I called it a piece of junk. It turned out to be a Frank Gehry L.A. masterpiece

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The early 1980s Los Angeles of my childhood always felt like a place where you could brush against greatness and not even recognize it.Take the strange, faceless building at Melrose and Sycamore avenues, just up from the house where I grew up.It stood apart from the Melrose Avenue hodgepodge, which included an auto body shop, an old bookstore famous for selling movie scripts, and a trendy boutique that sold vintage fedoras and marked the beginning of Melrose’s turn as a fashion mecca.In a street filled with signage screaming for your attention (“THOUSANDS OF BOOKS,” yelled the bookseller), that corner lot had nothing.

Just two concrete-plastered boxes seemingly closed off to the world.The only hint of life was a tree growing from what appeared to be some kind of courtyard hidden from view.

I passed by all the time — sneaking a Chunky bar at the corner liquor store, grabbing an ice cream cone from Baskin-Robbins.I didn’t give the building a second thought until my best friend and I started a little weekly newspaper we photocopied for 3½ cents a copy from a shop a few doors away.Jack and I hit up Melrose merchants to buy ads (usually just their business card), and a few agreed to help these teenage publishing tycoons.

Because of this, cracking the code of that strange little building became a brief obsession.One day, I found a door around the side and knocked.

No answer.So I left a copy of our paper and returned a few days later.

No luck.So I gave up.

Why was I wasting my time with this piece of junk?It took another 15 years to learn that the concrete box I so easily dismissed is one of L.A.architectural treasures.

It is called the Danziger Studio and was one of architect Frank Gehry’s first L.A.commissions.

Even back in the 1960s, it was hailed as something special.Architecture critic Reyner Banham called it a brilliant elevation of the “stucco box” so ubi...