There is a building on Broadway, at the alley between 17th and 18th Streets, that many of us have driven past dozens of times without a second glance. That was the point. For roughly a quarter century, its whole architecture was organized around not being noticed — and the man who organized it that way was Bob Dylan.
Yes, the Nobel laureate, Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, the voice of at least two generations. In the mid-1990s he quietly bought a chunk of this unremarkable inland block and put his longtime managers to work on something that existed nowhere else: a public coffeehouse with a private world folded invisibly behind it.
The public part was the 18th Street Coffee House, which many Santa Monicans knew without knowing whose it was: hand-tiled tables, checkered floor, a latticed, well-shaded patio garden, chef statues at the door, a vintage jukebox eclectically stocked, the story goes, by the owner. Its house rules read like a manifesto: no internet, no cell phone usage. Dylan, it is said, wanted a café to be a place where creative people converse and create. Today that policy seems less like eccentricity than prophecy.
The private part was stranger and better. Behind and under the café, through a sturdy door once a walk-in cooler entry, was a full boxing gymnasium, ring, heavy bags, walls pairing boxing’s and music’s giants: Joe Louis and Muddy Waters, Ali, Frazier, the Rolling Stones. Membership was by the owner’s personal invitation. There was no sign, yet all building permits sat in the name of Dylan’s general manager, Jeff Rosen, who told a curious reporter he knew nothing about it. Biographer Howard Sounes, who first revealed Dylan’s ownership, noted a hatch behind the coffee counter that let the owner peer out from the gym before coming in, a safety valve for a man allergic to being seen.
Dylan didn’t just own the gym; he used it. Former lightweight champion Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini trained and sparred with him there, and recalled, after he tagged a solid hit on Dylan, that he should “. . . ease up on the head, a few songs were still left in there.” Journalist Lynda Gorov, who trained there for a decade and wrote a vivid memoir last year, describes arriving one morning to a guitar and a low, unmistakable voice working out a song beside the ring. Noting that Dylan kept an office and wrote music there in his boxing gym. Separately, Ben Stiller, on a talk show, mentioned sparring with Mancini, Gary Shandling, and celebrities David Duchovny and Peter Berg. Several more persons of fame visited the gym.
None of this was a lark. Dylan’s engagement with boxing began early, from his Chronicles story about Jack Dempsey, in 1961, mistaking him for a young fighter at Dempsey’s New York Broadway restaurant, to his songs of boxing with “Who Killed Davey Moore?,” his cover of Simon’s “The Boxer,” and finally, “Hurricane” (1976), which helped free Rubin Carter. Then, forty years afterwards, on a different Broadway, in our town, he built the shrine to his serious pastime.
His Santa Monica roots run deeper still. From 1977 to 1982 his touring company occupied a named ‘Rundown Studios’ on Main Street, where Street Legal was reputably recorded in 1978. The Broadway complex wasn’t a lyricist’s whim but the mature chapter of a forty-year working relationship between a defining American artist and this city. He was even landlord, on the same property, to a neighborhood synagogue, where below was a boxing gym.
Here is what should concern anyone realizing the mystic Santa Monica had worldwide, which appears to be over. The gym wound down in the late 2010s; the café seems not to have survived the pandemic years. Visitors describe locked doors, dark windows, wilting ivy plants. A vacant property with a story like this does not stay in limbo forever.
So what becomes of a place like this?
Honesty first: the treasures that made it vivid, the jukebox, a fascinating painting no one knew was by Dylan, the fight posters, the ring, are likely long dispersed, and the buildings themselves are modest commercial vernacular. Dylan is famously private; the whole meaning of the place was its anonymity, and arguably the most Dylanesque outcome would be to let it slip away untold.
But a city’s memory does not live only in its grand facades. It lives in ordinary walls that sheltered extraordinary practices, and here, for nearly three decades, a world-historical artist owned a piece of an ordinary block, designed its program, worked in it, and sustained a deliberate experiment in creative privacy. The concealed door, the absent signage, the arms-length permits, the phones lacking internet service: not quirks, but coherent design thinking about what an artist needs from a city. Some of us call such places “sites of environmental memory”, that is, buildings whose significance lives not in their style but in the practices they sheltered. This may be the purest example Santa Monica has.
So, a modest proposal?
Not a campaign — a record. Gather the memories, the photographs, the permit drawings from the 1990s build-out; hear from the members, the staff, the neighbors, the congregation next door, while they can still tell it; and archive it all where the city keeps its stories. What we should not do is what this city has done too often: nothing, until the demolition notice concentrates the mind. Let’s organize the information and see what becomes of it.
Dylan once sang of building “. . . a fire on Main Street.” On Broadway, near 18th Street, he did something gentler and more permanent, a hidden subterranean room where the twentieth century’s greatest songwriter could be an ordinary man hitting a heavy bag, eighteen blocks from the sea. The room may already be empty. The walls are still there. Whether they will be in ten years is, for once, up to us.
If you have memories, photographs, or documents connected to the 18th Street Coffee House or the gym behind it, the Santa Monica Conservancy and the Santa Monica History Museum would welcome hearing from you.
Jack Hillbrand, Architect
For S.M.a.r.t.: Santa Monica Architects for a Responsible Tomorrow
Jack Hillbrand AIA, Landmarks Commission Architect; Dan Jansenson, Architect (former Building & Fire-Life Safety Commissioner); Robert H. Taylor, Architect AIA; Mario Fonda-Bonardi, Architect AIA (former Planning Commissioner); Sam Tolkin, Architect (former Planning Commissioner); Michael Jolly, ARE-CRE; Phil Brock (SM Mayor, ret.); Matt Hoefler, Architect NCARB; Charles Andrews, columnist and journalist; Bruce Leddy, Human Services Commissioner and NOMA Co-Chair.
