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Deal to Save Landmark Clinic in Long Beach Falls Through : Architecture: Fight to rescue the building is seen as a test of the city’s preservationist powers. Now it appears that the clinic will come down.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

When two of its oldest and most gracious landmarks were felled by the wrecking ball more than a year ago, Long Beach reacted like a Gold Star mother who lost two sons to the war and was not about to give up another.

But it appears that the elegant Harriman Jones Clinic, where some say half the people in Long Beach were born, is about to go to the graveyard.

A deal that would have turned the 1930 building into an international school--a plan preservationists had called “an answer to their prayers”--has collapsed, and the clinic at Broadway and Cherry Avenue could come down as early as June to make way for a 49-unit condominium complex.

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The fight to save the Harriman Jones Clinic was seen by some as a test for a city resolved to preserve its cultural past while inviting development. The demise of the Italian Revival building, some say, could mean the city’s tough new preservation tactics can do little more than forestall the inevitable: another pile of rubble.

“Every building they have gone after to save is gone. They have succeeded in holding up the show for a year or a year and a half and that’s all. . . . The reason is they don’t want to compromise,” said Don Nikols, a partner in Terry/Nikols Development Co., which plans to replace the clinic with condominiums.

Preservationists disagree, saying the city got tough too late to save Harriman Jones but not the scores of other historic buildings and neighborhoods that have been declared cultural landmarks since February, 1989, when Ruthann Lehrer was appointed as the city’s first historic preservation officer.

Her position was created after the elegant Pacific Coast Club and the ornate Jergins Trust Building, both downtown, were leveled last year. Their sites remain as holes in the ground today. Lehrer’s first big preservation challenge was the Harriman Jones Clinic, named for the man who founded the city’s first hospital, fashioned its public health laws and designed the wood-beamed clinic with a burning fireplace.

The building is in some ways as disastrous on the inside as it is beautiful on the outside. It is an earthquake hazard, a parking nightmare--more than 100 spaces short in an area where it is already tough to find a spot--and is full of asbestos, developers say.

But Lehrer managed to strike a compromise with Terry/Nikols that would have saved the building’s Cherry Avenue facade, entryway and library at an additional $1-million cost to the developers.

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Some more radical preservationists were outraged still, insisting that the building remain intact. The battle has gone on for more than a year at a cost of nearly $50,000 a month in mortgage payments and upkeep to the doctors who own it and the developers who are in escrow to buy it.

Then along came “the needle in the haystack”--a Madrid-based school that wanted to use the building to house classes for international students, most of whom do not drive.

“It was the answer to our prayers,” said preservationist Rae LaForce, a leader in the fight to save the clinic.

But the deal fell through this month when the cost of the property--$3.4 million--and expensive renovations apparently proved too high for the school owners. The city’s Cultural Heritage Commission has the power to block demolition for only six months, ending in June. It could extend the stay of execution for another six months if it proves that an alternative use for the building could be found. After that, the building comes down.

Meanwhile, the cost of maintaining the empty clinic has run the price tag of an already expensive piece of property to an all-time high, and no buyer has come forward with a plan to save it.

The developers said they are quickly losing the incentive to preserve even part of the building, when razing it would save them a million dollars.

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“They think if they hold this up long enough, somebody other than the big bad developer will come along,” Nikols said.

It may wind up that Long Beach gambled to preserve the entire building and lost the chance to salvage even part of it.

“Other developers laughed at us in the beginning when we said we would work with these guys,” Nikols said. “They were right.”

If the city does not strike an agreement with them by June, the developers say they will level the clinic.

If the city stalls the project further without finding another buyer, the doctors who own Harriman Jones will probably level the building, officials said.

But it isn’t over yet.

“I am beating the bushes,” preservationist LaForce vowed. “My head is bloodied but unbowed.”

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