Preservationists Cheered by Restrictions on Jones Clinic Changes

Already buoyed by the news that the landmark Harriman Jones Clinic may be kept intact for use as an international school, preservationists were further cheered last week by demolition restrictions placed on another development proposal for the old medical clinic.

The Cultural Heritage Commission last week approved a developer’s plan to turn the Cherry Avenue building into 49 condominiums, but only after stipulating that the clinic’s gracious waiting room be saved, along with other major portions of the 1930 Italian Revival building on Bixby Park.

Don Nikols, a partner in Terry/Nikols Development Co., denounced the conditions, saying they amounted to a rejection of his condominium project and a betrayal of his yearlong negotiations with historic preservationists.

“There’s no point in negotiating with them, in sharing information with them and taking time,” Nikols asserted. “It’s unbelievable. We’ve just been such naive suckers.”

Yet even as Nikols prepares to appeal the commission’s decision to the Planning Commission and City Council, an international school is negotiating to buy the clinic from the Harriman Jones doctors group and use the two-story building much as it is. If that sale goes through, Terry/Nikols would bail out of the project, and efforts to save the medical clinic from the wrecking ball will have succeeded.

Both Terry/Nikols and the Madrid-based school, called the Yago Group, are now in escrow with Harriman Jones. Nikols said that if Yago obtains the necessary city approvals to run a school at the site, his company will step aside and let Yago buy the clinic. The sale price would include money to repay Terry/Nikols most of the costs the company has incurred in helping to carry the empty building and develop the condominium plans.

“It’s evident that we have a much more difficult project to get approvals for than we envisioned when we started on this trail a year ago,” Nikols said, explaining why his firm would yield to Yago. In addition to cultural heritage approval, the four-story project requires planning approvals for its height and density.

Nikols said he nonetheless has to move ahead with the condominium plans in case the Yago sale collapses. “If the escrow with the school falls through, I don’t want to be at a dead stop.”

Officials of the Yago Group could not be reached. Cultural heritage Chairman Louis Skelton, who has met with school representatives, said they not only want to retain all of the two-story clinic, “They intend to restore it to its original luster.”

Yago has operations in various countries and would convert the building to a school for students brought from Spain to live with Long Beach families.

“It’s just like an answer to our prayers. At this point we’re very optimistic” about the school plans, said Rae LaForce, a resident who has led the opposition to Terry/Nikols’ plans to demolish much of the clinic. She endorsed the commission’s requirement that the waiting room be saved as the “very minimum that would be acceptable to us.”

The clinic occupies a sentimental as well as an architectural niche in Long Beach. Many residents were born in Harriman Jones as their fathers waited in the “living room,” which had a fireplace and a piano to quiet parental jitters.

When the condominium proposal was made, the clinic became the city’s latest preservation battleground and the first since the city’s Office of Neighborhood and Historic Preservation was established.

Harriman Jones was named a local cultural landmark in June after preservationists and the developers agreed to a compromise that would allow Terry/Nikols to tear down much of the building while retaining the Cherry Avenue facade, the portico, entrance and the upstairs library.

Although the agreement was heralded as a sign of new cooperation between developers and preservationists, the compromise plan stirred neighborhood protests. When the Cultural Heritage Commission met Thursday, it decided that the wood-beamed living room and part of the Broadway facade should be saved as well as those portions of the clinic Terry/Nikols had earlier agreed to retain.

Chairman Skelton broke a 5-5 tie by voting to accept the condominium proposal with the added conditions.

Skelton said that to reject the project altogether would have signaled that the developers’ negotiations with preservationists had been a waste of time. “My concern is that if you take an adamant approach to preserving the building, we’ll wind up like the Pacific Coast Club,” Skelton said, referring to a landmark that was razed after a protracted tug of war between preservationists and developers.

Nikols had kind words for Skelton, but he complained bitterly in an interview that he and his partner had been “harpooned” by other preservationists who agreed to partial demolition and then changed their minds.

City preservation officer Ruthann Lehrer, who said she had recommended approval of the Nikols project without the additional conditions, said Nikols had known from the beginning that it would be difficult to win acceptance of the compromise plan.

“I don’t think (the commission’s vote) indicates preservationists can’t work with developers,” Lehrer said. “We have been doing that since the project came on line in February. I think it does indicate that demolishing major parts of a landmark building is very difficult to accept.”