TV Academy Is Star Tenant of New Complex : North Hollywood: Officials hope that the mixed-use project will attract businesses, residents and tourists.

The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences headquarters, a production that was more than a decade in the making, opened its doors Monday for its first full week of business in North Hollywood, where it is the major tenant in a center that is considered crucial to revitalizing the neighborhood.

The 10,000-square-foot office at Lankershim and Magnolia boulevards will be the primary occupant in a $41-million commercial and residential development that bears its name.

Officials from the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency are hoping that the Academy project, the only mixed-use development of its kind in the San Fernando Valley, will reinvigorate the commercial center of North Hollywood by attracting new businesses, residents and tourists.

Don Spivack, CRA director of operations, said completion of the Academy project gives the area “a new focus.” He said the academy’s planned television library and archive, as well as its courtyard statue garden of television celebrities, would attract tourists and television buffs to the neighborhood. Completion dates for those projects are uncertain.

The complex includes a 600-seat theater for screenings and a 27-foot-tall Emmy statue in the center courtyard.

Most of the office space in the complex’s eight-story tower has already been leased. More than 240 apartments are scheduled to open this summer. And construction is expected to begin later this year on a 225-room hotel.

Retail spaces remain empty on the project’s ground floor, however. Spivack said some restaurants will open within the next few months, but it may take time for other businesses to follow. He said he expected that once the apartments are rented, merchants would find the retail space more desirable.

Nearby merchants, meanwhile, are concerned about their future as they watch their neighborhood change around them. Several along Lankershim said that so far they have seen no large increase in the number of customers.

“It’s nothing but an overpriced ghost town,” Rocky Heck, a clerk at Book City, said of the project’s retail component. Only a few more customers have strolled through the musty aisles of used books, he said; most of them are employees of the complex’s two film companies who browse through the store’s cinema section.

Many of the other shop spaces along Lankershim near the Academy are empty.

Nace Treves thought that he would be among the first businessmen to take advantage of new traffic generated by the Academy project when he and a partner opened PS 5213 Inc., a fashionable women’s clothing store, along a stretch of Lankershim lined with discount stores, used book shops and hair salons.

But Treves closed the shop in February. The crowds of shoppers never came.

“Promises don’t mean much,” Treves said about reassurances from redevelopment officials that the Academy project would attract upscale shoppers.

The discount store next door to Treves’ shop is still in business. So are the used book shops and hair salons.

Guy Paonessa, whose Entourage Studios is surrounded on three sides by the residential component of the project, said he will be happy to see construction of the apartments completed later this year. Although he doubted that the project would affect his business, Paonessa said operations at his recording studio sometimes were interrupted by the noise of workers outside.

“We’re going to be real happy when it’s done,” he said.