Hahn Has a New Downtown Miracle in Mind
Ernest W. Hahn is attempting a feat that would make many a wheeler-dealer blanch and turn away. He is trying to strike a deal with the Navy, San Diego Gas & Electric Co. and the City of San Diego to create a single government center in a downtown San Diego area now claimed by warehouses, weeds and squalor.
A cynical outsider might cover his smile of disbelief with his hand and chalk Hahn’s downtown dreamscape up to overzealous civic pride, but a resident San Diegan won’t count Ernie Hahn out, at least not yet.
As Hahn sees it, San Diego’s downtown bayfront is the hottest property in the world. He saw the prospects 15 years ago when he walked the seamy south-of-Broadway streets and hatched the idea of building one of his ubiquitous suburban shopping malls smack in the middle of Centre City.
Now, with Horton Plaza Shopping Center a reality and an array of skyscrapers and resort hotels displacing the Navy bars, tattoo parlors and porn joints, the 67-year-old entrepreneur has turned his attention to Centre City East, where the bums outnumber the tourists, and to Pacific Highway, where stark Navy supply buildings block the view of the bay. His dream is to clear the clutter of federal, state, county and city buildings off the bayfront and create a compact government center on a 12-acre tract along the trolley tracks south of Martin Luther King Jr. Way.
A Whole New Bayfront
What Hahn envisions is a bayfront free of squat, functional bureaucratic office buildings so that the area can be developed into clusters of slender towers, resort hotels, marinas, waterfront parks, shopping and restaurant complexes--and, of course, San Diego’s new convention center complex.
He has been pursuing his plan both directly and indirectly, addressing luncheon sessions of downtown business groups and spinning a web of “what ifs” that keep his audiences spellbound; talking privately with top governmental policy-makers, probing to find what it would take to bring the many diverse interests together into a binding deal, and brainstorming with others in his prestigious Centre City Planning Committee, mining for new avenues to his goal.
“It sounds unbelievable,” said Roy Potter, executive vice president of San Diegans Inc., after a hypnotic Hahn briefing, “but if anyone can do it, Ernie Hahn can.”
Key to Hahn’s plan are the nine blocks of property owned by SDG&E; in Centre City East. The property, south of J Street, between 9th Avenue and 13th Street, now houses the utility’s housekeeping divisions: fleet maintenance, carpentry and paint shops, test labs and the like.
Ed Gabrielson, SDG&E; property and environmental director, said the company plans to move the motley operations to a more central location in its service area. Ideally, the new site would be south of Miramar Naval Air Station, along Interstate 15.
The Navy has property in that area that SDG&E; would like. The City of San Diego has property that the Navy covets for residential construction. And SDG&E; has the downtown property that the city and Hahn are eyeing as a government center.
Miracle in the Offing?
Can a swap be made? SDG&E; and the city are cooperating on appraisals of the downtown site as a prelude to a possible trade.
“It would be a miracle if he could bring this off without an exchange of dollars somewhere,” admitted Gabrielson. “But I wouldn’t count it out.”
Even if Hahn is successful, the three-way property swap would not move the Navy or the county off their San Diego Bay sites.
Hahn has talked unofficially to county officials, including Supervisor Brian Bilbray, about the governmental consolidation move to Centre City East.
“I’ll see him the government complex and raise him the Cedar Street Mall,” quipped Bilbray, who favors consolidation but thinks that Hahn is moving in the wrong direction with his downtown improvement plan.
The Cedar-Kettner Boulevard area northwest of Centre City is as much in need of the economic boost a government center would bring as is the southeast area Hahn has targeted, Bilbray said.
Admittedly, the county “could be flexible,” if the proposed consolidation yielded the land-rich, cash-poor county the funds it is seeking for jail construction, court expansion and a dozen other necessities, Bilbray said.
“We are waiting for someone to make us an offer we can’t refuse,” Bilbray added.
Capt. Joe O’Donnell, project manager on the Navy’s hospital construction in Balboa Park, now is taking over the Navy’s ambitious bayfront redevelopment plans and, not coincidentally, is on Hahn’s Centre City Planning Committee.
Talks between the two have been private but other committee members say the conversation centers around transfer of some of the Navy property’s development rights away from their bayside property to the proposed government center.
Cmdr. Gene Talmadge, the Navy man who has headed the Navy’s bayfront project since its inception, won’t commit his successor--O’Donnell--on the question of whether the Navy might join in the governmental office consolidation.
But the federal authorization, received this past year, to go ahead with a massive public-private redevelopment on the Navy’s 20-odd waterfront acres south of Broadway, contains the requirement that the Navy “maintain its presence” on the site, Talmadge said. Under the Broadway Complex plan, Talmadge said, the Navy seeks to gain a million square feet of office space from a private developer in return for allowing the private firm to build an additional 3 million square feet of office-commercial development on the Navy site.
Talmadge said it would take a very persuasive talker to get around a Congressional mandate and the Navy’s longtime bias against landlocked sites.
However, talks are under way to try to modify the Navy site plans, which downtown planners feel would create a wall of high-rise along the bay. And Talmadge concedes that Navy brass plan to enter into a development agreement with the City of San Diego--part of a trend toward “not thinking of us as an island but as a part of San Diego.”
Centre City Development Corp., the city’s redevelopment agency, and Metropolitan Transit Development Board, the regional transit operators, also are in the huddle over the proposed governmental center.
MTDB was a pioneer in the project when it proposed building offices for itself and others as part of a trolley transfer center near 12th and Imperial avenues. Interest from the county and from other community organizations prompted expansion of the project from a two-story station to a 10-story high-rise.
Hahn is reluctant to talk about the informal negotiations he is engaged in, but he is more than willing to describe the project he hopes will replace the weed-grown lots, warehouses and homely buildings on the site.
He envisions a government center of more than 2 million square feet of space. The central city library should be located there, conveniently on the trolley routes downtown and to the east and south, he contends.
He sees a parking garage of the size to handle government workers’ cars and also serve as a satellite park-and-ride site for downtown office workers. That would cut down on traffic in the Centre City core, Hahn points out.
The parking garage could also serve the nearby Convention Center when it opens, offering evening and weekend spaces just a trolley stop away.
