Bradley Hails Report on Plan for Farmers Market

A team of experts appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley and the American Institute of Architects recommended Thursday that housing take the place of a proposed major shopping center at the Farmers Market site in the Fairfax District.

Their report was purely advisory, but Bradley said it included “a number of innovative and constructive recommendations” and that he was specifically interested in a response from the A.F. Gilmore Co., owners of Farmers Market, as to “whether they can incorporate these ideas into a viable project.”

While he did not immediately respond to the mayor’s request, Gilmore Co. President Hank Hilty said he was “deeply troubled” by the experts’ recommendations.

The 140-page document called for the building of as many as 2,000 housing units on land adjacent to the Farmers Market.

“The fact that the recommendations call for specific limits on the types of uses and the square footage to be allowed appears to infringe on the roles played by our city Planning Commission and the City Council,” Hilty said.

He said that the Gilmore company has worked for years to come up with a proposal that would respond to neighborhood concerns about building height, traffic and landscaping.

Ira Handelman, a spokesman for the company, said the firm had “considered many alternatives in the past, and it’s just not an appropriate alternative for us. There are other sites that are much more appropriate for housing.”

Gilmore’s latest plan, designed around the existing Farmers Market, includes a million-square-foot shopping mall anchored by two or three major department stores, a 600-room hotel, a 250,000-square-foot office building and 150 housing units.

The architects, developers and other professionals who made up the Beverly-Fairfax/Miracle Mile Urban Design Workshop found that it would generate too much traffic and would drive out the existing small ethnic businesses by boosting commercial land values.

“The traffic demands generated by the project cannot be accommodated by the existing street system and no feasible improvements are available,” the workshop said in a report.

If a major shopping mall is built there, “the heart and soul of the community will be lost to regionally driven mini-malls and associated non-ethnic, non-pedestrian, non-neighborhood uses,” the report said.