Metropolitan Hotel to Get New Look : Fanciful Facades in Works for Gaslamp Quarter

Enter now trompe l’oeil, the architectural rage of Europe but heretofore unseen on the streets of downtown San Diego.

Deciding to inject some illusion and whimsy into urban redevelopment, the Centre City Development Corp. board Friday approved a plan to convert industrial warehouse space into 26 loft-style “live and work” apartments and erect a fanciful eye-tricking facade on a nearby hotel.

The 1900-vintage Metropolitan Hotel on 5th Avenue south of Martin Luther King Way, which will get the new facade, was called “the ugliest building in the Gaslamp Quarter” by one of the project partners.

“We want a building with a sense of humor,” explained Gaslamp developer Bud Fischer. “We want something to draw people down below E Street, even if it’s a building to look at.”

“The problem with the (Gaslamp) district, is that it is dead,” said one of Fischer’s partners, Chris Mortensen. “We’re going to make a statement to artists coming to San Diego: we want you in Gaslamp.”

To make that statement, Fischer, Mortensen and Jerry A. Krasne, who have formed MFK Partnership, have proposed a painted facade that has fake windows and doors beside real windows and doors, a Prince Charles look-alike climbing out of a second-story window and clouds and blue sky splitting the floors.

It’s called trompe l’oeil (pronounced trom-ploy), from the French “trick the eye,” and it dates back centuries and recently has been used extensively in Europe and several urban centers in this country, including the Bronx. Think of it as a more surreal, more spoofing version of the urban mural, which has already found a home in Gaslamp.

“I think it’s wonderful,” said Gerald M. Trimble, CCDC’s executive vice president.

“Whimsical,” said CCDC board member Gil Ontai.

The facade proposal is the work of the McKinnon-Anderson design firm of San Diego. A preliminary design included a large flying fish, but that was considered too much for San Diego, Mortensen said.

The Gaslamp Quarter Assn., a group of property owners, tenants and merchants, asked that CCDC endorse setting up guidelines for where such facades would be appropriate, lest there be an unregulated proliferation of trompe l’oeil into a district where developers are trying to recreate a turn-of-the-century look.

The guidelines will likely be developed by the city Planning Department, along with CCDC and Gaslamp leaders.

CCDC board members concluded that Gaslamp will not be ill-served by putting a new front on the Metropolitan Hotel.

“This is not an historic structure and has no architectural significance,” said CCDC staffer Max Schmidt. “It could be torn down.”

Specifically, CCDC approved loaning the partnership $200,000 for the loft conversion in the Steele Building warehouse on Martin Luther King Way, and $100,000 for facade construction on the Steele Building and the nearby Metropolitan Hotel. In exchange, CCDC would share in the project’s profits. The deal is set to go to the City Council on Tuesday.

The overall MFK project includes the Steele, the Metropolitan, and the Simmons Hotel on 6th Avenue. The partners have a 36-year lease on the three sites.

Rehabilitation of the Metropolitan is under way to provide 54 single-room occupancy units and the Simmons has already been renovated for such units. The partnership wants to start work on the loft conversion by August, with work on the facade slated to take just a month.

Approval for the MFK plan came at a meeting devoted to a major goal of CCDC and the City Council in the post-Horton Plaza era: providing downtown housing.

The board voted to seek proposals to build a high-rise housing development in the area bounded by 1st Avenue, Front and G streets and Martin Luther King Way, and to build 35 to 60 apartments along the 4th Avenue side of Horton Plaza.

Also approved was an allocation of up to $500,000 to developers of a 200-unit single-room occupancy hotel on the block bounded by 2nd and 3rd avenues and Island and J streets. The subsidy will go for building fees and the installation of utilities, sidewalks, curbs, gutters and street trees. The money will only be spent, however, if an additional $3 million in federal funding for the project is available.