Conversation WITH DANIEL SOLOMON : The ‘Reinventing of Vermont Avenue’

A vacant lot and long-abandoned 1931 Moderne landmark building that once housed a grocery store and later the offices of Pepperdine University is soon to be restored as the focal point of a development at Vermont Avenue and 81st Street. The winner of a competition sponsored by First Interstate Bank to revive the once-lively commercial street in South-Central Los Angeles is an $11-million, mixed-use project with a distinctive 125-foot-high tower. It will provide 35 for-sale townhomes, ground-floor commercial space, a Boys and Girls Club, day-care center and offices for USC’s Business Expansion Network.

The winner, selected by a jury that included neighborhood residents, was led by San Francisco architect Daniel Solomon and Caleb Development Corp. of South-Central Los Angeles, teamed with local architect John Maloney and other local firms. Solomon, a teacher at UC Berkeley since 1966 and author of “ReBuilding,” talked with Public Places columnist JANE SPILLER. Question: What was the central challenge of the project for you?

Answer: Our intention was to invent a strategy for rebuilding Vermont Avenue. The problems of South-Central L.A. are so vast that one successful development project is almost irrelevant. Whole commercial streets have to be brought back to life. Neighborhoods are desperately without services like stores, cafes and recreation for kids. Residents have to drive all over to shop. Still-healthy neighborhoods need to be linked to commercial streets so they do not become even more isolated, connected to the world only by car and by television.

Q: What brought Vermont Avenue to the deteriorated state it’s in today?

A: Vermont Avenue was once served by the Pacific Electric Line streetcars. With the conversion of L.A. to the automobile, the best public transit system in the country was dismantled. In 1958, they reconfigured the street for 22 blocks with frontage roads for parking. Vermont Avenue declined, but the real collapse came after the mid-1970s with the advent of the mini-mall. Mini-malls are all for cars; they destroy pedestrian use of the street and compete with street-front retail.

Q: What were your goals in designing the project?

A: First, to find a way to bring the street back to life. We mix housing with a small number of neighborhood-serving stores that will draw people onto the street. We want to revitalize what’s around it but not steal tenants from other properties on the street. South-Central is crazily overzoned for commercial. It would sustain 10 Hong Kongs. There’s no market for millions of square feet of commercial space, and this dooms much of the land to be moribund.

Second, to find a way to link the street with the neighborhoods. On the west is Vermont Knolls, an impeccably maintained middle-class neighborhood. On the east is a really sad abandoned neighborhood. The key was to provide some stores, like a bakery, dry cleaners or video store, mixed with the same kind of (middle-class) housing that now exists. There are terrific streets like this in San Francisco.

We also wanted to create jobs. We brought in the Business Expansion Network as anchor tenant to create new community-based businesses for our project and for other vacant spaces. Q: Did your meetings with neighbors affect the design?

A: Initially the neighbors were in a state of considerable agitation because they thought this was going to be a 130-unit, low-income rental housing project. We were dissuaded from that by the neighbors, and for very good reasons. There is other affordable housing sitting vacant nearby and it is important for Vermont Knolls to reinforce home ownership.

Q: Why should people who don’t live there care about what happens on Vermont and 81st?

A: We’re all affected by the abandonment of inner-city neighborhoods. Finding a pattern for reinvestment is important to help build up the still-living tissue of a pretty unhealthy part of the city. And dead commercial streets are not a phenomenon restricted to South-Central.