CRITIQUE : Center Enriches Santa Monica’s City Scene

One of the most satisfying pleasures of living in a city is the wide variety of sights, sounds and people you encounter in the course of the day. Where suburbs offer mile after mile of the same types of houses and shopping malls populated by people of one particular social class, the truly urban scene is, at best, a marvelous human and architectural mixture.

This sort of interesting city scene is all too rare in Los Angeles, even on the affluent Westside. It’s even rarer to find a downtown environment where people of different social and economic levels actually live as well as come to work, shop, see a movie or patronize a restaurant. Mostly, Los Angeles’ commercial areas lack any feeling of community--the presence of a population that doesn’t retreat to the suburbs to go home.

Downtown Santa Monica is one of the few places on the Westside that offer a lively human and architectural mixture, a truly urban scenario. As an act of policy, Santa Monica has deliberately fostered the creation of a city core that mixes high- and low-income housing with shops, cafes and movie theaters on the streets surrounding its popular Third Street Promenade. The result is a bustling, well-rounded urban neighborhood more reminiscent of San Francisco than much of Los Angeles.

One of the reasons why downtown Santa Monica is so lively is the city’s intention to make a place there for citizens of all classes and economic conditions. Though Santa Monica is an affluent city, its social conscience strives to counter the tide of prosperity that tends to wash away the less-privileged layers of society.

The new Second Street Center in downtown Santa Monica is a prime example of that enlightened public policy in action. Superbly designed by local architect Frederick Fisher, the center provides 44 units in a single-room-occupancy hotel slotted into a narrow lot beside a city parking garage.

Apart from providing affordable accommodations in a high-rent district, the center is unusual in several other ways. It includes a mix of ground-floor shops in a residential building, and it has no provision for parking.

“The absence of parking is a deliberate ploy to encourage pedestrians downtown,” Fisher explained. “Getting people to walk around in this car-oriented city is a key to creating a vital urban core.” Besides, as Fisher points out, the center is located next to a parking garage.

The center was built by the Community Corp. of Santa Monica, assisted by the city, which also donated the 50-by-150-foot site, a former parking lot. The Community Corp. provides new affordable housing and renovates existing residential properties.

The rooms, intended for single people, are arranged on four floors above a double-height ground floor. The Second Street frontage of the ground floor is rented out for commercial use. The rear, facing the alley, is occupied by the offices of the Community Corp. The roof has a sun deck with a 360-degree panorama of the city.

The second floor contains a large community room and roof terrace for the residents’ use, plus a laundry and a kitchen for parties and other communal events.

Each 325-square-foot room has a kitchenette, an ample bathroom designed to accommodate a disabled person and a pleasant living-sleeping space with a projecting bay. The bay creates the feeling of a room within a room, where the occupant can place a bed, a table or an armchair and enjoy the splendid views of the city or toward the ocean a couple of blocks to the west.

To avoid an institutional feeling, Fisher has skillfully grouped the rooms into separate blocks. Each block has four rooms. One block faces the street, another faces the alley and the third faces north over the adjacent rooftops. Big windows bring the views into the rooms and make them seem larger than their minimal size.

Renting at $339 a month, the rooms are offered to local citizens who earn less than 40% of the median income determined by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. The current occupants include a wide variety of ages, plus a number who are disabled.

Throughout the center, the finishes are simple and hard-wearing, yet pleasant. The rooms have floors of patterned vinyl tiles and carpet and pastel-painted stucco walls. A plywood wainscot along one wall adds a touch of warmth. The corridors are partly open, to catch the ocean breezes and create a natural cross ventilation, especially in the hot summer months.

The Second Street frontage reveals Fisher’s special skills as a designer. Noted for a number of local studios and art galleries, including the L.A. Louver Gallery in Venice and the Eli Broad Family Foundation building in Santa Monica, Fisher produces designs that are distinguished by a clarity of expression and a kind of artful simplicity.

These qualities are manifest in the center’s front facade. To break down the scale of the building and make it more intimate, Fisher has contrasted projecting bays painted white with a recessed background painted a dark terra cotta. At the northern end, he has designed a slim, ochre-colored tower to echo the older towers that punctuate the downtown skyline. The overall effect is to make what could have been a bulky facade into what seems like a row of smaller buildings clustered together.

To add a playful touch, Fisher has designed the wall over the main entrance in a shape reminiscent of a high-heeled shoe. “This is a high-stepping town,” he said with a smile, “and I wanted to give a hint of that, even in this down-market building.”

Mary Hennessy, the center’s manager, claims that the design of the center has greatly encouraged a sense of community. “Residents get together here,” she said. “Younger people help the elderly, groups gather to chat on the decks and balconies, and everyone seems to share in a feeling of being at home here, rather than just renters in some anonymous hotel.”