The South Park neighborhood around the Los Angeles Convention Center is positively lousy with new development projects, and some charming commercial structures are being lost around historic Automobile Row.

This afternoon, we paid our last respects to The Hartwell Motor Company Building at 1224 South Flower Street. This elegant early auto showroom, office and mechanic’s garage survived just three months shy of a century on this site before being unceremoniously smashed to bits. (We’d heard that Onni Group planned to build a tower on the corner, but were mistakenly under the impression that the site only encompassed a surface parking lot.)

Automobile Row could be a volatile place in the teens, as early advertisements reveal. A trip through the Los Angeles Herald archives reveal that in January 1917, the Hartwell Motor Company moved into its custom digs, only to sell to the Troy Motor Sales Company a scant three months later. For a few months in 1919, this was the A.E. Evans Company, dealing in the Paige (“the most beautiful car in America”), before the Standard Steel Automotive Corporation moved in. In later years, it was a taxi dispatcher.

Thanks to Roger Price for pulling our sleeves to the dire situation, and sharing a photo of the partially demolished structure on the L.A. Historic Preservation Facebook page, taken a couple of weeks ago.

When we made it down to see for ourselves, it was too late to see anything but a patch of broken, but still beautiful, floor tile on top of the rubble pile.