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It turns out that about 150 LAPD officers and other employees still work in Parker Center, the bedraggled former headquarters that most of the department gladly abandoned a couple of years ago. "We are like a missing child,” night shift crime scene photographer Chase Choe joked to the Downtown News. “The people over there say, ‘Uh-oh, we lost them. We forgot to bring them over.” The department's top brass now make their home at the Police Administration Building across the street from both City Hall and the Los Angeles Times. For the stragglers, "nobody is happy to be here,” says facilities manager Thom Brennan.
City officials had long labeled the 1955 Los Angeles Street edifice as obsolete, overcrowded and potentially unsafe. After all, there were cracks in interior load-bearing walls, reminders of temblors past. There were no fire sprinklers, because the building’s bones were too weak to support the water-filled pipes. Vermin sightings were not uncommon.Not long before vacating it, former chief William Bratton joked that the best thing to do with Parker Center would be sell it to a Hollywood studio so they could blow it up.
Downtown News photo: Gary Leonard
