Michele Stueven
This December, Los Angeles’ historic Jonathan Club celebrates the 100th anniversary of its landmark Town Club building in the heart of Downtown Los Angeles.
Founded in 1895, the Jonathan Club was established by some of LA’s founding fathers as a modest social club. Members over the years have included LA Times publisher Harry Chandler, San Fernando Valley developer James Boon Lankershim, Tarzan writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, George Pepperdine, film pioneer Jesse Lasky, Buster Keaton, and Ronald Reagan.
From 1896 to 1905, the club was located on Spring Street above a tailor and a sporting goods store, and then went on to occupy the top two floors of the Pacific Electric Building, built by the club’s then-President and railroad magnate Henry Huntington, before breaking ground on its own dedicated headquarters in 1924.
The Italianate building was designed by Schultze & Weaver, famous hotel architects of the 1920s who were also responsible for the Waldorf-Astoria in New York and the nearby Biltmore in downtown LA.
The Grill at the Jonathan Club (Michele Stueven)
When the private members club began building its permanent home in 1925, Figueroa Street was just a dusty corridor. Once completed, it was the tallest building in downtown LA. The Renaissance-style building features hand-painted ceilings by Vatican-trained painter Giovanni Smeraldi, intricate wood carvings by early Hollywood set designers, and a 5,000-volume library that has remained untouched since the 1920s.
Smeraldi also painted Caltech’s Atheneum, the Blue Room at the White House, and New York’s Grand Central Terminal. The lobby floors were laid with pink Tennessee marble, which was meticulously restored in 1981 with marble from the same quarry as the original. New hidden rooms are still being discovered, like the camera room. Filled with vintage camera equipment, it is currently being restored.
Courtesy Jonathan Club
The entire fifth floor is dedicated to health and wellness facilities, featuring everything from squash and basketball courts to the original 1925 tiled swimming pool, reminiscent of a Turkish bath, a massive gym, and spa services, including a yoga program. There’s also a pilates studio, personal trainers, nutritionists, the only doubles squash court in the city, and a cutting-edge Med Spa offering LED light therapy, cryotherapy, and a hyperbaric chamber. In 2010, the rooftop running track was replaced with a 2800 square foot urban garden that produces more than 30 varieties of fruit and vegetables, all of which are used at the club’s two dining concepts and are used for educating culinary students.
In what was originally the sprawling game room, carved wooden gargoyles depicting playing cards, holding dice, or simply watching on in amusement can still be found in the club’s main restaurant, where they used to watch over members playing dominoes, billiards, and other parlor games. The building houses a functioning wood-paneled library and reading room unaltered since the building first opened a century ago, and a barbershop that still uses chairs from the 1950s.
Courtesy Jonathan Club
By all official accounts in 1925, the Jonathan Town Club was a 12-story building, capped at 150 feet, the maximum height permitted by the city at the time. During the Prohibition era, the rooftop served as more than just a scenic outlook that reached to San Pedro. Legend has it that the room, now known as the Sky Bar, could be sealed off at a moment’s notice, similar to the architect’s design at the Biltmore just a year earlier, which featured its own false walls, secret passages, and hideouts.
Ernest Batchelder, decorative artist and pioneer of the California Arts and Crafts movement, was a member, and in 2023, when renovating the Sun Room, the team uncovered original Batchelder tiles, handcrafted in Pasadena at the turn of the 20th century, hidden for decades under layers of drywall.
The building, drenched in details, is also home to an extensive collection of plein air paintings of the California Impressionist School dating back to the 1860s, including rare works by Guy Rose and Joseph Kleitsch, hundreds of historical photographs that are exhibited throughout the Club’s main restaurant and Peter O’Malley’s personal collection of Dodger memorabilia, photographs and books that are on display in the blue Dodger Room.
The Dodger Room (Courtesy Jonathan Club)
Originally a men’s club with dedicated elevators for visiting family members, the institution has evolved over the last century.
In 1965, the club was charged with “anti-Negro” and “anti-Jew” bias. In 1975, the club did not admit women as members. Women guests were limited to certain floors, dining rooms, and entrances, but later policy changes allowed women to use the main elevator and lobby at the club. It voted to admit women in 1987, and today has more than 650 female members, including Marta Fernandez, who served as club president in 2023-2024. The current Jonathan Club President is John Iino, the first AAPI to hold the position, and Black members have included Donna Oldman and composer Clifford Lamb. Andre Jackson is the General Manager of operations at the club’s sister location on the beach in Santa Monica.
Go inside the Jonathan Club in our photo gallery, courtesy of the Jonathan Club and Michele Stueven
Candy counter in the lobby (Courtesy Jonathan Club)