Firm Tries to Win Fans for Park Labrea Project : Fairfax District: Plans for 2,217 new apartments, a hotel and offices have raised fears of traffic and methane problems and preservation concerns.
The owners of Park Labrea and the May Co. have launched a public relations campaign on the eve of what is expected to be a difficult fight for city approval of a hotel, two office towers and more than 2,000 new apartments across the street from the recently approved Farmers Market shopping mall.
In meetings that began last Saturday at an unmarked storefront on 3rd Street, project manager Greg Vilkin has been assuring residents that traffic problems will be mitigated, methane threats eliminated and the interests of senior citizens respected if Forest City Properties Corp. is allowed to go ahead with its plans.
“Hopefully, we won’t have hordes showing up (at city hearings) saying, ‘We hate this project.’ If they hate it, at least they’ll know the facts,” Vilkin said Wednesday. “Not everybody is going to like the project. We realize that.”
The plans call for 2,217 new residential units, including a group home for senior citizens, at three corners of Park Labrea, an old oil field that Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. converted into a high-rise and garden apartment complex 40 years ago. Forest City bought the property in 1986.
The fourth site, now occupied by the May Co. store at the corner of Fairfax Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard, would become a hive of office buildings, a hotel and restaurants, distributed around a central plaza and sculpture garden.
But the May Co. building itself, hailed by preservationists as an outstanding example of the Streamline Moderne and International styles of architecture, would make way for a dramatically styled entryway, set off by sweeping staircases.
The May Co. building, distinguished by a towering gold cylinder flanked by glossy black wings, has been recommended as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument by the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission, however, and if approved by the City Council, that designation could slow the developers’ plans.
“As long as it’s not designated, they can argue that they don’t have to deal with it, so we want it designated to make sure that preservation is considered along with other planning issues,” said Teresa Grimes, preservation officer for the Los Angeles Conservancy.
The conservancy argues that the building serves as a gateway to the Fairfax shopping district and to the Miracle Mile, and that it could be used for other retail purposes or recycled as a library or other public institution.
Under Forest City’s plans, an existing tennis club would also be lost, along with Park Labrea’s administration building, a community center and the shopping strip that includes an old bank branch office where Vilkin holds his briefings.
“The idea was to take the peripheral areas of Park Labrea and build on them,” he said, pointing to a model that shows the new housing units to be lower than existing apartment towers, and the office towers to be level with existing buildings on Wilshire Boulevard.
He noted that the various segments of the project would be widely separated, with the office-hotel complex located a mile away from the new apartments on the site of the existing tennis club.
Existing zoning would allow the company to build as many as 3,000 new apartments without jumping any bureaucratic hurdles, but Vilkin acknowledged that the destruction of existing garden apartments and the displacement of their residents, would have been a public relations disaster.
Another alternative that was considered was a shopping mall. But that idea was scratched after City Council President John Ferraro, who represents the area, said the neighborhood was only big enough for one such development.
The A.F. Gilmore Co., whose land was already zoned for commercial use, won the City Council’s approval for the Farmers Market project in January.
Renee Weitzer, Ferraro’s planning aide, said that she has yet to respond to the Forest City proposal, but that designation of the May Co. as a city monument may force drastic changes.
Otherwise, she said, traffic will be a major concern. “Probably they’re prepared to cut it,” she said. “They’ll learn and we’ll learn a lot from the community meetings. The architecture on Wilshire would be spectacular, but whether the community would accept it, whether it causes too much traffic, whether the community wants the May Co. torn down, that all depends on the community.”
Forest City’s latest proposal would be more expensive to develop, but it represents an unusual opportunity to create an “urban village” where housing, shopping, restaurants, museums, a school and job opportunities all exist within walking distance of each other, Vilkin said.
Despite the elaborate presentation, at least one community activist who saw it last weekend said that it did not change his mind.
“I was intrigued by the remarkable degree to which my board’s reaction was exactly the same afterward as it was in our response to the Environmental Impact Review,” said David Hamlin, president of the Park Labrea Tenants Assn.
“We are real concerned about the size and the scope of this project,” he said, adding that traffic is still a concern and the proposed senior citizen housing on 6th Street would be better located closer to the Farmers Market.
Hamlin said his membership was also worried about the loss of Park Labrea’s community center, which is supposed to be replaced by a smaller facility at the eastern edge of the property.
“If the question is, ‘Will they get what they proposed,’ my response is that it’s going to be a very tough sell,” he said.
On the other hand, he said, “if we’re talking about some kind of package that addresses community needs and goes a long way to reduce traffic impact, then there’s some room to get some stuff done.”
Hamlin said that he had no problems with the proposed demolition of the May Co., saying that the structure, which stands across Wilshire Boulevard from an old Ohrbachs store that has been empty for seven years, is “at best obsolete . . . (and) has to go.”
“I’m more concerned with the economic viability of the neighborhood, and in this instance that’s more important than preserving what may or may not be a historical building,” he said.
