The Auto Club Moreton Bay Fig

Charles C. Chapman planted this fig outside his own house on Figueroa Street in 1894. The house is gone. The tree is not, and when the Automobile Club of Southern California came to build its headquarters on the site it built around the fig instead of felling it, opening the Spanish Colonial Revival building by Sumner Hunt and Silas Burns on 27 January 1923. A century of undisturbed growth shows. The branches spread over 100 feet, and the aerial roots that Moreton Bay figs drop from their limbs have reached the ground and hardened into buttresses, so that the tree now appears to be standing on several trunks at once. The Auto Club has treated it as a member of staff ever since. It threw the fig a hundredth birthday party in 1994, and every December it decorates the tree and holds a public lighting event under it, which is a fine time to come and about the only occasion in Los Angeles when people gather to look at a fig. You can see it from the Figueroa Street sidewalk at any hour; the building is a working AAA branch and open to the public during business hours if you want to stand under the canopy. The pin comes from the street address, so aim for the corner of Figueroa and Adams.