The Petersons’ penthouse loft was once ground zero for white-collar boxers

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES

Nine years ago, developer Dan Peterson was in the hydraulics business—setting cities up with heavy equipment to repair things like trash trucks—when he found himself irresistibly drawn to the Insurance Exchange building at Broadway and the Promenade.

He’d never, ever redeveloped a building before—but now he sure has. When it was over, Peterson and wife Peggie, empty-nesters, decided to occupy the nationally historic building’s airy penthouse loft. They’d earned it, having spent five-and-a-half years and reportedly around $6 million on the entire project.

“When I got into this, I had no idea being a developer is a full-time job,” Peterson says as we lounge on overstuffed sofas in his new living room—gazing out banks of windows at the Ocean Center Building, the Queen Mary and the city’s oldest former Masonic Temple. “It took about three years to get through the city paperwork and reviews and entitlements.”

The bright side is that now—finally—the two are probably the city’s only homeowners whose living room was once an open-air boxing ring. Yep: This is where office workers would once strap on gloves and try to really beat the typing pool.

Designed by a man named Harvey H. Lochridge and built in 1924, the Insurance Exchange building was vacant when Peterson closed escrow in January 2000. Its most charming visible attribute was an ornately carved terra cotta exterior with figures of playing children, griffins, sea serpents and garland-draped vases.

Originally home to Middough’s Boys Shop (young men’s furnishings, which explains the playing children), the IE had been offices since 1936. But like other historic buildings, it needed a bit of everything.

Peterson helped engineer a seismic retrofit that didn’t pierce its delicate terra cotta skin. And he found an original photo of Middough’s Boys Shop from opening day 1924—grim, suited office workers looking south across Broadway, surrounded by more than a dozen huge baskets of congratulatory flowers—to help heal the building’s scarred epidermis.

The building’s first floor, which will soon be home to the restaurant Quenton’s, and its basement, which houses the Cellar nightclub, had been gutted—and all its ground-level embellishments had been destroyed. So Peterson used his photo to replicate the terra cotta vases, overflowing with garlands, that had greeted shoppers back in 1924.

Convincing wife Peggie to leave their comfortable El Segundo home for a bare, concrete, 2,000-square-foot loft was another, not so daunting, challenge, Peterson says.

“We walked in it, and I just said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to build this and live here?’” Dan Peterson recalls. “She said ‘I’ll try it—I’ll try it for two years.’” Now they’re midway through that third year.

“It’s a little noisy sometimes, but it’s nice,” says Peggie Peterson, who even picked out the paint. Their loft is a testament to all the work in this bulding: Only its kitchen—where the gym was—is in the original footprint; its living room and the third level master bedroom and bathroom were added.

So were slate floors in the entryway and kitchen, and gorgeous wide-plank, distressed walnut floors everywhere else.

And in the bedroom, their architect—the august Roger Peter Porter of Long Beach, since 1968—divided the space with two floating walls. One hangs a tapestry, facing the stairs; the bed goes on the other. Their opposite sides reveal the master bath—linen closet behind the tapestry, his and hers sinks behind the bed. A gigantic tub and glassed-in shower overlook Blue Cafe and Third Street.

“You can stand and look out at the city. And the city can look at you,” Dan Peterson says. You can see all the way to downtown Los Angeles from their deck—which is maybe the best way to see LA.

“At night, it looks like the Emerald City,” he says. “You can see all the gold.”

Tags: insurance exchange building, living, Long Beach, Shelter