Los Angeles Times Interview : Kathryn Howe : Fighting to Preserving the Past In Los Angeles’ Historic Buildings

In a popular song of a generation ago, “Big Yellow Taxi,” songwriter Joni Mitchell laments the passage of an urban oasis. Mitchell’s hook line--”They paved paradise, put up a parking lot”--refers to the Garden of Allah, a 1920s deco-style hotel that was home to such Hollywood greats as Greta Garbo and Humphrey Bogart. In fact, they put up more than a parking lot at the southwest corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights--it’s now a strip mall, anchored by a McDonald’s restaurant. The loss of beloved structures like the Garden of Allah, the Pan Pacific Auditorium and the Brown Derby restaurant has often been seen as the price of progress in a rapidly growing city too focused on the future to pay much attention to the past.

There are signs that may be changing. Spearheaded by the 16-year-old Los Angeles Conservancy, preservationists are making headway in the city. The Bullock’s store on Wilshire was saved from the wrecking ball, and now houses a law library. In South-Central, the historic Dunbar Hotel once again resounds with the sound of jazz, and downtown, the Mayan Theatre, not long ago a porno house, is now the site of a chic nightclub.

Still, the business of preserving old buildings is a tricky one, and it can often be expensive. The 1994 Northridge earthquake exposed dangerous chinks in a wide variety of historic buildings. The cost of repairing many of these deficiencies is only now coming to light. For example, the headquarters of the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, St. Vibiana Cathedral in downtown, will require a massive retrofitting to be brought up to current seismic codes, and may not survive in a new redesign of cathedral square. And the City Hall, portions of which are now closed to the public, needs a refurbishing that some estimate may cost more than $200 million. These problems, and others, are sparking a heated debate over the costs and benefits of preserving important architectural landmarks in the city.

Participating vigorously in that debate is Kathryn Welch Howe, president of the conservancy’s board of directors. A recent arrival in Los Angeles, she has been involved in historic preservation for two decades, primarily finding new uses for older buildings. Howe’s husband, Con, is director of city planning for Los Angeles, and they have two children. In a conversation at her Westwood home, she talked about the thorny problems of preserving the city’s past, and the social and economic benefits of saving historic structures.

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Question: A big preservation controversy now is St. Vibiana Cathedral. One report estimated that it may cost as much as $22 million to bring the building up to current seismic standards, and many critics of the plan say the result will be a replica rather than a true restoration. Now, five internationally known architects are competing to design a new cathedral square--which may or may not include the old church. What’s the conservancy’s position on this?

Answer: Personally, I think the cathedral is an enormously powerful building. It is one of the earliest remaining Anglo buildings in downtown, and very evocative of Los Angeles 120 years ago. It is one of the few really great spaces in Los Angeles--let’s face it, the city doesn’t have a lot of soaring, inspirational spaces. We think St. Vibiana is a very important building, and so we developed an alternative bracing scheme for the church--which we had costed out by a contractor--and we feel the building could be retrofitted and stabilized for under $5 million. It’s actually a scheme that would be far less intrusive than the scheme proposed by the archdiocese.

Q: Now that a jury has selected the architects to compete for the design, do you expect the old cathedral to be part of the plan?

A: Our hope and expectation is that the architects will be allowed to develop proposals that will include or incorporate the old cathedral in the new complex. This is an extremely important project for Los Angeles, and we feel very strongly that the historic cathedral be part of any redevelopment. It can provide a critically important anchor for the new cathedral square, and for the development of that area of the historic core.

Q: How do you go about convincing all the interested parties--developers, bankers and the community in general--that saving an old building like St. Vibiana is worth the massive investment?

A: The primary way the conservancy works is to first win the hearts and minds of people about the value of Los Angeles’ significant buildings. We’ve done that most successfully through tours. We get people to experience architecture--whether it’s the historic theater district along Broadway, the Civic Center buildings or Chinatown. We take them there and show them, so that they really understand these important buildings, and so they can begin to visualize how these buildings might find new uses.

The next step is to persuade the development and investment community that there is a market. And that is a problem. You can count the number of adaptive-use developers on two fingers. So there just isn’t a broad base of experience here for converting older buildings to new uses, and not very many references for comparative costs and economic benefits.

The buildings that have been adapted in Los Angeles so far tend to be big names--the Wiltern Theater, the Bradbury Building, the Million Dollar Theater. The more ordinary older buildings, say on Broadway or Spring, that could be used for housing, offices or a mixture of those uses--that’s just not commonplace. To change that, you have to convince people there is a market. Sometimes, it’s more expensive to redo old buildings than to build new ones. So we’ve been pushing for tax abatement and other incentives for rehabilitating designated properties.

Q: The most recognized property in need of rehabilitation is City Hall. It is one of the symbols of Los Angeles, but the cost of retrofitting it has been estimated at $220 million. Is this a building Los Angeles needs to preserve at almost any cost?

A: Along with the [Central Public] Library and Union Station, the City Hall was built to give the city a true civic presence. I’ve seen wonderful old pamphlets promoting Los Angeles, and they always have that towering City Hall, with orange groves in the background. So much of the image of the city is tied up in that building, and it is virtually impossible to visualize downtown without it. We think there are cost-effective ways of rehabilitating the building, and we’re working very hard to make sure that they are explored.

Q: One plan involves shutting down all the upper floors and using only the first four. How does that strike you as an option?

A: We feel that’s the poorest of the alternatives. Certainly we don’t want the building demolished, but second to that, having the tower of Los Angeles City Hall mothballed sends a peculiarly negative message to the citizens and the larger world about our ability to address problems in the city. We do live in an earthquake-sensitive area, and we know how to stabilize buildings, and do it at a reasonable cost. We’re working with the city to figure out ways to do just that.

Q: It’s said there are more theater spaces along Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, than anywhere--except New York. Some of those theaters have already been restored, and restoring the others is a big goal of the conservancy. But with so many failures in past attempts to revitalize downtown, will revitalizing these theaters succeed in drawing people to the central city?

A: The conservancy has held a film festival every June for the last nine years--where we open the Broadway theaters and show vintage films and live entertainment. Last year, over 8,000 people traveled from all over Southern California to experience these theaters. And it’s because you can’t experience this anywhere else--you don’t have theaters like this in Woodland Hills and you don’t have them in Orange County. A common comment was, “Gee, I feel as if I’ve gone to Europe.” That’s because these theaters were built to transport people. If we can get a critical mass of theater owners and operators to put on the kinds of film and live entertainment that appeals to the highly segmented audience here, there is a great future for those buildings.

Q: But will the theaters alone be enough to get people into downtown? It didn’t seem to work for the LA Theater Center.

A: Sure. You can’t just say, let’s restore the theaters and they will come. There are many things happening in downtown right now that will contribute to there being a population that is served by these theaters--not to mention that there is a very active Latino population using them right now. But things like the Grand Central Market, the plans the state has made to reuse a number of historic buildings for state offices and the restoration of Angels Flight are very important to the health of downtown.

We need more public policy commitments to developers--they need to know the streets will be improved and security will be provided before they invest in restoring older buildings. But I see a number of things happening already that are beginning to build a foundation so that developers can see it’s a reasonable risk.

Q: What do you see as the great successes of the conservancy in its 16-year history?

A: The conservancy came into being over the library. And the work that was done on the library is impeccable. It is one of Los Angeles’ most important buildings, it has been beautifully restored, and it has an absolutely contemporary usage--it really proves restoration can work. The west lawn provides a very important space for downtown--almost an oasis. The library has contributed to a feeling that people can actually “enjoy” downtown.

We’ve managed to save the May Co. building at Wilshire and Fairfax from demolition. We were able to convince both the city leaders and the general public that the building was worthy of preservation, as one of the great national examples of Art Deco architecture. Our other successes include the Bullocks on Wilshire. The owner removed all the fixtures, and because we’ve been running tours there for years, our volunteers knew every inch of that building. They were able to make out a list of over 400 things that were gone, and we were able to get everything back. Now, Southwestern University Law School is using it as their law library, with most of the original fixtures in place.

Q: What do you count among the most tragic losses?

A: Many preservation organizations find there is a sort of sacrificial building that brings people together and raises awareness of the need to save important structures. I think here in Los Angeles it was the Pan Pacific Auditorium. There are near-misses, like the old Herald-Examiner building, which is used for film shoots, but still doesn’t have a secure future. But we are working to make sure that it, and other important buildings, don’t go the way of the Pan Pacific.

Q: In many cities, organizations like yours are very powerful and can literally stop the wrecking ball. But the L.A. Conservancy is simply a volunteer, advisory organization, without much in the way of legal clout. Are you satisfied with that, or would you like a more codified role?

A: The biggest difference between here and other cities where I’ve lived and worked is that our power is kind of in our powerlessness. We don’t have the kind of regulatory framework enjoyed by many other cities and states. So that means we have to work very hard to convince people that preservation is important, and part of their self-interest. We’ve done a pretty good job of that--we have about 5,000 members. We’ve developed and maintained a reputation of being responsible. We do not take maverick positions on buildings, and we try to recognize the needs of owners and developers. So one big part of our power is in that people feel they can trust us.

It’s not a perfect world, though. We need more incentives--whether it’s for the individual homeowner, or someone investing in a large, historic building. We’re working to change public policy--for instance, until last year, historic buildings could be torn down for speculative development, before a new building permit was issued. We’ve been able to change that, and that’s an important step toward saving significant buildings. Overall, I’d say we have very good support for our efforts from members of the City Council.

Q: One odd thing about Los Angeles preservation has to do with determining what is a historical building. We often get up in arms over a coffee shop, or a car wash. How is the way we define an architecturally significant building different from the rest of the country?

A: Preservation issues really must be decided on a very local level. It has to be based upon the history and evolution of the given locality. In Los Angeles, one of the city’s great contributions has been the architecture of Modernism. Here, the drive-in restaurants, the car washes, are architectural landmarks. They endure because they tell us about the city at that point in time past, and because they are still very usable. So while there may be buildings that are not worthy of preservation, they should be removed with precision-like quality, and you shouldn’t have full-scale removal of buildings, and you particularly have to be careful with buildings that are unique to the city and indigenous to history and setting.*