At Home in Tinseltown

By Roger Vincent

March 19, 2006 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Hollywood and Vine, the once-storied intersection that had degenerated into a home to panhandlers, prostitutes and drug dealers, soon could become home to an entirely different crowd: some of Los Angeles’ most well-heeled glitterati.

Developers hope their planned $1.2-billion construction of more than 2,000 upscale condominiums and apartments, along with a new ritzy W Hotel and other attractions, will make the spot a Los Angeles rarity -- a neighborhood like parts of Manhattan, with residents and nightlife.

The condos already are enjoying strong buyer demand. But the proposed transformation has its naysayers. Some existing business owners and neighbors worry about increased traffic congestion and say new residents may get turned off by the bustling nightlife the development is intended to enhance.

Los Angeles city officials have been plotting Hollywood and Vine’s comeback for more than a decade, but didn’t foresee the rush for high-end living in an area that had seen better days.

“We are a little bit surprised that Vine is becoming a premier residential address,” said Helmi Hisserich, the Community Redevelopment Agency’s regional administrator for Hollywood. “It just sort of emerged. Vine is going to become an extraordinarily wonderful street for Los Angeles.”

The momentum is so strong that developers are trying to buy the cylindrical Capitol Records Tower north of the intersection in the hope of converting it to condos. Early buyer reaction bodes well for builders at Hollywood and Vine, where construction at all four corners is underway or close to starting.

Nearly all 96 units in the former Broadway department store at the southwest corner of the intersection were sold as soon at they went on the market. Prices ranged from more than $500,000 to $2.8 million for some penthouses.

Developer Kor Group said there were hundreds of registrants for a chance to purchase a unit, but declined to identify any buyers. One of them, though, was real estate broker John Tronson, who described “a feeding frenzy” among “mostly high-profile L.A. people or celebrities who want an L.A. base. They think it will be hottest place in town.”

Part of the appeal for the glitterati is the reputation of Kor Group as a purveyor of Old Hollywood style. Chief Executive Brad Korzen and his wife, interior designer Kelly Wearstler, build for the chic set and made a splash with their lavishly decorated boutique hotels such as the Avalon in Beverly Hills and the Viceroy in Santa Monica.

Hollywood’s rebirth is a bit ahead of the comeback going on in downtown Los Angeles, where Kor is also building condos, Korzen said.

“Hollywood and Vine is surrounded by dozens and dozens of clubs, bars and restaurants,” Korzen said. “It’s got a robust nightlife in an urban setting. You don’t have that anywhere else in L.A.”

Korzen is transforming two adjoining buildings that date to the 1920s and 1930s and served as the now-defunct Broadway chain’s high-end Hollywood outpost for decades before closing in the 1980s. To revive the glamour factor, he is adding a roof garden with pool, cabanas, an exercise room and a spa.

The Broadway, the former Equitable office building across the street at the northeast corner and the Taft office building at the southeast corner are links to the era when Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street was one of the city’s great crossroads in the 1920s, when it was the second-busiest intersection after Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue.

It was a gateway to the San Fernando Valley in pre-freeway Los Angeles and had been a draw for the movie industry from the very beginning. Cecil B. DeMille shot “The Squaw Man,” Hollywood’s first feature film, at the nearby corner of Selma Avenue and Vine in 1914.

Later, radio and then television stations set up operations in the neighborhood and KFWB announcers chirped often that they were broadcasting “from Hollywood and Vine,” according to historian Marc Wanamaker. “It was considered the downtown of Hollywood.”

Such mass appeal was a distant memory by the 1980s, when the neighborhood fell prey to such activities as drug dealing, prostitution and panhandling.

By the early 1990s, the Community Redevelopment Agency had come up with a plan for improving Hollywood that called for commercial and residential development at the intersection. Changing political administrations, subway construction and real estate downturns kept builders at bay, however.

Finally, a city ordinance that simplified conversion of commercial buildings to residential use, along with the Hollywood and Highland development and the recent housing boom, spurred developers to action. The area’s grittiness even holds appeal for some.

“Hollywood has just become what the Meatpacking District was five years ago in New York,” said developer Avi Brosh, who builds for the single, hip and affluent and who is also spearheading the effort at Hollywood and Vine. “It’s the emerging epicenter of nightlife and culture.”

Brosh’s Palisades Development Group is currently converting the Equitable building to condominiums. He also got city approval in January to build a five-story condominium building on the intersection’s northwest corner. It will replace a parking lot situated between a nightclub and a theater built in 1927 that was home to the “Hollywood Palace” television vaudeville show in the 1960s.

He plans to provide furnished units for rent and for sale, all with a concierge, housekeeping staff and room service from the street-level restaurant.

“We want people who might have stayed in an Oakwood but don’t feel in tune with their design,” said Brosh, referring to the West Los Angeles-based company that specializes in renting furnished apartments.

The next major addition will spring up around the Taft building and a subway entrance at the intersection’s southeast corner.

Gatehouse Capital Corp. received approval from the city Planning Commission last month to build a 300-room W Hotel along with 150 condominiums served by the hotel’s staff. The project will include a restaurant, spa, fitness facility and rooftop bar.

The opportunity to build at Hollywood and Vine was worth the five years of effort it will have taken to get underway, said Marty Collins, Gatehouse’s president.

“It is one of those iconic intersections in the world,” Collins said. “From Africa to Nepal to China, you can say the word ‘Hollywood’ and they have an image of it that is largely good.”

Another developer, Legacy Partners, will contribute 375 apartments and retail space on the ground floor including a convenience grocery store, said Dennis Cavallari, senior vice president.

Plans for the development call for eliminating some old buildings along Vine, including a cocktail lounge, juice bar and a luggage store, which were condemned earlier this month by the Community Redevelopment Agency through eminent domain.

Luggage store operator Robert Blue said he would mount a court challenge to keep possession of his 78-year-old building in part because he hopes to be in business when new residents arrive. “All these people will need luggage and repairs.”

Some longtime locals wonder if the neighborhood’s transformation will go smoothly.

The trouble with Hollywood’s current appeal, said puppet maker Greg Williams, is that “it’s all alcohol-based” around trendy nightclubs. New residents may not care for the noise the clubs generate, he said.

Williams, who said he grew up in Hollywood and later ran his Puppet Studio at Hollywood and Vine, said a lack of city leadership following damages from the 1994 Northridge earthquake and following subway construction disruptions ruptured the fabric of the business community by driving out longtime small-business owners.

Like many neighbors in the path of development, Nancy Omeara, who keeps an office in the Taft building, worries whether all the new residents and their cars will be too much of a good thing.

“It’s great people are going to be coming,” said Omeara, vice president of the Foundation for Religious Freedom. “It’s all a positive story except for the traffic. Maybe we’ll actually have a city here.”

Former New Yorker Raymond Urgo, also a Taft building tenant, said he was worried about the heavy focus on housing development instead of office or retail.

“Everybody is trying to get in on residential, but I’m not sure the mix is right,” said Urgo, a management consultant. “The people coming in are going to be paying too much for what they are getting.”

Without other uses besides housing, “it will be 10 or 20 years before it becomes a true hot spot,” Urgo said.

Perhaps not surprisingly, developer Brosh predicts success will come a lot sooner: “What you are going to see is probably the most dynamic corner in the city. If you’re an urban person, this will be as good as it gets.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Boom town

Here are some of the projects underway or being planned for the neighborhood surrounding Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, the developer and the estimated cost.

1. Project :Palihouse Hollywood

Developer: Palisades Development

Size: New; five stories, 57 condos and apartments over a restaurant

Cost: $50 million

2. Project: Equitable office building

Developer: Palisades Development

Size: Rehab; 60 residential condos, five office condos

Cost: $50 million

3. Project: Apartments

Developer: Clarett Group

Size: New; five stories, 1,000 rental units over street-level retail space

Cost: $300 million