engineering

May Company Building (Los Angeles)

May Company Building (Los Angeles) is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand May Company Building (Los Angeles) rather than just read about it. In short: The May Company Building on Broadway in Downtown Los Angeles, a.k.a. Hamburgers/May Company Department Store and the May Department Store Building, later known as the California Broadway Trade Center, was the flagship store of the May Company California department store chain.

Key takeaways

May Company Building (Los Angeles) belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect May Company Building (Los Angeles) to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of May Company Building (Los Angeles) from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The May Company Building on Broadway in Downtown Los Angeles, a.k.a. Hamburgers/May Company Department Store and the May Department Store Building, later known as the California Broadway Trade Center, was the flagship store of the May Company California department store chain. It is a contributing property to the NRHP-listed Broadway Theater and Commercial District.

History By the start of the twentieth century, A. Hamburger & Sons had outgrown their Spring Street location, which had 520 employees working on five floors. The Hamburger family decided to build a much larger store at the southeast corner of Broadway and Eighth, a location that was outside of then current retail district. Construction started in 1905 with a grand opening held in 1908. This location, which was also known as The Great White Store, was the largest department store building west of Chicago at that time and would eventually become the flagship location for the May Company California. At the time that the Great White Store was opened, the store could boast of having one of the first escalators on the West Coast, several restaurants, a drug store with an 80-foot-long soda fountain, grocery store, bakery, fruit store, meat market, U.S. post office, telegraph office, barber shop, a dentist, a chiropractor, a physician's office with a fully equipped operating room, a 1,000-seat auditorium, an electricity and steam power plant in the basement that was large enough to support a city of 50,000 inhabitants, a private volunteer 120 men fire brigade, 13 acres (5.3 ha) of retail space, and 1200 employees. The Los Angeles Public Library was also located on the third floor from 1908 to 1913. Southwest Academy of Art opened in the building in 1912 and Woodbury Business College was also briefly located on the fifth floor. In 1923, the Hamburgers sold their store to the May family of St. Louis for $8.5 million (~$121 million in 2024). Thomas and Wilbur Mays, sons of the founder of the May Company, were sent to manage the former Hamburger store. One of the first things that they did was to expand the store again by building adjacent additions on the other parts of the city block. After several more years, the May Company store eventually occupied almost the entire block between Broadway and Hill and between Eighth and Ninth Streets. The old Hamburger store was officially renamed The May Company in 1925. The department store closed in 1986 when May moved to the Seventh Marketplace and the building was turned into retail on the ground floors and a garment factory on the upper floors. In 2014 it was announced that Waterbridge Capital had agreed to buy the building for an estimated $115–130 million; L.A. City Council member Jose Huizar indicated plans a mixed-use development to include offices, a hotel, stores and/or apartments or condominiums. The acquisition by Waterbridge Capital and New York real estate developer Jack Jangana - Broadbridge LA LLC - was completed on August 20, 2014. A spokesman for the company that helped broker the deal said plans include a 24-month renovation that will result in a "creative campus" similar to Twitter's headquarters building in San Francisco. The investors' goal is to create "one of the largest single tech centers" in the United States. In early 2020, the building was still being renovated when all construction projects in California were halted by order of the governor in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In April 2020, Waterbridge Capital and Continental Equities sought $251 million in bridge financing to replace $213 million in financing from Starwood Property Trust that was about to expire. In August 2020, having failed to secure the additional financing, they began seeking buyers for the unfinished building. In November 2020, it was reported that the asking price was $425 million (~$506 million in 2024). After reports surfaced in April 2021 that the lenders were planning to foreclose on the property, it was announced that Starwood Property Trust agreed to extend funding for the development to the end of the year. An affiliate of Starwood Capital acquired the building in December 2022 at a public foreclosure auction. As of 2025, the building has been vacant for roughly a decade, and no further plans have been announced for its future.

See also List of contributing properties in the Broadway Theater and Commercial District List of Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monuments in Downtown Los Angeles

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with May Company Building (Los Angeles)

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what May Company Building (Los Angeles) claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to May Company Building (Los Angeles) before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about May Company Building (Los Angeles) ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of May Company Building (Los Angeles)

In research: May Company Building (Los Angeles) appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses May Company Building (Los Angeles) in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: May Company Building (Los Angeles) is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1906 establishments in California, Beaux-Arts architecture in California, Broadway (Los Angeles), so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for May Company Building (Los Angeles) outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study May Company Building (Los Angeles) in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what May Company Building (Los Angeles) means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain May Company Building (Los Angeles) out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is May Company Building (Los Angeles) in simple terms?

Why does May Company Building (Los Angeles) matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study May Company Building (Los Angeles)?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on May Company Building (Los Angeles).