L.A. Paves Way for $50-Million N. Hollywood Office-Theater Complex
The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday cleared the way for construction of a $50-million high-rise office building and theater complex that is to be the centerpiece of redevelopment efforts in North Hollywood.
The project will include a six- to nine-story office building, restaurants, shops, a performance theater and a six-screen movie complex. It is being called “The Academy” because the nonprofit Academy of Television Arts and Sciences has a tentative agreement with the developers to move its headquarters from Burbank to the North Hollywood site. Plans also call for establishing a TV history museum there.
Ground breaking is scheduled for next summer, with construction to be finished in late 1988, said Lillian Burkenheim, assistant manager of the North Hollywood Redevelopment Project. The seven-acre project area is bounded by Magnolia Boulevard, Weddington Street, Lankershim Boulevard and Blakeslee Avenue.
An agreement approved unanimously and without discussion by the council Tuesday calls for the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency to acquire the property and sell it for $7.3 million to developers Birtcher Corp. of Laguna Niguel and Kensley Group of Beverly Hills.
The agency expects to spend a total of $13 million acquiring the site, relocating businesses and razing the buildings. By increasing the property’s value, the project will generate another $15 million in property taxes over 30 years, Burkenheim said.
Under redevelopment, the city discounts land to developers to encourage construction in economically depressed areas.
The Academy project is one of about a dozen that the redevelopment agency has taken on since the North Hollywood project was established in 1979 to revitalize a 750-acre area roughly bounded by Tujunga Avenue, Cahuenga Boulevard and Hatteras and Camarillo streets. Two of the major projects--a $25-million Hewlett-Packard Co. building across the street from the Academy site and a 200-unit senior-citizen complex at Magnolia Boulevard and Vineland Avenue--have been completed.
Birtcher Corp. and Kensley Group are negotiating with an unnamed hotel corporation to build a 300-room hotel north of the Academy site, Burkenheim said. “We hope they will have an agreement and be ready to go forward the same time as the rest of this development goes forward,” she said.
A thriving business district from the 1930s to the 1960s, North Hollywood’s core of about five square blocks has steadily declined as large department stores along Lankershim, such as Sears, May Co. and F. W. Woolworth, moved to shopping malls.
