DESIGN / ART DECO IN D'TOWN LA / 100 YEARS OF STYLE

 Cicada Restaurant & Lounge (Oviatt Building) Downtown, Los Angeles Maybe America’s most cinematic Deco dining room: 30-foot gold-leaf ceilings, Lalique-style glass, and live-band supper-club nights inside downtown’s 1928 jewel. 

Cicada Club is located in the Oviatt Building at 617 South Olive Street in Downtown Los Angeles. The building was completed in 1928 and commissioned by James Oviatt, co-founder of the luxury menswear firm Alexander & Oviatt. 

It was conceived as both a flagship retail space and a statement of Jazz Age confidence in a rapidly growing city. The Oviatt Building was designed by the Los Angeles architectural firm Walker & Eisen and is considered one of the city’s finest examples of Art Deco commercial architecture. 

Oviatt insisted on European materials and craftsmanship throughout, importing marble, ironwork, and decorative elements from France and Italy. The most famous surviving feature is the René Lalique glass doors at the entrance, which remain in place today. 

 

The building combined multiple uses: retail floors for the clothing business, professional offices above, and a private penthouse apartment for Oviatt at the top. During the 1930s and 1940s it stood at the center of a fashionable downtown corridor serving bankers, lawyers, and Hollywood executives. 

 After World War II, as Los Angeles development shifted westward, the Oviatt Building entered a long period of decline along with much of downtown. By the 1970s it was underused, though largely intact. Preservation-minded owners undertook a major restoration in the late 1970s and early 1980s. 

 In 1981 the upper-floor dining space reopened as Rex Il Ristorante, reintroducing the public to the building’s grand interior. In the late 1990s the space evolved into Cicada Restaurant and the Cicada Club. 

The club became known for swing music, big band performances, and classic supper-club evenings, using the original Art Deco interior rather than recreating one. 

Today the Oviatt Building, above, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a designated Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument. The Cicada Club remains one of the few venues in Los Angeles where a preserved 1920s interior is still actively used for dining, music, and social events.