Giving Life
Eighteen to 24 months is the projected gestation period for the plot of land obliquely named Parcel B — the parking lot adjacent to Trader Joe’s — in the emotional center of Downtown. Groundbreaking for what will become a fashionable three (or four)-floor, mixed-use office and commercial building is tentatively planned for February. The entire complex — the glamourous building, the glistening expansion of Towne Plaza, widened to connect the new bulding and the historic Culver Hotel, and the re-configuring of Washington-Culver Boulevard around the north side of Parcel B — should be poised for a dramatic unveiling by late ’08. It will compete for front page space. The curtain will rise just as America is changing Presidents. One of the tidy little details — among a welter of a thousand details — that the City Council breezily approved was the sale of the much talked about site, a 50,727-square foot parcel at 9300 Culver Blvd., to the developer Rush Pacifica. At $117 per square foot, the City Council/Redevelopment Agency sanctioned the transaction for a cool $5.9 million. By some kind of construction magic, the presently barren land will stonily blossom into a three- — or four- — floor building. The ground floor — which may include Culver City’s first Downtown bookstore in recent years — is reserved for restaurants and swanky-enough retail businesses. The upper floors will serve as offices meant to accommodate the needs of The Culver Studios, which is cramped for space. For bookkeepers in the audience, ground-floor space is 36,900 gross square feet, with 78,208 gross square feet above.
An Erector Set
Twelve years ago, City Hall committed an historic convulsion in Downtown. Hoisting two long, tall boulevards, Washington and Culver, as if they were limp strands of spaghetti, the city creatively re-strung them around just one side of the Culver Hotel. Arguably, the next realignment may be less drastic. With one of the keenest traffic engineering minds in Los Angeles at the helm, Max Paetzold, City Hall will be bending, twisting and rerouting familiar roadways. The stretch of Washington Boulevard that wraps around the front of the Culver Hotel will be closed off to accommodate the sprawling new plaza. Main Street/Washington Boulevard will become a “T” intersection. Cars must turn east or west. All east or west bound traffic east of Main Street will be channeled along the two-block stretch on the north side of Trader Joe’s. Ince Street, on the western side of Trader Joe’s, will be widened and renamed Washington Boulevard. Work on the rerouting is expected to begin in October.
Plumbing the Minds of Residents
Measuring the degree of excitement that residents and Downtown business owners feel about the project is more complicated than the paperwork for this densely plotted deal. During these relative dog days of the project, is anyone outside of City Hall paying attention? Barely. Only three persons were aroused enough to comment. The most impressive may have been the resident Linda Shahinian. Choosing a scholarly, activist approach after amazingly reviewing all 261 pages available to the public, she challenged arcane and obvious conclusions, assumptions and plans by City Hall. The well-positioned businessman Renato Romano, longtime owner of a building adjacent to Towne Plaza, at 9430, criticized City Hall for what he described as the lack of a “single comprehensive plan for (upgrading) Downtown.” Mr. Romano proposed that “all Downtown owners should sit down with the Redevelopment Agency and discuss what we want to do.” Speaking from his power wheelchair, Chris Brown worried that the realignment of Washington Boulevard, by any name, will make crossing the street more perilous for his wheelchair-bound friends.
60 Minutes, So to Speak
Never a group to be deterred by scant public interest in a subject, the City Council devoted a full hour to approving the several-legged plan that was a fait accompli. Vice Mayor Alan Corlin suggested that City Hall designate a liaison person to serve as a kind of ombudsman for all affected parties, especially the Culver Hotel. The volatile changes over the next two to two and a half years “will be tougher on the hotel than on anyone else,” he said. Councilman Steve Rose pledged “to fight any attempt” to shift the weekly Farmers Market from Main Street to the greatly broadened Towne Plaza. “I will not have oil slicks on Towne Plaza,” Mr. Rose said. He also fretted that casual but increasing characterizations of the easterly route of Washington Boulevard as “East Washington” is annoyingly erroneous. “The only ‘East Washington,’” he said, “is the East Washington Overlay.” Mayor Gary Silbiger inquired about plans for community comment on the project that has been seven or eight years in the making, and formerly was under the stewardship of OliverMcMillan of San Diego.
Postscript
In an accidental confluence of fascinating timing, representatives from both Sony Pictures and the resident theater troupe the Actors Gang dazzled the large audience in Council Chambers. They shared the stage with the Culver Studios. At a time when the sensitivity of global businesses toward their hometowns is a touchy political topic, Sony and the Actors’ Gang laid out portraits of their unusually deep community involvement on a continuing basis. They won the crowd, which responded with pithy and punchy raves. Sony came here at the start of the 1990s, the Actors’ Gang last year.
[Editor’s Note: A community meeting has been called for Council Chambers at 7 p.m. on Thursday, July 20, to review City Hall’s expansion of Towne Plaza and the entire makeover project.]