Commentary : Quake Jolts Preservationists : They Fear Owners May Destroy Landmarks

The preservationists and others concerned with Los Angeles area landmarks are the ones trembling these days following the Mexico City earthquake, not the buildings considered seismically unsafe.

They worry that owners of buildings of historic interest, faced with upgrading them to meet new, stringent seismic safety standards, might precipitously choose to demolish the structures.

At risk is much of the city’s inventory of historic buildings and districts, at a time when their value to Los Angeles provides a needed sense of history and place and is just beginning to be appreciated.

About 8,000 buildings in Los Angeles, generally brick structures built before 1933, have been cited as susceptible to severe earthquake damage, based on rigid standards adopted by the City Council in 1981. Of these, 2,000 are currently under orders to be brought up to code or to be demolished.

Doing More Damage

The owners’ overreaction to the city’s Earthquake Hazard Reduction Ordinance could result in the destruction of numerous useful buildings and the displacement of thousands of businesses and families--in effect, possibly doing more damage to the city’s urban fabric than an actual earthquake.

“The purpose of the ordinance is not to prompt the demolition of the cited buildings, but to prompt their retrofitting so as to reduce their life-safety risk,” declared Richard Rowe, a planner and architect with the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency.

The agency has joined with the nonprofit Los Angeles Conservancy to study how owners might comply with the ordinance in a “cost efficient and architecturally sensitive manner.” The $100,000 study is funded in part by the agency and a so-called critical-issues grant of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and focuses on the Broadway and Spring Street Historic District downtown.

“There are many ways to meet seismic safety standards without destroying the building or its architectural integrity, but an owner must first know about them,” explained Ruthann Lehrer, executive director of the Conservancy.

‘Improve Profit Potential’

“But they also must want to save the building,” added Rowe. With Lehrer concurring, Rowe indicated that the overreaction to the possibility of earthquake damage by a few owners just might be calculated. Other preservationists expressed the same fear.

“I worry that some owners seeking to improve the profit potential of their property might use the public’s legitimate concern of earthquake safety, heightened by the recent tragic events in Mexico City, to cloak a demolition that otherwise would generate strong protests,” declared Claire Bogaard of Pasadena Heritage.

It was in Pasadena two weeks ago today that the central building of the Huntington Sheraton Hotel was closed because the owners said they feared the landmark structure could not withstand a major earthquake, such as the one that struck Mexico City.

Citing an engineering study, they estimated that it might cost $4 million to $10 million (the figures have varied, depending on who is talking) to bring the structure up to seismic safety standards, and indicated that they were not willing to spend such money.

Land-Use Consultant

While the owner, Keikyu USA Inc., a Japanese conglomerate, was expressing regrets that the hotel might have to be demolished, it was quitely retaining a land-use consultant to develop a plan for the lush, rolling, 23-acre hotel site adjoining the affluent suburban community of San Marino.

In downtown, along retail-rich Broadway, a few owners would very much like to demolish at least the upper, unreinforced floors of their cited structures, but not primarily for safety reasons, according to Lehrer and Rowe.

They noted that many of those floors are vacant anyway, and the demolition would be a way for the owners to break an unfavorable, long-term lease with the ground-floor tenant and, after the work is done, rent out the space for a shorter time at a much higher rate.

Rowe said that while lucrative for the owner, the effect would be to harm the retail character of the block, as well as preclude the eventual possible use of the upper floors. Lehrer added that taking down the upper floors also would hurt the scale and massing of the historic district.

Taking Hard Look

In Pasadena, the possibility that the Huntington might be demolished, prompted the preservation-conscious city to retain one of the nation’s leading seismic engineers, John Kariotis, to take a hard look at the owner’s study and the structure itself to see how the landmark might be strengthened and saved at a reasonable cost.

Kariotis, who was one of the authors of Los Angeles’ seismic ordinance, commented that while there always will be a risk in any building from an earthquake, the risk can be reduced substantially by various, relatively simple and inexpensive methods, principally bolting walls to frames.

Just back from Mexico City where he investigated why certain buildings withstood the recent earthquake and why others did not, Kariotis cautioned against a rush to judgment in analyzing seismic safety factors. He also questioned the survey done of the Huntington, as well as the report issued a few weeks ago, rating 22 of the 90 buildings at UCLA “very poor.”

“It was a low-cost survey, and they got low-quality answers based upon some very questionable assumptions,” said Kariotis, who also is a consultant on the CRA-Conservancy effort. He added that new ways to analyze a building have been developed, due in part to studies funded by the National Science Foundation, resulting in new methods to reduce risks.

Retrofitted Buildings

Some of these methods already are being used in the retrofitting of historic buildings in Los Angeles, such as the Cameo and Rialto theaters and the Bradbury Building on Broadway. “If these very dated buildings can be saved, so can most others,” Rowe said. (Those seeking more information concerning how buildings can be made more seismically safe may phone the Conservancy at 213/623-CITY.)

Lehrer added that it was important to note that, contrary to the implication of the earthquake ordinance, not all pre-1933 buildings are seismically unsafe.

Among the city’s more prominent landmarks constructed before 1933 (the year of the disastrous Long Beach earthquake which prompted the first seismic safety ordinance) are Bullocks Wilshire, the Wiltern Theatre, the Biltmore Hotel, the Coliseum and City Hall itself.