Discarding the Notion of the ‘Throwaway City’ : City Review

At the ceremonies last week announcing the recycling of the landmark Pan Pacific Auditorium, the comment was made that “Los Angeles is a throwaway city” that for years has discarded some its most interesting buildings.

The implication was that the planned restoration of the Streamline Moderne-styled structure as a film and video center combined with a hotel and commercial complex was an exception and should be celebrated.

On Brink of Collapse

Celebrated the announcement should be, for the 50-year-old auditorium with its distinctive facade accented by four curved towers in the form of fins has over the last decade suffered from fire, vandalism and neglect to totter on collapse.

To lose the landmark--considered by architectural historians to be one of the outstanding examples of the streamline style that expressed America’s love affair with machines and speed in the 1930s--would have been a tragedy.

But the auditorium’s planned recycling is not an exception. Indeed, inspired by preservationists, there is a growing trend in the Los Angeles region and elsewhere across the country to save historic structures by having them adapted to new and updated uses.

Spurring the trend are such considerations as significant tax incentives, pride for communities that preserve their heritage, and, for politicians who support preservation, an aura of enlightenment.

The substantial list of local buildings of historical interest that have been or are being recycled include a former stock trading center into a theater complex, a bakery into an antique showroom, a funeral parlor into an office center, a jail into a community center, and a firehouse, jewelry store and haberdashery into restaurants.

With the help of the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, a variety of downtown office buildings on the National Register of Historic Places have been converted into, among other things, a design center and senior citizen housing. And just recently the agency announced that it is soliciting proposals to recycle three more office buildings.

‘More and More Popular’

“The concept of recycling an historic building is becoming more and more popular,” observed Wayne Ratkovich, who, as a partner in the development firm of Ratkovich, Bowers Inc., rehabilitated the Oviatt and Fine Arts office towers downtown and the Wiltern Theatre and Pellissier Building in the mid-Wilshire district. “Their advantages in marketing and costs are catching on.”

In Monrovia, an 80-year-old deteriorated hotel is being recycled as low- and moderate-income senior citizen housing by the nonprofit Los Angeles Community Design Center. “The project contributes to our historical efforts downtown, while promoting needed housing and commercial space,” commented city official Steve Cervantes.

And what was once a landmark Whittier College dormitory, then an office building, has been converted into a retail and commercial complex. In West Hollywood, a plant store became a bank, and a furniture store that was once a gas station became a pricey, attractive restaurant, Trumps.

Actually, one of the most distinguished landmarks in Los Angeles, the Bradbury Building at 304 S. Broadway, was constructed in 1893 as a garment factory and only converted years later to an office building.

One of the more successful recycling efforts in recent years was the updating of a variety of athletic facilities for the 1984 Olympiad. Playing a major role in the retrofitting was the architectural firm of the Jerde Partnership, the offices of which, perhaps not incidentally, are located in a converted Pacific Electric Railway substation.

Ambitious as well as unique was a project completed this month in Pasadena. It involved the relocation across the city of a six-unit, 75-year-old Craftsman-styled bungalow complex, known as Gartz Court, and its sympathetic rehabilitation directed by the architectural firm of De Bretteville and Polyzoides as affordable housing.

The project was a joint effort of the City of Pasadena and Pasadena Heritage, the local preservation organization, which joined forces a few years ago when the court had been threatened with demolition to make way for an office complex.

Noting the construction details of the bungalows that include Arroyo stone chimneys, hardwood floors and beamed ceilings, Claire Bogaard of Pasadena Heritage commented that it would be impossible to reproduce the structures today, especially at the $70,000 to $90,000 price for which they were sold at a lottery last year.

The executive director of the Los Angeles Conservancy, Ruthann Lehrer, added: “People are beginning to recognize that historic rehabilitation makes economic sense, is marketable and is important in creating in communities a needed identity and sense of place.”

A broad-based preservation organization, the conservancy worked with the Friends of the Pan Pacific, headed by Linda Mehr and Fran Offenhauser, for nearly a decade to stave off attempts to demolish the historic auditorium while they explored the possibilities of adaptive reuse with the help of Los Angeles County Supervisor Ed Edelman.

Eventually, the city, county and state joined to purchase the complex, convert its adjacent acreage into a park and solicit proposals to try to save the auditorium, or at least its facade.

The result was the plans revealed last week for a nonprofit American Cinematheque, a hotel of about 150 rooms and shops and restaurants, designed by Gruen Associates and to be known as the Pan Pacific Center. Construction is expected to total $22 million and take three years to complete.