The Gaylord Apartments & HMS Bounty

The thirteen-story Gaylord apartment building opened in 1924 directly across Wilshire from the Ambassador Hotel. It was one of L.A.’s first co-ops, marketed as “own-your-own” apartments with large kitchens and a central refrigeration system that allowed tenants to freeze their own ice cubes. The Los Angeles Times called the Gaylord one of the largest and most pretentious apartment houses in the country. Movie star Constance Talmadge moved in, as did John Barrymore in the 1940s and Richard Nixon, who kept an apartment on the 6th floor before he was President. Gordon Fields opened the HMS Bounty in 1962 in a space formerly occupied by The Gay Room and later The Secret Harbor, which opened in 1951 as an outpost of brothers Seymour and Harold Dimsdale.