Preservationists Hope to Save La Cienega Park Waterworks

Admirers of an abandoned waterworks in La Cienega Park in Beverly Hills hope to save the Spanish-style building despite plans to wreck it to make way for new athletic fields.

“It’s part of our heritage in the city,” said Pauline Stein, chairwoman of the city’s Architectural Commission. “I think it could be rehabilitated and there could be some adaptive re-use of the building.”

Park department officials, local residents and leaders of youth athletic leagues have said they favor clearing the site.

But Stein said, “One or two more baseball or soccer fields are not going to add to the city as much as converting what we have left.”

The concrete building, completed in 1928 at a cost of $147,882.73, was the first municipal water treatment plant on the West Coast, according to a study conducted for the American Society of Civil Engineers.

‘Outstanding Achievement’

The society has listed the building as “an outstanding architectural and engineering achievement.”

Ruthann Lehrer, director of the L.A. Conservancy, a preservationist group, said, “From our perspective it’s a very unique structure that has both architectural and engineering significance. . . . We’d hope the city of Beverly Hills would recognize the unique significance of the building and agree to fund some feasibility studies . . . there’s nothing like it in Los Angeles.”

Designed to resemble a Spanish Colonial hacienda, its cathedral-like rosette window, flying buttresses and 130-foot-high, Moorish-style tower have led generations of passers-by to believe that the structure is a church.

In fact, the gray concrete walls and red tile roofs hide a warren of laboratories, treatment rooms and settling tanks that have fallen into disrepair since 1976, when the city began taking all its water from the Metropolitan Water District, a regional agency.

It was news of a proposed renovation of the park that moved Stein and others to take a tour of the structure, which is closed to the public.

The Beverly Hills Architectural Commission later proposed that the City

Council sponsor a study to determine whether the building is worth saving, but city staff said such a report could cost as much as $60,000.

No action was taken, but Sally Sherman, a member of the commission, said she has since discovered that a study could cost significantly less. She said the commission would discuss the matter again and probably recommend that the City Council, too, take another look.

“I don’t think the issue is dead yet,” she said. “The city needs to start with Step 1 (a study) so that at a later date nobody will say, ‘Sorry, we didn’t do the proper research.’ ”

“It looked pretty solid to me,” Stein said after the recent tour. “There is beautiful space inside.”

But Councilman Max Salter, who went along on the tour, called it “a monstrosity.”

Converting it for any other use would be prohibitively expensive, he said, recalling its “narrow hallways, terrible staircases.”

‘Need Open Space More’

“I think we need the open space more,” Salter said. “This is not to say that stuff with historical meaning shouldn’t be saved, but I don’t believe this is of that nature.”

Although Vice Mayor Benjamin H. Stansbury Jr. said he was “really fond of it as an architectural edifice,” he said city staffers have told the council that the building may not be strong enough to withstand an earthquake.

“I’m not sure we have a quorum of enthusiastic people,” he said, noting that only “a small group of people concerned about historical buildings” have spoken out on the issue.

He said it would be worthwhile to spend thousands of dollars on a study that concludes a building worth several million dollars should be saved, but the money would seem ill-spent if the conclusion is negative.

“We need to have a large group of people who come forth and say this is an architecturally significant building, part of the landscape of buildings we’d like to save,” Stansbury said.

Although the building’s southern end, where water was once sprayed into the air as part of a process to remove hydrogen sulfide from it, shows severe damage, the rest of the waterworks appears to be in good shape, said John Kariotis, a consulting structural engineer.

He said the hydrogen sulfide weakened the concrete and exposed the steel reinforcing bars to rust.

‘Other Parts in Good Condition’

“The other parts are in good condition,” said Kariotis, who toured the building with Salter and members of the Architectural Commission.

“The configuration of the building, of course, is planned for water works,” he said. “The building is not easily adaptable to other uses, but it could be.”

He said a renovation study could cost as little as $10,000 for a brief look to determine what direction to proceed in, or as much as $60,000 for a complete testing program and engineering analysis.

A study prepared in 1983 by Robert Jay Chattel, a Los Angeles city planner who was then an architecture student at Columbia University, suggested that the building might be useful as a cultural center, indoor sports facility or food-oriented commercial space.

“That particular building happens to be wonderful for almost any use . . . it’s so basic yet so elegant,” said Chattel, citing the dramatic metamorphosis of an old bank building into a four-theater complex in downtown Los Angeles as an example of what could be accomplished.

“There’s no reason the park can’t be expanded and improved while keeping the building there,” he said.

Built at a time before water was available from outside the city, the water treatment plant was designed to reduce the high concentration of dissolved solids in Beverly Hills ground water and to counter the characteristic “rotten eggs” odor caused by hydrogen sulfide.

Stages of Treatment

Once the chemical was recovered through the aeration process that damaged the southern end of the building, it was heated over a small oil stove at the base of the tower so that it would rise and dissipate into the atmosphere instead of wafting into neighboring homes.

Other stages of treatment were carried out in four outdoor settling tanks the size of large swimming pools and in a flocculator--a round, open-air pool equipped with four sweeps to gather sediments that accumulated on the bottom of the chamber.

Additionally, lime was added to the water to counter its natural hardness. Sacks of lime were carried from the ground floor to the top of the three-story structure on a conveyor belt that is still in place just inside the main entrance.

Although the technology was advanced for its time, it has since become antiquated, said Gene Tanner, the city’s superintendent of water.

A recent visit to the abandoned structure found graffiti on virtually every inch of wall space, testimony to the visits of intruders who are periodically rousted by police.

Litter Inside Building

An 11-month-old newspaper lay on the floor, near the ashes of a fire that long had gone cold and a discarded Veterans Administration patient care card issued to someone with “no local address.”

Dust from fallen plaster covered the floor, staircases had no banisters and glass from broken windows crunched underfoot.

On the ground floor, a long, gloomy gallery filled with broad-diameter pipe looked like the engine room of a sunken ocean liner.

Pigeons cooed and swooped about the upper chambers, which enjoy a dramatic view west to Century City. There were long vertical cracks on the exterior of the tower.

Rickety wooden catwalks led from the interior of the building to settlement tanks outdoors, where broken walls showed damage from the 1971 earthquake.

“Several individuals and agencies approach the city regularly to inquire about possible lease or purchase of that property for some kind of community use or venture,” said Rick Putnam, the city’s director of recreation and parks.

‘All of Them Turn Tail’

“When they take a look at it or review the status of the facility as it is, virtually all of them turn tail,” Putnam said.

Despite that, and despite the plans that call for new tennis facilities and a field for baseball and soccer on the site, the unique qualities of the building should be taken into account, said Albert Hoxie, a retired architectural historian at UCLA.

“It’s good architecture and it’s a good example of the period in which Beverly Hills flourished, that early great era of growth when they still had money to spend on things that were well done, and we’re not going to get a lot more of that,” he said.

“Things are being torn down with such speed in Beverly Hills that if we don’t start saving some things we’re going to be in trouble.”