Built in 1893,[1] the five-story office building is best known for its extraordinary skylit atrium of access walkways, stairs and elevators, and their ornate ironwork.

The building was commissioned by Los Angeles gold-mining millionaire Lewis L. Bradbury and constructed by architect George Wyman from the original design by Sumner Hunt.

[11][12] In 1892 he began planning to construct a five-story building at Broadway and Third Street in Los Angeles, close to the Bunker Hill neighborhood.

Since 1996, the building has served as the headquarters for the Los Angeles Police Department's Internal Affairs division[18] and other government agencies.

The retail spaces on the first floor currently house Ross Cutlery, where O. J. Simpson purchased a stiletto that figured in his murder trial, a Subway sandwich restaurant, a Blue Bottle Coffee shop, and a real estate sales office for loft conversions in other nearby historic buildings.

It includes soft seating in the atrium, conference and meeting rooms, event spaces, and the private speakeasy called the Wyman Bar operated by NeueHouse exclusively available to building tenants, social members, and their guests.

[26] The building's undistinguished exterior facade of brown brick, sandstone and terracotta detailing was designed in the commercial vernacular Italian Renaissance Revival style current at the time.

[27] The narrow entrance lobby, with its low ceiling and minimal light "has the look of a Parisian alley of arched windows", and opens into a bright naturally lit great "awe-inspiring cathedral-like"[14] center court.

Robert Forster, star of the TV series Banyon that used the building for his office, described it as "one of the great interiors of L.A. Outside it doesn't look like much, but when you walk inside, suddenly you're back a hundred and twenty years.

"[28] The five-story central court features glazed and unglazed yellow and pink bricks,[14] ornamental cast iron,[20] tiling, Italian marble, Mexican tile,[5] decorative terracotta[14] and polished wood, capped by a skylight that allows the court to be flooded with natural rather than artificial light, creating ever-changing shadows and accents during the day.

[30] Most notably, the building is a setting in the 1982 science fiction film Blade Runner, for the character J. F. Sebastian's apartment, and the climactic rooftop scene.

The five-story atrium also substituted for the interior of the seedy skid row hotel depicted in the climax of Good Neighbor Sam (1964).

The building is also featured in China Girl (1942), The White Cliffs of Dover (1944),[33] Indestructible Man (1956), Caprice (1967),[33] Marlowe (1969),[32] the 1972 made-for-television movie The Night Strangler,[30] Chinatown (1974), The Cheap Detective (1978),[33] Avenging Angel (1985),[34] Murphy's Law (1986), ‘’Midnight Cabaret’’ (1990), The Dreamer of Oz (1990), Wolf (1994), Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), Pay It Forward (2000), What Women Want (2000),[35] (500) Days of Summer (2009) and The Artist (2011).

The building appeared in at least one episode of the television series Banyon (1972–73), where it was used as Robert Forster's office,[37] City of Angels (1976) and Mission: Impossible (1966–73),[34] as well as Ned and Chuck's Apartment in Pushing Daisies, which debuted in 2007.

In the Star Trek novel The Case of the Colonist's Corpse: A Sam Cogley Mystery, the protagonist works from the Bradbury Building four hundred years in the future.

Other appearances occur in The Man With The Golden Torc by Simon R. Green, Angels Flight The Black Box, and "The Drop," by Michael Connelly, and the science-fiction multiple novel series The World of Tiers by Philip Jose Farmer.