TV Actress Building Conference Center
As honorary Mayor of North Hollywood, actress Beverly Garland (who stars as Kate Jackson’s mother on CBS-TV’s “Scarecrow and Mrs. King” but is probably best known for her role as Fred MacMurray’s wife on the long-running TV series “My Three Sons”) does more than talk about bringing more business to her community.
She and her real-life husband, Fillmore Crank, will hold a ground-breaking ceremony Thursday for their $2.5-million conference facility there.
Known as the Garland Center, the facility will be an addition to their Beverly Garland Hotel at 4222 Vineland Ave. Perhaps because of its proximity to the Palomino Club, the hotel is a favorite with such touring country-western acts as Dolly Parton’s and Hoyt Axton’s.
Actually, there are two Beverly Garland hotels--this one, opened about 13 years ago, and a 5-year-old one in Sacramento, managed by Beverly’s stepson, Fillmore Crank Jr., who is married to Tina Cole, the actress who played Beverly’s stepdaughter on “My Three Sons.” What irony!
Garland has said that she got into the hotel business after her husband found a seven-acre parcel in North Hollywood that Gene Autry owned. She has been quoted as saying, “We decided that if we could get it, we’d build a complex of condominiums on it.” Her husband’s longtime friend, the late baseball manager/player Casey Stengel convinced them to build a hotel there instead. “ . . . and we knew nothing about the hotel business,” Garland once said.
Now she and her husband are turning their North Hollywood hotel into a full-service conference facility, complete with 175-seat theater, ballrooms, meeting rooms and physical fitness facility. Her husband’s construction company expects to complete the work next spring.
Honolulu now has a Hard Rock Cafe like the ones in West Hollywood, San Francisco, Chicago and Houston.
Peter Morton, who also owns the trendy Morton’s restaurant in West Hollywood, opened his fifth Hard Rock (the world’s ninthh, counting ones opened by Morton’s original partner) last weekend, and Stephen Shapiro of Stan Herman Associates, Beverly Hills, flew over just for the opening, a benefit for Child & Family Services in Hawaii. (Morton gave them a check for $100,000 to build or buy a home for abused mothers and children, which will be called “the Hard Rock House.”)
Shapiro could afford to go all that way for one evening, because he closed $20 million in residential sales during the first six months of this year.
Speaking of Hawaii, actor Sylvester Stallone has two lots for sale at Anini Beach, near Princeville, on the island of Kauai. Price: $550,000 each. And we hear that his plans to build a house for himself nearby are in the final stages. His real estate agent, Pat Harrington of Bali Hai Realty, would only say that the house will be “large,” but we heard elsewhere that it will be 7,000 square feet.
Stallone’s manager already built a home on Hanalei Bay, not far from entertainer Charo’s restaurant and home in Haena, also on the north shore. Charo has had her places there for about two years and has been described as one of the island’s “best ambassadors.”
From the sea to the desert . . . They’re a bit older now, but (Spanky) McFarland and Sidney (“Woim”) Kibrick appeared together the other day at a ground breaking for the last phase of developer Kibrick’s Desert Shadows RV Resort just outside Palm Springs. As kids in the ‘30s, the pair starred in the “Our Gang” comedy shorts, and some of Kibrick’s movie memorabilia will be displayed in the clubhouse being built during this phase.
On the business side, did you hear about the sale of a former data-processing center on Vermont Avenue, just south of the Hollywood Freeway, that had been on the market for eight years? Bud Elam, an associate with the John Alle Co. who was formerly an electronics engineer, saw its potential for the video-tape industry, so got his client--Andrew McIntyre Enterprises (A. M. E.)--to buy it for $6.1 million. It’s544108407suites and film- and tape-storage facilities.
. . . And here’s a big item--”biggest in the West,” they say--biggest post office, that is. And Los Angeles Postmaster Charles W. King describes it as “the nation’s largest mail-processing facility on one level.” When finished on the President’s Day Weekend in February, 1989, it will have 1.1 million square feet and accommodate 4,100 employees. It’s being built on 74 acres bordered by Gage, Central and Florence avenues.
That should give economically depressed South-Central Los Angeles a lift!
