Art Deco Icon with an Elevator Shaft Secret
3050 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90010
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
The building is an active law school campus. Public tours are occasionally offered through the Los Angeles Conservancy; check conservancy.org for schedules. Generally closed to drop-in visitors.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved; historic elevator and ground-floor access available
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1929 · Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument · Art Deco Architecture · Wilshire Boulevard Heritage · Los Angeles Conservancy Landmark
Bullocks Wilshire opened on September 26, 1929, at 3050 Wilshire Boulevard. The timing was three weeks before the stock market crash that would begin the Great Depression, but the building's ambition was calibrated to a different economic era. Architect Donald Parkinson designed a five-story reinforced concrete structure clad in terra cotta, finished with copper accents that oxidized to the building's signature green verdigris.
The building was notable from the start for its orientation: the primary entrance was at the rear of the building, accessible by automobile, with a porte-cochère designed for the growing car culture of Los Angeles. The pedestrian entrance was secondary. This was a store built for the automobile age.
Walt Disney, Mae West, John Wayne, Marlene Dietrich, Alfred Hitchcock, Greta Garbo, and Clark Gable shopped at the store during its golden decades. The building's tea room and interior finishes represented the apex of Southern California retail design from the late 1920s through the 1980s, when competition from suburban malls and shifts in retail patterns eroded the department store model.
Southwestern Law School acquired the building in 1994 during bankruptcy proceedings and spent the following decade restoring it to its 1929 appearance. The restoration won the 2000 National Preservation Award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the 2005 Los Angeles Conservancy President's Award. The law library, which opened in 1997, occupies 83,000 square feet of the restored building.
Sources
The elevator shaft is the building's anchoring paranormal geography. Two origin legends attach to the same location and neither has been confirmed through available newspaper archives. The first account describes a young girl pushed into the shaft during the department store's 1930s heyday. The second places the death of an elevator repairman crushed by the car at the bottom of the shaft during maintenance. Southwestern Law School communications officer Hillary Kane refers to the spirit — most commonly associated with the girl-in-the-shaft version — by the nickname 'Evelyn.'
The reported phenomena cluster around the elevator itself. Staff describe pressing the second-floor button and arriving elsewhere without explanation. Kane has said of the recurring malfunction, 'She wants me there.' Security officer Cindy Lopez reported similar elevator glitches and, on a separate night while alone in the building and pregnant, watched a glass office door shatter with no one near it. Officer David Mendoza preserved surveillance footage of a cafeteria menu pivoting and flying to the floor in an empty room.
Other reports are distributed through the building rather than concentrated at the shaft: a piano heard from inside a locked, unoccupied room; gym doors opening when the building was empty; footsteps in hallways after hours; window shades drawing closed without contact. During the 1990s renovation, security guards working overnight reported hearing a young girl's voice from inside the shaft, which had been sealed during construction.
The UCLA Daily Bruin documented these accounts in 2018, treating them as an atmospheric element of the law school campus without confirming any specific historical incident. The building's Prohibition-era secret compartments, confirmed during restoration, contribute to the reputation that the structure holds things it has never disclosed.
Notable Entities
The Los Angeles Conservancy periodically offers public tours of the Bullocks Wilshire building, which remains largely intact from its 1929 opening. The original Art Deco interiors, bronze fittings, and the tower that once glowed violet at night are accessible during these scheduled events.
The terra cotta and green verdigris copper exterior of Bullocks Wilshire is visible from Wilshire Boulevard. The 241-foot tower, the porte-cochère designed for automobile entry from the rear, and the overall Art Deco mass of the structure are accessible views from the public sidewalk.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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