Building to Replace Women’s Center Tents

The Downtown Women’s Center, where actress Loretta Young regularly volunteers to help the homeless and mentally ill on Skid Row, has broken ground on a $500,000 daytime facility.

“What we did all summer and most of the year was operate out of two party tents donated by Abbey Rents,” Jill Halverson, founder/director of the center, explained. The old building used by the 10-year-old center was condemned after last year’s Oct. 1 earthquake.

“Now we’re just providing services to the 48 (women) residents in our hotel,” she went on unhappily, though she is delighted with the hotel, built next door nearly three years ago with a lot of volunteer labor and materials. “As soon as we can, we’ll serve meals to other women in our back yard.”

The new, two-story building (designed by the same architect who designed the hotel--Levin & Associates) isn’t expected to be completed until the start of next year. Security Pacific Foundation enabled the center to use glazed, cement blocks with graffiti-proof exterior material and a pastel pattern.

In the meantime, Eileen and Norman Kreiss, who own the trendy California-style furnishings firm--the Kreiss Collection, are gearing up to decorate the new building, as they did the hotel.

The Kreisses just bought a site for a home in Rancho Santa Fe, where Lakers owner Jerry Buss reportedly also bought property. A few weeks ago, the Kreisses opened their 29th showroom (first one overseas) in Tokyo with a party attended by the emperor’s daughter.

Whoever heard of using a credit card to buy real estate? The Japanese!

And guess where they do this? In a department store--Tokyu Nihonbashi.

Potential buyers of homes in California and Hawaii can get a glimpse there on video, then use a credit card to put their transactions into escrow--thanks to the efforts of San Francisco-based Grubb & Ellis; a Tokyo subsidiary of Citicorp, and the store.

Through the program, qualified Japanese home shoppers can get an initial credit line of $500,000! Seven similar centers are due to open in Japan during the next six months, with property offerings in other states.

While Imelda Marcos was in Manhattan last week for arraignment on charges of diverting Philippine government funds to buy millions of dollars’ worth of New York real estate, the Park Avenue firm LandVest was still trying to market her former Long Island estate known as “Lindenmere.”

Purchased in 1981 by Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos when they were still the Philippines’ First Family, the 13.23-acre property with 16-room mansion and boat docks was taken over by the Philippine government last year.

Meanwhile, LandVest just sold a 101-year-old house in Tuxedo Park, N.Y., where the tuxedo purportedly made its first appearance, and has “under contract” (that’s like escrow) the 84-year-old Georgian home in Newport, R.I., where Claus von Bulow was charged with trying to kill his heiress wife with insulin injections. (He was acquitted. She remains in a coma.)

A Washington, D.C.-based international antiques dealer is buying the place for $4.2 million, though the asking price was only $3.95 million! James Retz, who worked for Previews and Sotheby’s in Los Angeles before heading for New York, is the LandVest broker representing all three properties.

Merv Griffin isn’t the only one in recent weeks whose nearly completed home--in La Quinta--practically burned to the ground. Remember the fire that swept through the former Pasadena home of Dovie Beams de Villagran, who claimed to have been a lover of Ferdinand Marcos?

That blaze caused an estimated $3 million in damage to the house, which was undergoing a major renovation begun last January. Now its owners, Japanese investors who last year bought the 4.5-acre property as an auxiliary home for $3,864,500 (according to public records), are planning to build an all-new house.

The old one--a 26-room Greek-neoclassic built in 1914--was being renovated with the help of William McWhorter, a designer with Bobbie Everts’ Decorator Previews. McWhorter plans to design interiors of the new house. The owners are still looking for an architect.

As for Griffin’s $1.75-million, Moroccan-style home in La Quinta, reconstruction has begun, and this time, it will have a sprinkler system.