The Broadway

Defunct department store chain
the former department store

The Broadway was a mid level department store chain headquartered in Los Angeles, California. Founded in 1896 by English born Arthur Letts Sr., and named after what was once the city's main shopping street, the Broadway became a dominant retailer in Southern California and the Southwest. Its fortunes eventually declined, and Federated Department Stores (now Macy's, Inc.) bought the chain in 1995. In 1996, Broadway stores were either closed or converted into Macy's and Bloomingdales.

In 1895, J. A. Williams formed J. A. Williams & Co., built and opened his Broadway Department Store on August 29, 1895. In February, 1896 the store was liquidated, and Arthur Letts bought the name, assets, fixtures, and the building lease for $8377 and, on February 24, 1896, the Broadway started operating under Letts. The previous owners had a good location in a recently constructed building at the southwest corner of Broadway and Fourth Streets, but had all of its assets seized by their creditors for failure to pay its bills after just four short months of operations. In contrast, Letts was able to pay off all of his creditors in a short period of time after acquiring the assets for the failed store by the quick sale of the same assets and by watching his expenses. In a short period of time, the business was doing so well, that it had to expand into adjacent store fronts.

The Broadway's parent Carter Hawley Hale Stores ran into financial difficulties which resulted from poor management decisions and hostile takeover attempts. In 1996 the chain was acquired by Federated Department Stores and the majority of locations were converted to the Macy's nameplate. Several stores in affluent areas where Macy's already had locations, South Coast Plaza, Sherman Oaks Fashion Square, Century City Shopping Center, Beverly Center, and Fashion Island Newport Beach, were closed, refurbished and reopened as Bloomingdale's. Federated sold many of the remaining stores to Sears.

The nine stories Beaux Arts building with its restrained Italian Renaissance Revival ornamentation at the southwest corner of Broadway and Fourth was designed by architects John Parkinson and Edwin Bergstrom to serve as the headquarters and the flagship store for Arthur Letts' Broadway Department store chain with the first phase of construction completed in 1913. Construction, which included demolition of the previous store and expansion to the rest of the block when additional property were acquired, continued on several different stages until 1924. The Broadway occupied this location from 1913 to 1973. On Friday, November 16th, 1973, at 6:00 P. M., The Broadway's downtown flagship store at 4th and Broadway, where it had operated for 77 years, closed its doors forever, and was replaced by a new, smaller store at the Broadway Plaza office and retail complex, now called The Bloc Los Angeles, located
The property changed hands a number of times and had sat empty for a number of years before coming into possession of developer Roger Luby in May 1984. Luby's plans fell apart the following year when his partners, a consortium of 32 Oklahoma savings and loans defaulted as a result of the savings and loan crisis and the $56 million (~$ in ) renovation project defaulted on its loans when half completed in September 1986.

In June 1995, the State of California paid $1.8 million for the building to the Resolution Trust Corporation, which inherited the property upon the collapse of some of the savings and loans, and $61.5 million for renovation to replace the unsafe Junipero Serra State Office Building at Broadway and First streets, which was later demolished in 2006. The renovated building at Broadway and Fourth reopened as the new Junipero Serra State Office Building in 1999. To balance the state budget, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger plans to sell the office building to private developers as a part of a sale and lease back scheme. as of 2020, the Junipero Serra Building is one of 56 buildings managed by California Department of General Services and only one of two (the other is the Ronald Reagan State Building) that are located in Los Angeles.