GLENDALE : City Gets OK to Buy Lot for Parking

The Glendale Redevelopment Agency has unanimously approved a resolution that allows officials to purchase property to construct a 600-space parking structure for downtown visitors.

The move allows the agency, whose members also sit on the City Council, to pay the property owner $535,000 from a portion of the agency’s 1994-95 budget that includes funds for retail and theater district parking.

The resolution was approved Tuesday.

City officials plan to build a multilevel parking structure on several lots in the 200 block of N. Orange Street, in part, to serve patrons of the Alex Theatre.

Since the landmark theater reopened in January, theater-goers have had a difficult time finding parking downtown. Ribbon cuttings for myriad new shops and restaurants in the city’s center have crowded downtown lots even more.

The Orange Street parking garage, which is still in the design phase and won’t be completed until late next year, is part of an overall plan to relieve a downtown parking crunch, said Jeanne Armstrong, director of redevelopment.

The city plans to demolish the former Novotny’s Antique Store, which still stands on the property at 228 N. Orange St., before constructing the structure.

City officials agreed with results of a parking study released by a private consultant in October, saying it isn’t that the city has a lack of parking downtown--there are 16,000 spaces in privately owned garages, and 1,400 spaces in city lots--but that shoppers didn’t know where to find it.

Officials have tried to alert residents to the location of downtown parking lots, even initiating a program in March in which local restaurants offered free parking to theater-goers who dined at their venue before the show.

Parking downtown has gotten somewhat easier as patrons have learned their way around, and also with the reopening of the Glendale Galleria parking structure in November, Armstrong said. The structure was damaged in the Northridge earthquake.