Grand Hopes for City Core : Downtown: Backers say a $64-million project of apartments, shops and offices in three historic buildings will help create a funky district like N.Y.’s Greenwich Village.
Surely somewhere in this city are a few people who love cities.
At least that’s the bet developer Ira Yellin is making as he directs a $64-million renovation of Downtown’s Grand Central Market--an innovative project that restores the aged grace of three historic buildings, mixes low-income and luxury apartments and capitalizes on easy access to the region’s budding rail transit network.
Its backers hope the Grand Central Square project at Broadway and 3rd Street will serve as a catalyst for the creation of a funky residential district akin to such places as New York’s Greenwich Village or Denver’s Lower Downtown, neighborhoods where different cultures and classes mingle willingly in a noisy, unpredictable environment.
“Broadway can eventually become a real city walk,” said Yellin, referring to Universal CityWalk, the city-themed entertainment complex built two years ago in a parking lot at Universal Studios, 10 miles northwest of Downtown.
When it is finished next spring, Yellin’s project will include a mix of 121 apartments, office space and retail shops as well as a refurbished Grand Central Market, the 77-year-old open-air food bazaar that serves up everything from cow brains to guava nectar.
One- and two-bedroom apartments will occupy the upper floors of the six-story Homer Laughlin Building above Grand Central Market. In the 12-story Million Dollar Building next door, apartments will rise above ground-floor retail shops and the Million Dollar Theater, a baroque movie palace built in 1918 by Sid Grauman--who also built the Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. The adjacent Lyon Building on Hill Street will include 20,000 square feet of office space.
Apartments in the project will range from subsidized units for low- and moderate-income residents to market-rate. Rents have not yet been calculated, but Yellin predicts the project will attract a range of tenants--from Downtown professionals to poor immigrants dependent on the bus and subway to get around.
Three apartments on the top floor of the Million Dollar Building, once the headquarters of the Metropolitan Water District, will be marketed as historic penthouses. The living room of one, for instance, will be the mahogany-paneled board room where William Mulholland planned a water system that laid the foundation for the modern metropolis.
“This is a part of Downtown that has a human dimension; the streets and sidewalks are of a human scale,” said Yellin, a lawyer turned developer who earned praise for his careful restoration of the 1893 Bradbury Building across Broadway from Grand Central. “It has a history.”
When it opened in 1917, Grand Central Market catered to society matrons who descended the Angel’s Flight funicular railway with butlers in tow from their ornate wooden palaces atop Bunker Hill. Over time, as the wealthy moved farther and farther from Downtown, their mansions became flophouses and finally were splintered under bulldozers making way for towers of concrete and glass during the 1960s and ‘70s.
Silent movie stars Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish and Charlie Chaplin attended the opening of the Million Dollar Theater, Grauman’s first Los Angeles theater venture. The MWD occupied the upper floors for more than 30 years, but since the agency moved in 1963, the building has been mostly vacant. In 1984, one critic described it as “an aging Miz Kitty in her dated dance-hall finery.”
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That finery remains evident in intricate facade carvings that include bison heads and longhorn cattle skulls. Construction crews have stumbled upon hidden treasures such as ornately carved ceilings hidden under plaster, and canvas murals of cherubs behind false walls. Inside, marble floors are preserved whenever possible, as are original tiles. A sweeping staircase spirals down 12 stories.
But even as its exteriors darkened with urban smear, Grand Central Market survived and even thrived as one of the few truly urban places left in Los Angeles. Its shops remain busy serving food as eclectic as its clientele--from lawyers to bums. Yellin said his intent is to make the neighborhood as vibrant as the market.
“If there are people who like living in a city, then they will like this project,” he said.
While this sort of mixed-use undertaking has long been common in cities such as Boston or San Francisco, it is a new concept in Southern California, a region that has been historically scornful of urban-style development.
Overcoming that prejudice is among the toughest tasks in the marketing of Grand Central Square. But even the project’s doubters admit that if it is successful, it could signal the rebirth of a slowly dying district as well as serve as a prototype for other areas.
Aside from its significance as a major historic renovation, the Grand Central project is a model of cooperation between public officials and private developers as well as an example of new ways to build in urban neighborhoods.
For the first time, two of the city’s most powerful public agencies--the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Community Redevelopment Agency--are pooling their resources to back a project that could not get traditional financing.
Yellin said private banks initially were excited about his plans--which originally included more office space instead of apartments--but backed away after they visited the neighborhood, a largely Latino shopping district lined with sagging buildings and garish signs.
At the same time, the bottom fell out of the office market. Even top-notch space in new buildings on Bunker Hill was empty. Yellin’s own Bradbury Building, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is still 60% vacant. So he shifted the Grand Central project’s emphasis to housing and attracted the attention of the CRA and the MTA.
Last year, the CRA issued a $44-million bond to combine with the $20 million Yellin had raised to finance the project. Part of the public debt will be serviced by the MTA, which in turn will share in part of the project’s revenues, said Bill Lewis, manager of special projects for the transit agency.
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Such an arrangement was possible because of the proximity of the Metro Red Line; an entrance to the Pershing Square station is just down the block from Grand Central. MTA officials hope that sort of link will both give people a reason to ride public transit and make it more convenient when they do.
“This project will create what we think will be a catalyst,” Lewis said. “A lot of people already use rail and bus transit to get to the market. It just really became in our minds a real potential.”
In fact, such so-called “transit-oriented” development is gaining favor in Southern California. Other cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, San Diego and San Jose already are concentrating development along transit lines. And the concept is a major component of the city’s new long-term growth strategy being formulated by Los Angeles planners.
Planning experts said Grand Central’s proximity to transit may be the wild card that helps it succeed where other residential projects Downtown have failed.
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“This is a complex question for Downtown,” said Edward Soja, head of UCLA’s urban planning school. “The history has been a failure to attract significant numbers into Downtown. Mass transit is the big question.”
Transit of a different kind is being counted on to bridge the gap between the old Downtown along Broadway and the new Downtown atop Bunker Hill, adjacent neighborhoods that are worlds apart. “There is this massive barrier at Hill Street where a huge wall of condominiums divides Downtown into First and Third World halves,” Soja said.
Construction is expected to begin next year on a new Angel’s Flight, which will ferry passengers up and down between Bunker Hill and Hill Street--just as it did during Downtown’s heyday. The Angel’s Flight station will be directly across the street from Grand Central. Yellin and others expect the Grand Central project to be the link that connects old to new, luring people first onto Broadway and then into the rest of the historic core.
“That whole neighborhood is really going to jump-start,” CRA General Manager Ed Avila said. “What’s happening is that Grand Central is the pivotal point for the revitalization of this neighborhood.”
At least that’s the plan. But the very urban unpredictability that Yellin sees as central to the project has a history of dashing even the best-laid plans. Yellin, however, likes the odds and thinks his bet will pay off.
“I have always believed that places like this have inherent value,” Yellin said, peering through vertical blinds at the freshly scrubbed facade of his Million Dollar Building. “You just have to know how to use it.”
