IRVINE : Old City Hall Gets Some New Tenants

Outside, the sign on Jamboree Boulevard still reads “Civic Center,” but city offices are nowhere to be found. Inside the brown building, the words “Police Department,” although scratched off, can be traced on a corner partition where they were posted for 13 years.

Both the Civic Center and the Police Department have moved to 1 Civic Center Plaza, just off Harvard Avenue, where Irvine has built a new $27.8-million City Hall. But instead of selling the old building, the city turned it into an office complex for eight nonprofit groups.

“We’ve all learned a little about all of the organizations here,” said Linda Benjamin, program secretary for the Irvine Chamber of Commerce, the building’s largest tenant. “We all get along very well.”

The building at the corner of McGaw Avenue and Jamboree Boulevard served as Irvine’s City Hall starting in 1975, when officials moved from the original quarters in the old University Town Center. The Jamboree Boulevard building was considered a temporary facility, City Manager Paul Brady Jr. said.

“We were supposed to have a new City Hall in 1980,” Brady said. “So we actually got a new one about eight years late.”

After leaving the center in 1988, the city decided to keep the 40,000-square-foot building for nonprofit groups rather than sell it, Brady said.

“Sometime in the future it could be sold,” Brady said. “It was appraised recently for about $5 million, but who knows what it might be worth in a couple of years.”

The building’s tenants now include the County Historical and Cultural Foundation, the city’s Child Resource Information Center and Irvine Temporary Housing, where the city provides 10 apartments and two farmhouses for needy families.

Another cubicle houses the Irvine Baseball Assn., headquarters for the city’s baseball leagues. Also in the building is CSP Inc., which manages programs for youths, for crime victims and in child abuse prevention. The former police area of the building will soon become a child-care center.

The office of For Families, a city-run program that supplies free services to families in stressful situations, is at the opposite end of the building from the chamber. Among the services offered by For Families are counseling, food, shelter and legal assistance. People contact the agency for a variety of reasons, but receptionist Dalene Bo said callers usually have one thing in common.

“It all revolves around finances,” Bo said. “You wouldn’t think that would be so much of a problem, especially in Irvine, but almost without exception, finances are the major problem.”

Bo has been working in the building since August, when she wandered in looking for the adult career center, whose office is in the back.

“They told me For Families was looking for a receptionist, up front here,” Bo said. “I’ve been here ever since.”