$149-Million Fox Theatre Tower to Rise 33 Stories

Plans for a $149-million complex including office and hotel towers that will flank the renovated Fox Theatre downtown were unveiled Tuesday by developers and city officials who hailed the project as architecturally imaginative--a dramatic addition to the city’s skyline that will preserve the historic theater as a permanent home for the San Diego Symphony.

The Symphony Towers complex, targeted for completion in early 1988, will feature a 33-story office tower that would become the city’s tallest building and an 18-story Westin Hotel adjacent to the theater, developers said at a downtown news conference. The two towers will be connected by an elaborate truss system above the theater that will include a 60,000-square-foot “sky lobby” atop five levels of parking suspended over the theater’s 120-foot-high dome ceiling.

Called “breathtaking in its scope and grandeur” by Douglas P. Wilson, one of the project’s developers, Symphony Towers blends classical and modern architecture through use of glass and Spanish pink granite. Wilson, one of three general managing partners in the Charlton Raynd Development Co. of San Diego, the firm developing the project, said ground-breaking is scheduled for early next year.

“This is a very important step in the revitalization of downtown,” said San Diego City Councilman Uvaldo Martinez, whose district includes downtown. “Most importantly, it’s a private project” to be built without public subsidies, the councilman added.

The mixed-use complex, to be built on the block bounded by A and B streets and 7th and 8th avenues, will include 45-foot-wide bay windows that extend five feet from the office tower’s facade, diamond-shaped glass-enclosed elevators, an open-air, landscaped street-level entry plaza and cone-shaped rooftops. A private dining club will be built on the top floor of the office tower “to take advantage of the views from the highest point in the city,” Wilson said.

Perhaps the project’s major architectural highlight, however, is the proposed sky lobby, an elevated city block 11 stories above B Street. The sky lobby will include the check-in area for the 450-room hotel, meeting rooms and a ballroom, small shops intended primarily to serve hotel guests, restaurants and some office space.

The developers originally had planned to construct a 37-story office tower but, at the suggestion of the Federal Aviation Administration, scaled back their plans to 33, according to John A. Whitney, another of Charlton Raynd’s managing general partners. Whitney said, however, that the developers “anticipate no problems” in obtaining FAA approval for the revised project, located just south of Lindbergh Field’s major landing path.

One of the major challenges involved in designing the complex, according to project architect Christopher J. Cedergreen, deals with building the office and hotel towers around the existing Fox Theatre, which occupies 28,000 square feet in the middle of the 60,000-square-foot block.

The truss system, the architectural solution to that problem, will span the theater and provide the base for the five-level parking garage, which will accommodate 850 automobiles, Cedergreen said.

The 56-year-old theater, scheduled to reopen in November after a $5-million renovation, will be renamed Symphony Hall and become the permanent home for the San Diego Symphony.

Ballard Smith, president of the San Diego Padres and chairman of the fund-raising campaign to finance the renovation, said Tuesday that his group is about halfway toward its $6.5-million goal. Saying that the group hopes to meet that target within the next three months, Smith explained that the $1.5 million beyond the renovation cost is intended to be used as an endowment to the symphony.

The symphony also will receive an annuity from the developers in the form of a percentage of the lease revenues. Wilson estimated that the gift will total about $75,000 a year at first and “go up substantially after that.”

Among those present at Tuesday’s news conference was George Gildred, one of the sons of the late Philip Gildred, who built the Fox in 1929. At the time it opened, 10 days after the stock market crash, the Fox was one of the most ornate theaters in the West.

On Tuesday, Gildred lauded the developers of Symphony Towers for incorporating a refurbished Fox into their project. “Our late father, were he here, would certainly be standing and saluting you and joining in a round of applause,” Gildred said. “This is marvelous.”