Hollywood Pro School to Be Auctioned

The Hollywood Professional School building--where some of Hollywood’s great learned their ABCs--will be auctioned, along with some adjacent structures, next Saturday at noon.

“The whole block is for sale,” Stanley Kottle, whose Marsh Dozar Auctioneers of Encino is handling the auction, said. It was owned by Bertha Keller Mann, who had--as Kottle described her--”a habit of collecting properties.”

She was--as her niece, Sheila Ferrari, described her “the main force” behind the 54-year-old Hollywood Professional School since 1949. The school, which was accredited for nursery-through-high school children, was closed in June.

“We ran the school to complete the year,” Ferrari said, “but my aunt died last September. She was past 80.” Ferrari is an executor for her aunt’s estate. “I’d like to get $1.5 million for the block,” Ferrari added. (The block includes nearly an acre of land and a total of 24,000 square feet of buildings, including two houses, a duplex, a four-plex and the school building, zoned for commercial use.)

Mann’s legacy can’t be measured in dollars and cents, though. The halls of that two-story, white building at Hollywood Boulevard and Serrano Avenue (where the auction will be held) are filled with nostalgia. Traces of celebrities who attended the school as youths show up in old yearbooks and a magazine article written five years ago by Tom Nolan, an alumnus who attended the school from 1956 to 1964.

He remembered Mouseketeers Cubby O’Brien, Lonnie Burr and Tommy Cole; Sue Lyon (star of “Lolita”), Tuesday Weld, Brenda Lee and Lana Wood, Natalie’s sister. The annuals also carry pictures of Natalie and other luminaries labeled “graduates and former students.”

Among them: Ryan O’Neal, Julie London, Connie Stevens, Yvette Mimieux, Debra Paget and even Betty Grable!

“I believe Judy Garland, Donald O’Connor and Mickey Rooney also went there,” Ferrari said. “Some just attended between pictures. When they were doing a picture, they took classes on the set.”

When they went to the Hollywood Professional School, they attended classes from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. “There was no P. E.(physical education) and no lunch,” Ferrari explained. “It was a school for professionals who needed their academics so they could graduate and go on to college.”

Not all of the students were in the movies. As Nolan wrote: “There were sports figures too . . . most notably Peggy Fleming.” Said Ferrari: “The whole school turned out to greet her at the airport when she won her (1968 Olympic) gold medals.”

Kareem Abdul Jabbar is one of about 35 investors in a newly formed group that has purchased an old Birmingham, Ala., hotel now undergoing restoration at a cost of about $6.5 million.

The group, known as ITB Enterprises (ITB stands for something funny and fascinating but unprintable in a family newspaper), is a California corporation intent on buying and fixing up old hotels in secondary markets and running them under the banner of Karina Hotels, a hotel-management firm headed by David Brudney of Rancho Palos Verdes. Besides the Laker star, ITB investors also include Ralph Sampson of the Houston Rockets.

The Birmingham property, known as the Hotel Redmont, is expected to be the first in the Karina chain of small hostelries. In a telephone interview last week from Birmingham, Brudney said that he is looking for three more sites in the next two years. “We’re actively looking for properties like the Redmont in the the Southeast, Southwest and California.”

The Redmont is a 117-room lodging built in the early ‘20s. Because of its historical designation (it’s on the National Register of Historic Places), it is being restored so that its exterior and public areas will look much the way it did when the hotel first opened. It is due to reopen in December.

The Film Advisory Board has presented its Award of Excellence recognizing “buildings that accentuate the positive in Hollywood”--as Elayne Blythe, founder and president of the 10-year-old board, put it--to the 7080 Tower Building at 7080 Hollywood Blvd.

Dr. Khalil Seyrafi, president of Electro-Optical Research Co. and owner of the building, accepted the award at a ceremony attended by several Hollywood personalities, including actress Anne Jeffreys.

“Dr. Seyrafi has owned the building (constructed in 1968) for years, but he does so much to keep it in tiptop shape and make it nice,” Blythe said. “There is a metal sculpture in front of every office and a metal tree in the lobby.” Not only that but the building has an outdoor track for one of its tenants, Holiday Spa.

“He is also getting more motion-picture industry tenants,” Blythe added. For years, the tower was a medical building.

Among the new tenants she listed are Color Systems Technology, which is in the process of converting some old but classic black-and-white films (“Miracle on 34th Street” and others) into color, and her own Film Advisory Board, which moved from Sycamore Street in Hollywood.

The board is dedicated to promoting better motion picture and television programming. “We’re worldwide in scope now because our seal (of approval) is on video-cassettes all over,” she said.

Ice cream in a deli? It’s a new idea for Baskin-Robbins, according to George Farmer with Grubb & Ellis Commercial Brokerage Services, who said that a new venture will mark “the first-ever combination of a deli-and-gourmet foods store with a Baskin-Robbins 31 Flavors franchise anywhere in the world.” (Glendale-based Baskin-Robbins has about 4,000 franchises around the world.)

The new venture involves a popular downtown Los Angeles deli, Darm’s, when it moves two blocks from its current location at 6th and Hope streets (where it has been for 16 years) to 2,200 square feet of space in the 14-story Linder Plaza at 6th and Figueroa streets. The move, to 888 W. 6th St., will be a homecoming in a sense, because Darm’s first opened its doors as a meat market inside a hotel on that site in 1922.

The 63-year-old building now occupied by Darm’s will be demolished beginning on Sept. 1 to make way for Lincoln Properties’ 33-story office building.

Donald Rickerd, Darm’s owner, said that Baskin-Robbins executives are enthusiastic about having their products sold at his deli, where an average of 1,000 sandwiches a day are sold. In fact, he plans to open a second, similar store in the near future.

Farmer represented Rickerd in the $1-million, 10-year lease transaction.