Annex Gala Marks End of Struggle : Development: Grand opening Friday of expanded Westside Pavilion is culmination of long road to compromise.

The grand-opening celebration of the Westside Pavilion’s new annex of shops and restaurants will begin Friday with a parade across the newly constructed automobile and pedestrian bridge that spans Westwood Boulevard.

Although the construction does manage to bridge the two sides of the shopping center, it has not completely closed the gap between developers and the homeowner groups who had opposed it.

The 105,000-square-foot annex is the result of a compromise in which the developer agreed to drastically reduce the size of the project to meet neighborhood concerns over traffic congestion.

“I’m delighted that it is finally come to a conclusion and we are opening,” said Richard E. Green, president of Westfield Inc., the Pavilion’s parent company.

The official two-day ceremony begins Friday with a parade of classic cars, a marching band and dancing clowns across the bridge to the new annex. A sneak preview of the new section of the mall is being held today when Boggies Diner, a food and clothing emporium in the new annex, holds a charity party for the American Film Institute Associates and Love Is Feeding Everyone (LIFE).

The gala opening, Green said, will not only mark the beginning of the new annex but the end of a long struggle between the developer and neighborhood residents.

“It has been give and take on all sides--the developer, the city and the community,” Green said.

But nearby residents who have had to live with traffic from the Pavilion since it opened six years ago are taking a wait-and-see approach.

“It has been a long process, a political one and a draining one,” said Sara Berman, president of the West of Westwood Homeowners Assn. “We are watching to see whether it all works out.”

When the Pavilion opened in 1985, it was supposed to have enough parking to accommodate the thousands of shoppers it was to draw. But within a few months of its opening, nearby residents were demanding permit parking to protect their streets from the congestion caused by the new mall.

“What started out as a file has grown to five cartons of material,” Berman said.

The City Council in 1989 approved the expansion after the developer proposed the construction of a bridge over Westwood Boulevard that he said would reduce street traffic. In addition, the plan alleviated concern about off-street parking by providing 1,000 parking spaces in the annex, more than enough to meet the demands of the shopping center. Numerous improvements also were made on nearby residential streets to improve traffic flow.

Green says the changes will more than offset the traffic generated by the addition of 43 speciality stores in the annex, which cost $70 million to build. The cost of the original Pavilion was $90 million.

Annie Szilagyi, another association member, said: “We’ll have to wait and see how the parking turns out, but visually it looks good, and I love the bridge.”

She praised the developers. “They have encouraged people to use the mall as a community center, not just a shopping center,” she said. “They have really worked with us.”

Other residents, however, say that no matter what amenities are provided, malls just do not make good neighbors.

Leonard Shilton, who lives a block south of the mall, enjoys shopping there but adds that there are a number of negative side effects from living next to it.

“How much can you live with garbage on the lawn, traffic, dust and noise?” he asked.

Marilyn Tusher, president of the Westwood Gardens Civic Assn., is no fan of the original mall and likes the annex even less. “The Pavilion has had a domino effect on the neighborhood, with every street feeling the change,” she said. “The Pavilion is totally out of character with the neighborhood. It’s like a long wind tunnel along Pico Boulevard.”

Although streets have been widened and traffic signals installed to improve the flow of traffic, Tusher said these have hurt the community.

“We have lost neighborhood stores, drug stores, bakeries,” she said.

The Pavilion leads malls in Southern California in sales per square foot and ranked ninth among the county’s 45 malls in taxable retail sales in 1989.

Green said that the original mall is fully occupied and that leases have been signed already for 80% of the annex. He said its lack of an anchor store will not be a drawback. “It will be anchored by parking, 1,000 spaces of parking, and its closeness to Nordstrom’s,” which lies across the bridge.

The bridge is key to the expansion, Green said. “It will enable shoppers to travel easily between the two malls by foot or by car without having to leave the mall to deal with street traffic.”