New Pike Plan Envisions City’s Biggest Project
After months of survey and reflection, developers of the old Pike amusement park site have decided to build in stages a massive high-rise office, residential and shopping center, rather than the low-slung seaside village they had first envisioned.
As now conceived, the $750-million, 3-million-square-foot development would be the largest and most costly ever built in Long Beach--one-fourth larger than the four-tower World Trade Center being constructed nearby and approaching the size of the nation’s biggest renewal projects.
A preliminary design of the oceanfront development--expanded from 10 to 13.8 acres by agreement with the developer of adjacent land--is scheduled for presentation to the city Redevelopment Agency board in October, said Paul W. Stern, Pike project manager.
Marketplace Abandoned
Last fall, after buying most of the Pike site, developers James Rouse and Wayne Ratkovich said they hoped to incorporate into their Long Beach plans the colorful shopping and entertainment elements of Rouse’s “festival marketplaces,” which have revived waterfronts elsewhere.
But Stern said last week that construction of a tourist-oriented marketplace would have duplicated existing activities at Shoreline Village and new ones planned by operators of the Queen Mary attraction.
“We’ve pretty certainly determined that festival retail is not suitable” for the Pike site, which is south of Ocean Boulevard between Pine and Magnolia avenues, Stern said in an interview. What is needed, he said, is “a more serious, more traditional urban development that’s responsive to the organic needs of the city.”
Instead of a lively central plaza with perhaps 250,000 square feet of shops surrounded by hundreds of low-rise apartments, the Pike plan now calls for a shopping promenade and several high-rise office and residential towers, though the precise number and configuration have not been determined, Stern said.
“We just are not at the point yet where we know what it will look like,” Stern said. Even when formally presented to city officials this fall, the plan “will still be in a very fluid state.” And construction may not begin until spring, 1989, he said.
However, out of an unusual two-day brainstorming session with city officials, architects, urban planners and academics in January, a broad-brush plan for phased construction during the next 10 to 15 years has been developed.
It calls for about 1,250 apartments or condominiums with 1 million square feet of space, possibly in towers of 25 to 30 stories, and 1 million square feet of office space designed in part to lure large corporate clients, Stern said.
The final 1 million square feet would house a 400-room hotel, which would be constructed after the city’s current hotel-room glut passes, along with at least 200,000 square feet of retail stores on a dining-and-shopping promenade stretching the three-block width of the site.
The promenade, a resurrection of the Pike’s old “walk of a thousand lights,” would function like the Embarcadero in San Francisco, linking the Convention Center on the east with the World Trade Center on the west, Stern said.
But, unlike a strictly tourist destination, the promenade would be lined with the kind of specialty stores that can be found in a trendy shopping mall. And it could possibly include a smaller version of a high-end department store such as I. Magnin, he said.
The remaining 400,000 square feet would be built in response to future market demand, Stern said.
The project would increase by 50% the first-class office space downtown and would account for nearly one-fifth of all new residences planned for the 421-acre downtown redevelopment zone.
As now planned, the project would put more building space on less land than any other downtown project. And some city officials familiar with the Pike plan say they will be asking hard questions about how local roads and sewers would handle such development.
Councilman Evan Anderson Braude, who represents the downtown area, said he is excited about the project but is certain that freeway access will have to be improved to accommodate it.
“We in Long Beach are not used to that kind of density. The numbers are startling,” said Planning Commission chairwoman Nancy Latimer. But she said the numbers could make sense, considering the project’s lengthy construction timetable.
Stern said that at 3 million square feet on 13-plus acres, the Pike’s ratio of floor space to each square foot of land is only 5.3-to-1. Los Angeles’ downtown redevelopment area allows 13-to-1, with 6-to-1 in the rest of that city.
“This is not very dense urban development. It is not in any sense . . . overloading the site,” Stern said.
Downtown Los Angeles’ California Plaza on Bunker Hill, the nation’s largest urban renewal project, calls for about 4 million square feet of space on 11.2 acres.
“Our objective is not to get as much as we can on the land. Our goal is to build the right project . . . . We’re being very sensitive to everybody’s desires,” Stern said.
The evolution of the Pike plan reflects, in part, the practical needs of a rebuilding downtown Long Beach, he said.
While a dozen new office buildings and three new hotels have been erected, and several more are planned or under construction, the housing and shopping elements of redevelopment have lagged.
The Pike project would help in both high-priority areas, Redevelopment Agency director Roger Anderman said.
“They’re doing a good job of master-planning that site . . . . They’re touching base with the community, which is preferable to a design that comes from an architect’s head and doesn’t relate to the needs of the surrounding areas,” Anderman said.
Anderman, along with city Planning Director Robert Paternoster, participated in the developers’ brainstorming session at the Ramada Renaissance Hotel. Paternoster said the session--shaped around uninhibited, unrecorded responses to a diverse set of “straw plans”--was creative and unique.
Emerging from the ideas of that session is a Pike development plan that embraces the concept of a self-sustaining “urban village” whose elements play off one another, Stern said.
When completed, perhaps by the year 2000, the Pike would be a place “where people could sort of be and get a large number of their needs met, living their whole lives there if they wanted and doing it in a way that was flowing,” he said.
The developers are careful not to carry that concept too far, however, since the city’s only definite requirement for the Pike site is that it relate strongly to the rest of the downtown.
“It cannot isolate itself,” Anderman said. “We don’t want that site to behave as the Queen Mary does. . . . We want people to visit that site as part of their visit of the downtown.”
To that end, the Redevelopment Agency plans to create pedestrian activities in front of the nearby Convention Center and on the existing seven-block north-south promenade that links Shoreline Village with the Plaza Mall at Third Street.
Also, the city has urged planning the Pike property uses in conjunction with the $180-million, 15-acre Westin Hotel project on its southern boundary.
Developers of both sites say they view them as complementary, with the Westin providing a six-acre lagoon and park while the Pike supplies housing and shopping. Both will have office buildings and hotels, but their development will be staggered--the Westin hotel coming long before the Pike project.
Harry Newman Jr., whose Newman-Brettin Properties Inc. is developing the Westin site with The Koll Co., said he is eager to cooperate with Ratkovich and Rouse in creating a common design.
Architect Jon Jerde, known for his innovative and color-splashed Horton Plaza in San Diego, designed the Westin development and is also working on the Pike plan.
Newman and a Koll Co. representative, whose negotiating right to the Westin site is expected to be extended by the Redevelopment Agency board this week, said they hope to begin construction early next year with completion in 1992.
Since purchase of two Pike parcels last August, Rouse and Ratkovich have reached a joint development agreement with local builder Robert Kendrick, whose firm was then buying most of 3.6 developable acres on the so-called City Block that separated the two Pike parcels, Stern said.
The rest of the City Block, excluding the Sovereign Apartments and the Blackstone Hotel, will be bought and made available by the Redevelopment Agency, he said.
Rouse, 73, is a Maryland-based developer who built four of the nation’s first five enclosed shopping malls, constructed the nation’s first planned community of Columbia, Md., and for the last decade has helped rebuild several decaying downtowns with projects like Faneuil Hall market place in Boston and Harborplace in Baltimore.
Ratkovich, 46, is an influential Los Angeles developer. Since entering the business 12 years ago, has bucked conventional wisdom to restore three historic Los Angeles office buildings, including the Pellissier building and Wiltern Theater complex in the mid-Wilshire district.
