial building can make a structure susceptible to fires. Wiring and lighting fixtures should be updated in older buildings and wiring and circuit breakers need to be sufficient to meet today’s demands.

Heating Equipment

Heating equipment in commercial buildings, like homes, is a major contributor to fires in the country. Older equipment and space heaters are problematic in commercial structures, especially in buildings that remain empty overnights and on weekends. Never use household extension cords with space heaters and make sure they are turned off when not in use.

Just after 03:30​ hours, Los Angeles Fire Department Battalion 1 companies were dispatched to a reported structure fire in 17’s first-in at the intersection of Long Beach Ave. x Washington Blvd.

E14 was first on-scene and unable to locate any signs of fire. Upon further investigation, E17 found an outside rubbish fire impinging on a 100 x 300 single-story commercial building on the 2700 blk. of S. Long Beach Ave. (14’s first-in), approximately half a mile south of the reported intersection.

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Labor and materials are arguably the two most critical ingredients of any construction project. No buildings transform skylines, no bridges span rivers and no homes rise from foundations without them. That’s why pricing of these two production components can mean cost-cutting is in store for other areas of the job budget or, given steep-enough increases, the scuttling of the project altogether.

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