The McKinley Building was one of the best interpretations of the Spanish Revival Churrigueresque style ever built on Wilshire Boulevard.

Designed by prominent architects Morgan, Walls, and Clements for the Sun Realty Company, this ornate building featured a three-story corner tower and retail spaces surrounding a central courtyard.

"The shopper feels that he is in another small world," the journal Pacific Coast Architecture gushed in 1928. Here is a fountain, trees and flowering shrubs, pleasant nooks in which to rest and smoke. Mere shopping becomes an adventure. Every small shop adjacent to the court is an exotic, delightful world that must be looked into.

The McKinley Building spent its last years vacant and deteriorating, a victim of demolition by neglect, when a property owner fails to maintain a historic building to hasten its demise.

Despite intensive efforts by the Los Angeles Conservancy, the building's determination as eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places, and two viable purchase offers to rehabilitate the building for retail and entertainment use, the McKinley Building was demolished in 1998.

The site remained vacant for years and now houses a CVS drugstore.