Quake Study Clouds Plan for Complex : Rebuilding of Crenshaw Shopping Center Delayed by New Law

The sprawling Crenshaw Shopping Center has become the focus of a full-blown geological investigation--sparked by earthquake legislation--to pinpoint possible ground faults that could kill or drastically alter a planned $100-million rebuilding of the aging complex in Southwest Los Angeles.

Depending on what the underground exploration yields, the probe also could run up the cost of transforming the Los Angeles area’s first suburban shopping center, a commercial showcase when it was built in 1947, into a modern enclosed shopping mall.

Revitalizing the Crenshaw center has been high on the city’s agenda for several years. With a planned investment of more than $21 million in public funds, the project has been described as a stabilizing tool for the declining, largely black neighborhood on the eastern edge of the Baldwin Hills.

Could Be Too Costly

The redevelopment plan, in a unique approach to the city’s urban renewal programs, calls for the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency and the private developer to split the profits, if any, generated by the new mall.

But if the geological survey uncovers potentially hazardous faults, a CRA official said, it may be “too costly (and) not worth doing.” An initial finding is expected in September.

Last week, however, as geologists worked behind huge excavating machines that tore into the shopping center’s parking lot to expose thousands of tons of earth, the Alexander Haagen Development Co., the firm selected by the agency to rebuild the center, remained optimistic.

While conceding that geological problems could cripple the rebuilding program, a spokesman said the new buildings probably could be designed to avoid earth ruptures, if any are uncovered in the 15-foot deep gashes in the parking lot. And if not, planners hope to start work in the fall of 1986.

The redevelopment agency--spurred by statistics showing the Crenshaw center’s retail sales down by nearly 10% in the early 1980s but up elsewhere in the city--declared the 42-acre complex blighted early last year to help speed the rebuilding program. The finding of blight was necessary for its designation as a redevelopment area.

As a formal redevelopment project, the program also is the first in the city involving a separate, clearly defined shopping or business complex.

From the outset the old Crenshaw center was a merchandising trailblazer. It had two major department stores--the Broadway and the May Co.--shops, markets, restaurants and a vast parking lot when it was built soon after World War II. For some years it served middle- and upper-income clientele, but the neighborhood’s changing ethnic mix also brought changes in shopping habits and customers.

Nearly 40 years of hard use has taken its toll on the buildings, and security guards now patrol the parking lot on foot and from a lookout tower. Many people still living in the Baldwin and Windsor Hills now prefer to shop at the nearby Fox Hills complex, Beverly Hills or in the Wilshire district.

About 1 million people live within a five-mile radius of Crenshaw center.

With the layout for the rebuilding set, including the location of various buildings, the need for a thorough geological survey came as a surprise to redevelopment agency officials and the developer. They had already overcome other obstacles, including putting a complex financial package together to meet a special tax incentive deadline last Dec. 31, when the city’s Building and Safety Department advised them of the earthquake legislation.

Plans Put on Hold

“Now (our plans) are stalled,” said Andrew Natker, who is directing the project for the Haagen company. “We can’t do anything about design work until we have this problem resolved. We have to determine, beyond any reasonable doubt, that there’s no (earthquake) hazard.”

After a preliminary $8,000 study, the redevelopment agency approved a vastly more detailed geological investigation late last month, citing the area’s “extraordinary geotechnical condition” and the “urgent need” to proceed with the project.

The study costs $267,000, but it will go even higher because a tunnel must be built in order to expose possible faults under Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, which divides the complex into north and south sections.

The subsurface exploration, which is unusual because of its size and location in a densely populated urban area, is necessary because the Crenshaw shopping complex is situated on surface traces of a fault considered to be active, agency officials explained.

“A trace is a line along which the fault appears to have reached the surface,” said Douglas E. Moran, whose Tustin firm was selected to do the geologic investigation. “It (the fault at Crenshaw center) has been mapped for years and is suspected of being an active fault. But that doesn’t mean that it’s moving or that it’s likely to move.”

Provisions of Statute

The property also is traversed by a one-quarter-mile-wide Special Studies Zone, one of a series of such zones mapped by the state under provisions of the Alquist-Priolo law. That legislation, an outgrowth of the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, prohibits buildings “for human occupancy” to be constructed over the surface trace of a fault that may be active.

Conforming to requirements of the Alquist-Priolo statute, Moran’s geologists are trying to locate the surface traces to determine if they are active and to gauge the possibilities of the ground rupturing.

The job is painstaking. Armed with shovels, whisk brooms, magnifying glasses and other tools, Moran geologists are sifting through the earth in 15-foot deep, 30-foot wide trenches the length of football fields.

Eric Chase, an engineering geologist with Moran, said the search for faults is especially elusive in the Crenshaw shopping center because the area has undergone so many changes.

The huge parking lot, for example, was first surfaced when the center was built. Before that the old Sunset Fields Golf Course occupied part of the site, and in the early 1920s earth taken from Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for its excavation was dumped against the Baldwin Hills.

Deposits From River

Below those layers, the trenches are exposing sand, clay and other material deposited by old swamps, ponds, stream beds and the Los Angeles River, which at one time drained westward past the site into Santa Monica Bay. Even after the river had established its present southerly course to Long Beach, it swept past the Crenshaw area during heavy flooding that occurred in the winter of 1883-1884.

Included in Moran’s geological findings will be design criteria for locating the center’s new buildings on the site--unless, as David Lewis, a CRA deputy administrator, put it, the property is found to be totally laced with faults, making any more structures prohibitive.

Haagen’s present plan would leave the Broadway and May Co. stores at their current locations on either side of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, west of Crenshaw Boulevard. The stores would be linked by a covered bridge and small shops arching over the boulevard. A third department store would be built in the parking lot, and an enclosed mall would tie it into the existing stores along Crenshaw Boulevard.

Moran said locating these structures would depend on the outcome of the geologic investigation, with cost being a big factor.

Avoiding Danger

“If you find one or more traces or branches of a fault where these buildings are planned, that’s something you have to respect,” he explained. “The structures would have to be situated far enough away from the traces so they wouldn’t be threatened if displacement occurs.

“You want to keep the structures out of harm’s way--away from a line where you suspect surface displacement might occur. We’re not talking about anything of disastrous proportions. The faults are not going to open up or swallow people or move 20 or 30 feet. It may very well be possible to leave gaps between the buildings . . . and roof over the gaps,” Moran said.

Natker, representing the Haagen firm, said his engineers believe a design solution can be found for almost any problem. Even so, he acknowledged, there is a chance that a huge fault could stop the project.

He said his firm nevertheless is “high” on the project.

The firm, based in Manhattan Beach, has put $30 million, backed by a letter of credit, into the project, and plans to rename it the Baldwin Hills Regional Shopping Center.

Relocation Program

Haagen’s investment will be used to acquire land, relocate the present tenants, numbering about 40, and build the new mall and parking facilities. Under the complex financial arrangement--which involves industrial development bonds, tax increment funds, city block grant money and funds from other sources--the redevelopment agency is now the landlord for the property and some buildings. However, the land will be turned over to the Haagen firm when construction begins.

The Haagen firm and the agency have worked together before. Haagen, which developed the successful Manhattan Beach Plaza, built the Watts shopping center--formally called the Martin Luther King Jr. Shopping Center--for the redevelopment agency. Normally the agency does not tie up public funds in a renewal project. But just as it did in the Watts venture, the agency, according to Lewis, considers its participation in the Crenshaw project “a matter of necessity.”