The Fight’s Over at City Hall : West Hollywood Gets New Digs, Ending Years of Squabbling

Eight years after an international competition came up with exotic and fanciful ideas for a new civic center, city officials in West Hollywood are settling for plain vanilla--a newly redecorated office building in the center of town.

If the move goes as planned, City Hall will leave its old, rented quarters in three separate office buildings over the weekend and open for business at 8300 Santa Monica Blvd. at 8 a.m. Tuesday morning.

“The show is over and the monkey is dead,” read a hand-lettered sign that some jokester stuck up on the front counter after a frenzy of packing last week. “Clear out!”

The new City Hall, in a newly purchased and renovated building at the corner of Sweetzer Avenue, is said to be roomier and more convenient, offering “one-stop shopping” for citizens in their dealings with the local bureaucracy.

The move comes as a peaceful anticlimax to years of fighting over how best to house the municipal offices for the city of 36,000, which was a county-run unincorporated enclave until 1984.

Soon after incorporation, City Council members proposed a $25-million civic center to be built in West Hollywood Park, near the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Station on San Vicente Boulevard.

An international competition brought in ideas from as far away as Czechoslovakia and Zimbabwe. One competition entry consisted of a grandiose civic center topped by a huge glass statue of Eve on a glass American flag. Some council members resisted the civic center proposal, saying that it would be too expensive and deprive the city of much-needed parkland.

The proposal was eventually rejected by voters in a referendum.

“This City Hall ends a long and contentious chapter in the city’s history. It was very, very bloody,” said City Councilman Steve Martin, who was active in the effort to keep the civic center out of the park.

“Now we have a happy ending where almost everybody is pleased with the result,” he said.

In its new digs, the city’s mortgage payments will be $100,000 less a year than its previous rental costs, a saving that is expected to increase as rents increase in the future.

The city is putting $8.3 million into the project. Plans also call for the construction of a 400-space parking structure on the site of the old P&J; Major Brands gas station on the north side of Santa Monica Boulevard.

“It’s kind of fun to be part of the revitalization of that part of town,” said Gay Forbes, the city’s community development director, dressed down for moving day in a T-shirt reading “WEST HOLLYWOOD--Where the Women are Strong and the Men are Pretty.”

The old location, near a popular gym on the western end of town, has already been rented to new tenants, she noted, while the new building had been virtually empty for months before the city took it over.

She said that plans are under way to modernize and expand a neighboring supermarket to take advantage of the influx of 200 city workers and hundreds more members of the public.

Smaller merchants hope to benefit too, said Ann O, manager of a dry-cleaning shop nearby.

“The street is looking much nicer,” she said, gesturing across Santa Monica Boulevard to the brightly painted new city building, which has been gussied up with gleaming steel trim and windows that pop out beyond the old building lines. “It’s starting to get a lot cleaner, which is good, very good.”