Hollywood Millennium skyscrapers vs. Capitol Records building

The Hollywood Millennium project, which will plant two massive skyscrapers in the heart of Hollywood, got a green light from the L.A. City Council on Wednesday, reports The Times’ Kate Linthicum. The news surely came as a disappointment to opponents who’ve worried that the buildings would sit too close to a fault line and that their tenants and visitors would clog traffic. Some have also fretted that the Millennium skyscrapers would trump the Capitol Records building.

“The proposal includes more than four acres of high-rise luxury condos, offices, bars, boutique hotel rooms, restaurants and a vast fitness center, all encased in private towers so tall they will dwarf its centerpiece, the Capitol Records building,” Laurie Becklund wrote in an Op-Ed arguing against the project in March.

On that point, Louis Naidorf, the architect behind the Capitol Records building, says not to worry. In last week’s Op-Ed pages, he wrote in favor of the Hollywood Millennium project:

I’ve been stunned over the years that there is still a vacant parking lot next to Capitol Records. It would seem to me that somebody in 60 years might have gotten off the mark and done something with it. […]

I’m not concerned about putting buildings of any scale next to Capitol Records. I don’t think people walking along a street pay a lot of attention to anything above the third floor. It’s insignificant from a pedestrian’s point of view whether a building is 20 or 30 or 40 stories high. I think this building can nicely hold its own.

More important than the Capitol Records building, Naidorf said, was the need to move Hollywood forward. And to do that, he argued, we need people.

What Hollywood needs more than anything else is people — people coming there, people living there, people being there, people working there. Now there’s an opportunity for Hollywood to finally take a step forward, to burst out and do something.

The Times’ editorial board also saw the project’s silver lining when it covered the controversy in April, writing that it “furthers the goals of the Hollywood community plan.” Additionally:

The project has benefits for the city, including many construction jobs. Developers have agreed to make this a union project and to offer local workers priority in consideration for jobs. The developers are also contributing $4.8 million to the city housing department which will be put toward 106 units of affordable housing being built at two projects, one near Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue and the other in Westlake. The developers will give the city $2 million toward traffic mitigation.

The board also reminded us that “when the Capitol Records building itself was erected in the 1950s, it too towered over most of the buildings that then existed in Hollywood.”

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Follow Alexandra Le Tellier on Twitter @alexletellier