A vacant building at 1725 Broadway hides one of Santa Monica's strangest cultural secrets: for roughly 25 years, Bob Dylan owned and operated a members-only boxing gym and a no-phones café there, and now a city landmarks architect wants neighbors to help preserve the story before the property is redeveloped.
Jack Hillbrand, the city's Landmarks Commission Architect and a member of S.M.a.r.t. (Santa Monica Architects for a Responsible Tomorrow), revealed the full scope of the site's history in a column published Friday, July 31, in the Santa Monica Mirror. He's calling on the Santa Monica Conservancy and the Santa Monica History Museum to collect oral histories, photographs, and permit records from the 1990s build-out while former members and neighbors can still share them.
"Not a campaign — a record," Hillbrand wrote. "Gather the memories, the photographs, the permit drawings from the 1990s build-out; hear from the members, the staff, the neighbors, the congregation next door, while they can still tell it; and archive it all where the city keeps its stories."
What was behind the door
Dylan quietly purchased the Broadway property, in the block between 17th and 18th Streets, in the mid-1990s. The public-facing portion was the 18th Street Coffee House, with hand-tiled tables, a checkered floor, a latticed patio garden, and a vintage jukebox. House rules banned internet use and cell phones. Dylan wanted the café to be a place where creative people could converse and create, according to Hillbrand.
Behind and below the café, through a door that was once a walk-in cooler entry, sat a full boxing gymnasium with a ring, heavy bags, and walls decorated with images pairing boxing and music legends: Joe Louis alongside Muddy Waters, Ali next to Frazier, the Rolling Stones. Membership was by Dylan's personal invitation only. There was no sign on the building. All permits were filed under the name of Dylan's general manager, Jeff Rosen.
A hatch behind the coffee counter allowed Dylan to peer out from the gym before entering the café, a privacy measure for a man who avoided being recognized.
Who trained there
Former lightweight champion Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini sparred with Dylan at the gym. After landing a solid hit on Dylan's head, Mancini told him to "ease up on the head, a few songs were still left in there," according to Hillbrand's account.
Actor Ben Stiller mentioned on a talk show that he sparred there with Mancini, Gary Shandling, David Duchovny, and Peter Berg. Journalist Lynda Gorov, who trained at the gym for a decade, published an essay titled "Boxing at Bob Dylan's Private Gym" on her Substack on January 27, 2025, describing a morning when she arrived to find Dylan working out a song on guitar beside the ring.
Dylan also kept an office at the property and served as landlord to a neighborhood synagogue on the same parcel.
A site going dark
The gym wound down in the late 2010s. The café appears not to have survived the pandemic. The 18th Street Coffee House is now listed as permanently closed on Yelp. Visitors describe locked doors, dark windows, and wilting ivy.
Hillbrand acknowledged that the interior treasures (the jukebox, a painting believed to be by Dylan, fight posters, the ring) are likely already dispersed. The buildings themselves are modest commercial structures. But he argued the site qualifies as what preservationists call a "site of environmental memory," a building whose significance lives not in its architectural style but in the practices it sheltered.
How to help
The Santa Monica History Museum, led by Executive Director Rob Schwenker at 1350 7th St., won the 2023 Cultural Heritage Award from the Conservancy for its "Broadway to Freeway" exhibition documenting the historic Broadway corridor. Hillbrand directed residents with memories, photographs, or documents to contact the Conservancy at [email protected] or the History Museum at [email protected] or (310) 395-2290.
Neither organization has publicly responded to Hillbrand's call. No timeline or formal process has been announced.
