Office Glut Has Made Life Difficult for Downtown Center
What went wrong with the World Trade Center in downtown Los Angeles?
The project has stalled and sputtered ever since it was first conceived in the 1960s. City officials originally planned a world trade facility as a high-rise office-hotel (with 1,000 rooms) on land east of the Los Angeles Convention Center.
Those plans were scrapped in 1973, however, because of lack of interest from developers, who claimed that interest rates were too high and that downtown was overbuilt.
The city relinquished the rights to the Los Angeles World Trade Center name only after a bitter tug of war with developer Edward K. Rice, general partner of Bunker Hill Center Associates. In 1972, the city objected to the use of the name on Rice’s new eight-story office building atop a parking lot. So Rice renamed it the Los Angeles International Financial Center.
He pulled out the World Trade Center sign again at his building on Third and Figueroa streets when the city gave up on its center.
‘Another Office Building’
The center formally opened amid much fanfare in 1975. It had an international trade club, meeting rooms and programs. Original qualifications for tenants required that they be involved in trade such as customs, consulate or trade promotion offices or freight forwarders.
But leasing of space proved difficult in an overbuilt downtown office market.
“The pure concept of world trade center was compromised by the reality of leasing space,” explained Richard King, former president of the center. “From that point on, rather than an international trade center, it became another commercial office building.”
Equitec ’78 Real Estate Investors purchased the center in 1979 for more than $24 million. Haseko of Tokyo became its third owner in June, 1987, for an undisclosed price.
James Garrigus, vice president of Haseko (California) Inc., said that after King left in 1978, there was a “decline in enthusiasm in the program so that in 1983, the World Trade Centers Assn. decertified or terminated its membership within the body mainly because Equitec was not keeping with the spirit of things.”
As Garrigus puts it: “They weren’t doing anything crazy; they just weren’t doing much.”
The International Club of Los Angeles, for example, which had 150 members at one time, closed, and its former members now meet at the Stock Exchange Club.
In applying for reinstatement as an official World Trade Center, Haseko, which is renovating the building, plans to tailor its services to new international firms that want to be downtown. Garrigus says the building, which is 90% occupied, now has a good mix of tenants that include U.S. and foreign government agencies involved in trade.
