Fire Won’t Stop Work on Book About Architect Paul Williams

The late black architect Paul Williams, who designed dozens of movie-star mansions and other buildings from the late 1920s to the mid-40s, converted an old five-and-dime in the ‘50s into the Broadway Federal Savings branch, which was burned to the ground during the Los Angeles riots.

Some records of Williams, who was one of the founders of the bank, were also destroyed in the fire, which leveled Broadway Federal’s main offices at 45th and Broadway.

But Karen Hudson, Williams’ granddaughter, still expects the book that she has been writing about him to be published this year.

“There never was a book about him, and he is often not mentioned in books about Los Angeles architecture,” she said when she started the project in 1989. Hudson’s other grandfather, the late H. Claude Hudson, was also a founder of the bank and the NAACP.