Mid-Wilshire Rebirth : Wiltern Center: Life Begins at 54

Opening night this week at the Wiltern Theatre will mark more than completion of restoration at the 54-year-old landmark movie palace, although that in itself is a major accomplishment.

The opening also signifies the beginning of another stage in the history of the 4.4-acre property,now known as Wiltern Center, where a $150-million development incorporating the theater and its historic building with 850,000 square feet of additional office space is planned.

The opening may also foster a change in the neighborhood, which appears to be undergoing something of a rebirth.

Mid-Wilshire: That’s what the area is called, but Wayne Ratkovich, who took on the renovation when it and the locale looked least promising, prefers the name “Uptown Los Angeles.”

It was, as he has remembered, “historically uptown Los Angeles,” where “you’d stop at the bargain basement downtown and then go uptown along Wilshire to the best stores and restaurants, ending up on Miracle Mile. It was high (quality) stuff.”

It wasn’t that way in 1981, when he and his firm, Ratkovich, Bowers & Perez acquired the Pellessier Building and its 2,400-seat Wiltern Theatre for $6.3 million. The surroundings then have been described as seedy. Businesses were moving east and west.

The Pellessier and Wiltern were vandalized and vacant, except for a few vagrants who were camping inside. Clifford Ratkovich, Wayne’s nephew and vice president of Ratkovich, Bowers & Perez, described conditions: “Portions of the building were burned from the fires the vagrants started to keep themselves warm, and there was a lot of graffiti on the walls.” Many of the once much-admired Art Deco decorative features in the offices as well as the theater had been removed by collectors anticipating that the building would be razed.

Wayne Ratkovich and his partners, already restoration experts because of their work on the Oviatt and Fine Arts buildings in downtown Los Angeles, stepped in after a citizens group and the Los Angeles Conservancy held a rally to spare the Pellessier and its Wiltern Theatre. After trying unsuccessfully to sell the building for nine years, Franklin Life Insurance Co. planned to demolish it and market the land, which might have appealed to developers because of its prominent location on the southeast corner of Western Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard.

At the time, though, the Mid-Wilshire office market was depressed. The economy was in recession. Southern California real estate values were declining. Nonetheless, Ratkovich, Bowers & Perez started refurbishing the 12-story office tower in 1981 and reopened it a year later.

Today, the 34,000 square feet of office space in the tower is 100% leased--”by a lot of yuppies,’ if you want to call them that,” Cliff Ratkovich observed. “I’d say the average age of the tenants is mid-30s.”

Their businesses? Among them: advertising, architecture and interior design. “It says something about a project when architectural firms move in,” he added.

Zigzag Moderne Style

What it probably says is that the tenants like the marble interiors, green terra-cotta facade and other distinctive features of an age gone by, an era when the tower was the tallest building west of City Hall, and its tenants included many dentists. It is “the only office building of its period in L.A. with a theater,” according to Ruthann Lehrer, executive director of the Los Angeles Conservancy. The entire building is a Los Angeles Cultural Historic Landmark and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

The architectural style, designed by Morgan, Walls & Clements, has been described as “one of the finest examples of Zigzag Moderne in Los Angeles.” The tower is so skinny that even a small firm can afford to rent an entire floor, though monthly rates--at about $1.75 a foot--are at the high end of the market. (Retail space is being marketed in the $2-a-foot range, and available offices in the wings are expected to fetch $1.65 to $1.75 a foot.) Floor areas in the tower average 3,200 square feet.

‘Up-and-Coming Area’

“Tenants like the sense of having a grand entrance into their offices as they step out of the elevators,” Cliff Ratkovich noted.

They also like the neighborhood, said Kate Bartolo, who is handling leasing through Coldwell Banker. “They want to be near Melrose Avenue and its theaters, art galleries and restaurants, and they are finding some exquisite housing opportunities in Hancock Park and other places nearby.”

Indeed, she continued, “Yuppies, who are more upwardly mobile with more discretionary income, are replacing the hourly-wage worker in Mid-Wilshire, an up-and-coming area with an office vacancy rate of about 11%.”

In the Pellessier Building (named for the family which owned and built the landmark), there is still some office and retail space for lease in its two two-story wings, totaling 40,000 square feet of space. The 2,375-seat theater, now a performing arts center, is about 60,000 square feet in size. The theater was restored at a cost of $4.6 million, and the rest of the building took another $5.5 million.

“I’d say that 73% of the whole project, including the theater, is occupied,” Cliff Ratkovich estimated. “We literally held off on leasing the ground floor because we wanted to button up the theater deal.”

Retail Users in Mind

With the theater deal “buttoned up,” so to speak, Bartolo has been marching at top speed to find the kind of ground-floor tenants Wayne Ratkovich has had in mind. He actually turned down some institutional-type tenants.

“Wayne thought we needed some retail uses to play off the theater’s nighttime environment,” Cliff Ratkovich explained.

The Upstage Cafe, a reflection of this approach, was expected to open this weekend at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Oxford Avenue, and another restaurant that Bartolo calls “gourmet regional Mexican” is due to open a few feet away in August.

“The operator is the same as for the Cadillac Bar in San Francisco,” she said. “The Cadillac Bar is the quintessential yuppie bar, the happening place. There are few places like it in L.A.--places that are just plain fun; where the waiters sing, dance and play musical instruments; where a Margarita is mixed by shaking it, rather than making it in a blender.”

Night Life Arriving

She still envisions a “mini-market, something like Fanueil Hall in Boston, with flower stalls, 20 different kinds of coffee, 15 kinds of pate, wine and cappuccino bars, and an international newsstand” in 4,500 square feet of vacant space still available on Wilshire Boulevard, and she’s looking for a health-club operator for 4,500 square feet of ground- and second-floor space along Western Avenue.

In the meantime, the theater and the Upstage Cafe will bring more new life--this time, night life--to the Pellissier.

And Wayne Ratkovich is contemplating Phase 2: construction, behind the Pellessier, of 850,000 square feet of office space in a building designed by the Los Angeles office of Rossetti Associates to be 34 stories tall. A parking structure with a jogging track is also planned, and some housing units may be built later.

The new tower might be scaled back “somewhat--to 650,000 square feet or so,” he said, because of the Metro-Rail Specific Ordinance. A Metro-Rail stop is proposed at Western Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard. “But we just about have the zoning now,” he added.

So when does he think construction will start?

“That depends on a commitment from a major office tenant or hotel operator.”

During the past month, he said, “interest has surfaced from hotel operators. In fact, we’re in serious negotiations for a 400-room hotel that would take the bottom 10 floors or so.” The rest would be occupied by offices.

“Hotel operators have been calling us. We didn’t call them,” he noted. “When we wondered why they were interested, they explained that there is now a wonderful opportunity for a hotel in the area, where weekend traffic has been down.

“They see a tie-in with the Wiltern. They think the theater will bridge the gap.”