History

Ella Crawford, a Los Angeles entrepreneur, commissioned Robert Derrah to design a retail complex unlike anything that had been attempted in American commercial real estate. The concept of grouping shops around an open courtyard — accessed by pedestrians from the street rather than from an enclosed interior — drew on the mission-era California tradition of the courtyard commercial building but pushed it into the mid-1930s automotive age, where the frontage on Sunset Boulevard and the Crossroads’ visibility from passing cars was as important as the retail interior.

Derrah, who had already designed the Coca-Cola Bottling Plant on South Central Avenue in the form of a streamlined ship, brought the same nautical obsession to Crossroads of the World. The central building’s ship prow, porthole windows, and bridge superstructure were not whimsical additions but the core of the design concept: in the language of Streamline Moderne, the ship was the supreme metaphor for controlled speed, efficiency, and technological optimism, and the spinning globe at the top amplified this message with a suggestion of global reach. The surrounding cottage shops — each designed in a different historical idiom — provided the eclectic variety that Hollywood’s international population and its entertainment industry mythology demanded.

The complex operated as retail through the mid-twentieth century. As Hollywood’s commercial center shifted west toward the Cahuenga corridor, Crossroads transitioned to office use. It was designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 1974 and has been maintained as an office complex, its exteriors preserved. The building demonstrates the direct lineage between the pre-war outdoor shopping complex and the post-war suburban shopping center, and its commercial concept — if not its architecture — became the dominant retail format of late twentieth-century America.