For Sale, 25 Years Later : Owners of Cottage Spurned Design Center’s Offers; Now the ‘Blue Whale’ May Not Bite
They held out. But did they miss out?
The owners of a tiny West Hollywood cottage who refused 25 years ago to sell their place to developers of the huge Pacific Design Center will soon find out.
Emma and Otilia Diaz have finally decided to sell the 900-square-foot shack that sits in the middle of the entryway to the 750,000-square-foot building, fondly known as the “Blue Whale.”
Question is: Has the shack become a white elephant?
Officials of the landmark Pacific Design Center, which struggled in vain in the early 1970s to persuade the sisters to sell, say they are no longer anxious to acquire the holdout parcel.
The little lot is of little use to anyone else since it is surrounded on three sides by the Design Center and lacks space for on-site parking required of new commercial businesses.
Caught in the middle is Hugo Castaneda, the man who has operated a metal-plating business in the wood-framed Melrose Avenue shack for 27 years.
“I don’t think anybody knows what’s going to happen,” said Castaneda, who refurbishes old door knobs, light fixtures and other home furnishings by dipping them in vats of heated nickel, brass and copper that bubble away inside the tiny cottage.
Castaneda, now in his 70s, said he hadn’t laid eyes on the cottage’s owners for 25 years until they stopped in three months ago. The sisters had come to say they were reluctantly raising his rent from $450 a month to $1,000.
“I said, ‘Well, I cannot pay that much.’ And the next day they put up the ‘For Sale’ sign,” Castaneda said.
The Diaz family was in no mind to sell in the early 1970s when developers began mapping plans to build the West’s largest interior design and home decoration showroom center.
Most of the northeast corner of Melrose and San Vicente Boulevard had been a railroad switching yard. An antiques store, a lumber yard and a few small retail shops shared the block with Castaneda’s plating business.
Everybody agreed to sell out to the Design Center. Except the Diaz sisters.
“They wouldn’t talk with us,” recalled Ron Birtcher, the lead developer of the Design Center, who now heads his own Laguna Niguel real estate company.
Representatives made repeated efforts during a two-year period to buy the 50-year-old cottage and its 1,750-square-foot lot. Birtcher said he no longer remembers the amount being offered, except that it was “an enormous number.”
“I’m not sure what their rationale was. Maybe they were holding out for more money. But there never was even a counteroffer. It was a crisis issue to us--we were willing to pay anything.”
Original plans by architect Cesar Pelli called for the 530-foot-long Pacific Design Center building to be set off by sycamore trees and a 350-foot planter filled with blooming bougainvillea that would contrast with the glass-sided blue behemoth’s south entrance.
Instead, its entry plaza centerpiece ended up being a tar paper-roofed shack.
Landscapers erected a six-foot fence around it and hastily planted a U-shaped line of dense-growing, evergreen ficus in hopes of screening it from the Design Center’s chi-chi customers and tenants.
Nonetheless, humble Hugo’s Plating quickly became a humorous symbol of the contrast between the new Los Angeles and the old.
“It’s a kind of whimsical part of our landscape,” said Joel Polachek, the Design Center’s chief operations officer.
Polachek said brokers representing the Diaz sisters immediately contacted him when the women finally decided to sell. He said the asking price was $375,000. “But it’s nothing we’re actively pursuing.”
Polachek predicted that the tiny lot will be difficult to sell to an outsider because it lacks room for parking.
But John Tronson, a realty agent who represents the sisters, argues that the site would be perfect for “very high-end retail or a bistro.” He said his “phone has rung off the hook” with offers.
Sale of the property has been delayed, however, by the recent death of a third Diaz sister, Tronson said.
Through Tronson and fellow realty agent Chris Bonbright, the sisters declined this week to discuss the property. They did not answer knocks at the door of their Larchmont-area home.
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The Design Center was built with the approval of Los Angeles County, which governed the area before the incorporation of West Hollywood in 1984. Under current city zoning, a building 90 feet high could be built on the holdout lot if the developer could meet municipal off-street parking requirements.
City Community Development Director Ray Reynolds said the buyer of the lot would need to find empty parking spaces nearby to lease in order to build any size shop or restaurant--a difficult task.
The future of the tiny parcel has begun stirring debate.
Design Center tenant Jerry Agajohn’s Oriental rug shop overlooks the rear of Hugo’s Plating. He said he hopes the center buys the lot, tears down the shack and paves it over.
“It’s an eyesore right now,” he said. And forget building another store or cafe out front: The Design Center already contains all of the shops and eateries that it needs, Agajohn said.
Screenwriter Jonathan Roberts said he hopes nobody buys the place.
“Hugo’s little building makes the Design Center,” said Roberts, who stopped in the other day to have some window fixtures from his Hollywood Hills home replated with chrome.
“His little building brings the big building down to street level.”
Castaneda said he will reluctantly retire if his building is sold. He said it is doubtful he could afford the rent on a new place, even if he was lucky enough to find a location that allows metal plating work.
He said he will miss the handshake way of doing business in his jumbled shop, where business cards are tucked into cracks in its wooden walls and a pair of ancient fans whir continuously in a futile effort to draw away the vats’ heat and fumes.
“I don’t regret a day in this business,” he said. “You’d be surprised how nice people have been. My customers, people here in neighborhood.”
And for 25 years, his reclusive landlords.
