North Hollywood Will Be Home of Emmy Sponsors : Television Group to Take Role as Theme Tenant in Planned $350-Million Commercial Development
TV’s 39th annual, Prime-time Emmy Awards and the first Charity Starscene ‘87, a festival at North Hollywood Park, have something in common besides being held today.
Actually, they have someone in common, though that someone has nothing to do with producing the nationally televised awards show.
The someone is Kenneth H. Adkins, a real estate developer and prime mover behind the festival and future home of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, the 6,000-member nonprofit organization that presents the Emmy Awards.
“It’s no coincidence that the festival is being held today,” he said. “The (Universal City/North Hollywood) Chamber of Commerce wanted to put on some kind of a charity event, and I had the idea that three or four years after the Academy opens, we could put on a festival built around celebrities during the weekend of the Emmys.”
Adkins decided not to wait until the Academy that he was talking about got built. He shared his festival idea with the chamber, and a 120-member committee made it a reality.
Now, as co-chairman of the multifaceted Kensley Corp.--general partner of the Academy Venture, he is working with KG Academy Corp., a subsidiary of Kumagai Gumi Co. Ltd. of Tokyo, and the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency to make the $350-million, 22-acre Academy in North Hollywood a reality.
Kumagai Gumi will be the general contractor, and McLarand, Vasquez & Partners is the architect, with landscaping designed by the SWA Group.
“Kensley was organized in 1981 to develop the project,” Adkins said in his office, across the street from the construction site on the northeast corner of Lankershim and Magnolia boulevards.
Leo Chaloukian, the Academy’s building committee chairman and newly elected first vice president, has worked on the project for six years, or three Academy president’s terms.
“It’s really going to be something for North Hollywood,” he said in his office on Vine Street in Hollywood. “And for the Academy, it will finally be a home for everything we dreamed of--for things like this. . . .”
He pointed to some of the Emmys and Oscars, including one for the movie “Platoon” that Ryder Sound Services, the 39-year-old company he has owned since the late ‘70s, won. “And for things like this.” He gestured toward some old microphones and other antique professional equipment.
Museum, Library Included
The Academy project will have a museum with exhibits of such items--”or maybe scenes from, say, the old ‘I Love Lucy’ show, which you can see by just pushing a button,” Chaloukian suggested.
It will have a library, he said, “open to students like the library of the motion picture academy’s.”
It will house busts of the 21 stars already in the 4-year-old Television Hall of Fame and the seven more to be installed Nov. 15.
The Academy also will have a 25-foot tall replica of the Emmy statue, which is expected to become another Hollywood-industry landmark.
What Chaloukian views as “the most exciting thing,” though, will be the 600-seat theater, which will have a kitchen, 55-foot wide screen, five projectors and a capability of projecting slides and various sizes of videotape.
Academy ‘Theme Tenant’
It’s being designed by Jeff Cooper Architects AIA, which also designed theaters and studios for George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, among others. The Academy theater will be available for lease when the Academy isn’t using it during an estimated 90 days of the year.
The Academy, known as the “theme tenant” of the project, will have about 10,000 square feet of offices and meeting rooms, which about doubles the size of its current headquarters in Burbank. The project is being described as the Academy’s “first permanent home,” since Academy facilities were previously on short-term leases.
“And we can expand and have a total of 20,000 square feet if we choose,” Chaloukian said. “We also have an option to buy the building within five years, and/or we can buy--at very favorable rates--some property directly behind the theater, which could be our library site.”
At what rates? Nobody would say, but when asked why the Academy was willing to move from the more studio-oriented, newer environs of Burbank to North Hollywood, the first area of the San Fernando Valley to undergo redevelopment because it was one of the first communities to be built, Richard Frank, president of the Academy and Walt Disney Pictures & Television, said:
‘An Incredible Deal’
“For us, it was an ability to get an incredible deal in what appears to be a really fine development. It wasn’t like matching Burbank and North Hollywood, but so much of the (movie and television) business has moved to this end of the valley, anyway--I’d guess that 60% is on this side of the hill now--that 10 blocks farther away, in North Hollywood, isn’t that far to go.”
Besides, before the Academy’s headquarters was moved to Burbank, it was in North Hollywood, so the area isn’t new to the group.
“We were worried, because we have a lot of nighttime events, and we didn’t want our members walking a block or two, but the developer incorporated parking in our plan, so now we can park and walk, all inside,” Frank said. “Then, with the (220-room) hotel (also being built as part of the project), we will have valet parking too, so safety ceased to be a problem. Anyway, I think the area will improve.”
Developer Adkins said that crime around the project, one of the first in the redevelopment area, is “no worse than in other parts of the city” but conceded that there are “severe problems” three to four miles away. “When you have a declining economic base, you frequently attract a more transient population,” he added. “When you turn that around, the transient population usually relocates.”
Help Economy
The Academy project should do much in turning around the economic base on Lankershim Boulevard along a 1.5-mile stretch from Chandler Boulevard to Universal City, which Adkins terms “the Universal City, North Hollywood Corridor.” It links North Hollywood to Universal City along an area he’d like people to call “the Northside.”
And who knows? By the time the Academy’s $100-million first phase is completed in 1989, what he calls the Northside might be on a near-equal footing with parts of the city’s trendy Westside. He envisions the Academy’s initial phase doing for Lankershim what the Design Center did for Melrose Avenue.
There are, after all, a lot of elements in Phase 1: Besides the screening room, Academy offices and Hall of Fame, there is an eight-story, 160,000-square-foot office building; 2,750-seat United Artists multiplex theater; 60,000 square feet of retail space, and a 1,150-car parking structure. Cushman & Wakefield’s Woodland Hills office is handling leasing.
And though not technically part of Phase 1, the hotel also will be built about the same time, he said.
Metro Rail Terminus
As for the rest of the project, he admitted, “it’s master planned, but how it will look depends on Metro Rail, which is involved in controversy.” The project is expected to be Metro Rail’s Valley terminus.
Adkins plans to do as much as he can to upgrade the area, which already has two new redevelopment projects: a senior citizens’ complex and an office building for Hewlett-Packard. Adkins has been talking to Lankershim merchants about improving their properties, and his company has been buying some nearby buildings with an eye toward renovation. “I will rehab one or two blocks of Lankershim myself,” he said.
He’s even willing to take on residential development.
When asked about building housing for entertainers, a goal long sought by local trade unions, he said he might build 60 to 70 units adjacent to the Academy project.
“Proposals are being requested through the CRA by the first of next year,” he said, “and if nobody steps up to build it, I will.”
Adkins says he said much the same thing about the Academy project four or five years ago, “but nobody believed me.”
As the January ground breaking draws nearer, the project will become even more of a reality, but the recent razing of 28 buildings on the construction site and the signing of a contract with the Academy to be the theme tenant are signals that development is moving ahead.
