Lewis Bradbury was a mining millionaire who wanted to leave Los Angeles something lasting. He commissioned the building on South Broadway in the heart of what was then the city's commercial district, hiring architect Sumner Hunt to design it. Hunt's design didn't satisfy Bradbury, who then approached Wyman, the draftsman. The building that resulted from this unlikely collaboration opened in 1893 at 304 South Broadway: a five-story commercial block that is almost entirely unremarkable from the outside — brick facade, modest scale, nothing that prepares visitors for what waits inside. The Los Angeles Conservancy calls it the city's oldest landmarked building.

Through the entrance doors, the Bradbury Building opens into a five-story skylit atrium that has been photographed continuously since the building opened. Glazed yellow brick rises along the walls. A central light well floods the space from a glass roof. Two open-cage elevators with ornate ironwork move between the floors. Terracotta balustrades, Italian marble floors, Mexican tile, and intricate cast-iron filigree railings on every gallery level fill the space with the particular excess of High Victorian design — the belief that beautiful details multiplied are better than beautiful details restrained. The LAPD offices in the building have reportedly nicknamed it 'the Ovens' for its heat in summer.

The National Historic Landmark designation arrived in 1977, but the Bradbury Building had been a cinematic presence long before that. Its interior has appeared in more than 100 films and television productions, most famously in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), where the building's layered industrial Victorian geometry stood in for the dystopian Los Angeles of 2019. The filming turned the Bradbury's aesthetic into a cultural shorthand: when directors want a space that feels simultaneously ornate and oppressive, Victorian and futuristic, the Bradbury Building's atrium is what they reach for.

The Bradbury Building opened on South Broadway when that street was the main commercial corridor of a city of 50,000 people. The theaters that would define the Broadway corridor — the Million Dollar, the Orpheum, the other palaces of the movie-house era — hadn't been built yet. The building watched Broadway rise to become the highest concentration of cinema seats in the world by 1931, then watched the street decline as white middle-class residents moved to the suburbs, then watched a Latino commercial revival reshape the corridor, then watched the newest wave of downtown revival bring loft dwellers and tourists back to a block that has been continuously occupied for 130 years. The interior remains unchanged.