Old Gardena Card Clubs Get New Deal
The lawyer who reconstructed much of a 19th-Century Iowa courthouse in a somewhat isolated area of north Torrance is giving two Gardena card clubs a new deal.
“There are no jokers,” the attorney, Dudley W. Gray Sr., said. “My project is in the cards.”
His project is turning the defunct Rainbow and Monterey clubs into a $17.5-million corporate headquarters and research-and-development park. “We closed escrow in January and I expect to break ground in the next 90 days,” he said.
When completed, the space will be marketed to companies from the Pacific Rim because Gardena already has a sizable Asian population--nearly 13,000 of the 47,000 residents at last count (in 1980). “Gardena has 26 good Japanese and 16 standard American restaurants,” Gray pointed out.
He expects to add about 175,000 square feet of multi-tenant R&D; space to the existing 60,000-square-foot buildings, which have been closed for some time. As nearby communities opened their own casinos, the Monterey folded in 1981 and the Rainbow Club shut down two years later.
With the dismantling of gaudy signs that once helped proclaim Gardena’s half-century monopoly on legalized card clubs, Gray’s plans will again change the landscape of a Los Angeles suburb. Built in 1979, his Iowa Courthouse office building (where he and his sons maintain law offices as Gray, Gray & Gray) still looms as a landmark, where there was nothing but large stretches of barren land.
“Too bad Johnny Carson didn’t buy this one.”
That’s how Joan McGoohan, wife of Emmy Award-winning British actor Patrick McGoohan, describes the house that Jim Fox, formerly a child actor on TV’s “My Three Sons,” just built in the Trancas area of Malibu and listed with McGoohan at Rodeo Realty in Pacific Palisades.
The 9,000-square-foot house, on two acres overlooking the ocean, has a movie theater, guest house, 50-foot-long swimming pool, gardens, rolling lawns, security gates, beach access and a tennis court, which the talk-show host--who is also an avid tennis player--doesn’t have on the 2 1/2-acre property he bought last fall for $8.6 million in nearby Point Dume. (Fox is asking $6.5 million.)
The tennis court might also account for pop singer Michael Jackson’s interest. Though he built a large house near his parents’ home in Encino only a couple of years ago, Jackson has been among the people looking at the house that the 29-year-old Fox built. Like Carson, Jackson doesn’t have a tennis court.
The Rodeo Collection, one of the most scintillating shopping centers on one of the most famous streets in the world (Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive), has been granted one of the largest, if not the largest, per-square-foot real estate permanent loans in U. S. history from one of the country’s largest and most conservative lenders: the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co.
The $30-million loan indicates that the 66,000-square-foot Rodeo Collection, which opened in 1983, is worth more than $450 a square foot. Most shopping centers are valued at $150 to $200 a square foot.
Does riding the range have any appeal? If so, the Las Flores Ranch on the north side of the San Bernardino Mountains, might be the answer--if you can afford it.
The 7,000-acre ranch, first settled by the Piute Indian tribes and later used by the Mormons in their travels to San Bernardino, is scheduled to go before the U. S. Bankruptcy Court in San Bernardino on Friday at 1:30 p.m., but the property--now being used as a cattle-feeding operation for dairy heifers from the Chino Valley--has been appraised at $32 million.
There have already been two offers: one for 4,000 acres at $3 million cash down and a total of $9.5 million and the other for the whole property at $3 million cash down and $13.5 million total.
Five dairymen bought the place five years ago with the intention of putting dairies on the land, where the first permanent buildings were constructed in 1850. (The big barn, built in 1872, is still being used.) The dairymen ran into trouble, however, when the zoning could not be changed to permit dairy operations, according to Fred C. Heyl, exclusive broker and ranch manager, who has offices in Hesperia. “As it is,” he said, “we just have enough to pay our cowboys, maintenance and electricity. We can’t even pay our taxes.”
So what would the people who have already made offers do with the property?
“One, from Kentucky, would put a horse ranch on it, but he would probably also develop part of it and sell the water rights,” Heyl answered. The water rights have been valued at more than $20 million. The Mojave River flows through the ranch for six miles.
The other party who has made an offer (and happens to be from Dallas) would put condos and “some type of recreational facility on it,” Heyl continued, “because the ranch is loaded with trees, water and wildlife.”
