A Wake-Up Call for Westwood Village

A new guard of developers and property owners has quietly crept into Westwood Village, buying up key commercial buildings, hiring architects and leasing out stores in a neighborhood that has seen steady decline for more than a decade.

The changes in ownership are widely regarded as a prelude to an influx of new merchants, marking the best chance for a revitalized Westwood since the 1920s, when the Janss Investment Corp. first announced its plans for a “high-quality shopping complex.”

“You’re going to start seeing people on the streets at 7 o’clock on a Saturday night,” said urban economist Joel Kotkin, a senior fellow at the Pepperdine Institute for Public Policy. “It’s not going to be what it is now--a dead district that has all the excitement of downtown Des Moines--because you’re going to have investors who want to have people shopping.”

Throughout most of its history, Westwood was one of the Southland’s premier shopping and entertainment destinations. But by the early 1990s, the holding companies that dominated the village offered mostly aging properties and unacceptably high rents.

Tony store owners fled for the sparkling Century City Mall and thriving Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, both of which offered better shopping and--in sharp contrast to Westwood--ample cheap parking. T-shirt shops, frozen yogurt joints and empty storefronts prevailed in the village. Shoppers and moviegoers, also made anxious by several highly publicized incidents of violence involving teenagers, dwindled.

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Now the improving economy has brought investors back and encouraged Westwood’s largest property owner to begin selling. Meanwhile, a $4-million program financed by local business owners is adding decorative tile intersections and walkways, a larger pedestrian plaza in the village core and new lighting.

As jackhammers pound and dust flies along ripped-up Westwood Boulevard, many neighbors cheer the long-awaited resurrection and merchants talk optimistically of the future.

“It’s time to come,” said Michael Chow, of Mr. Chow’s restaurant in Beverly Hills, who is planning a new Asian-Italian eatery, called Eurochow, in Westwood’s Dome Building. Secure about the area’s revitalization, Chow signed a 10-year lease on the space and plans to spend $1.5 million in renovations. “When one starts investing, everybody starts, and then it happens, right?”

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The biggest of the new power brokers is real estate developer Larry Taylor, who, along with partners including the Wall Street firm Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette, has snapped up more than $35-million worth of Westwood property in the last eight months and has hopes of being Westwood’s dominant property owner.

“What you have, finally, is an opportunity to do something with properties that have been under-managed for years,” said Taylor, whose group anticipates spending $50 million to buy and improve buildings in Westwood.

Taylor said the area’s physical upgrades are an important part of luring investors back.

Those began late last year. Under the business-financed “Streetscape” program, buckled sidewalks are being replaced, 135 new street trees are being planted and Broxton Avenue is slated for widening. New bike racks, news racks and twinkle lights are on the way.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is taking advantage of the open trenches to upgrade Westwood’s water system for the first time in 50 years.

Work has also begun on a new, 400-space parking garage on Broxton Avenue, touted as the cornerstone in a two-hour free-parking program that began last winter.

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In addition, Westwood--whose reputation for safety was tarnished in 1988 when a young Long Beach woman was shot to death by cross-fire between two South-Central Los Angeles street gangs--last year inaugurated a Police Community Service Center as a home base for UCLA and Los Angeles police officers who patrol the area.

Taylor’s Christina Development Corp. has owned a building on Gayley Avenue, housing a pizza place and a fast-food Asian restaurant, since the mid-1980s.

Although Taylor long wanted an opportunity to buy more in the village--a demographic gold mine wedged between UCLA, Bel-Air, Brentwood and the Wilshire Boulevard office building corridor--he did not want to do it piecemeal.

“It’s the gem of the Westside and the only way to buy it was to buy all of it,” he said.

Westwood was the last undivided ranchero in Los Angeles in the late 1920s, when the Janss family announced plans for a shopping district to take the place of the empty fields of the region. At the same time, the UC Board of Regents chose the same site for its “southern campus,” and a real estate boom was born.

By the mid-1960s, one owner, Manny Bornstein, owned a majority of the village. From his post as honorary patriarch, Bornstein was able to direct Westwood’s transformation into an entertainment destination rather than a community shopping district.

For more than 30 years, the Bornstein family’s Westwood Village Development Co. was not interested in selling--or, seemingly, in stemming the decline of the area.

“The community which had originally shopped in the area fled,” said Greg Fischer, the project director with the Center for the Study of Los Angeles and a third-generation Westwood resident. “All the really good stores that I knew growing up fled, moved, died, whatever.”

As the Bornstein heirs aged into a selling mood, Taylor stepped in to buy.

Since last winter, Taylor has scooped up entire blocks of buildings and says he has brought in Getty Center architect Richard Meier to “upgrade, refurbish, reface and redesign” his new acquisitions.

Other purchases are likely to follow, said Taylor, who owns clusters of property in Beverly Hills and along Santa Monica’s trendy Montana Avenue.

Allan A. Sigel, the Westwood Development Co.’s attorney for more than 20 years, said the Bornstein family delayed redeveloping its property until a legitimate plan for the village emerged.

“Hindsight is always 20/20,” Sigel said. “I counseled ‘Wait and see what they do.’ And we’re not waiting any more because I wish to see it in my lifetime, as does Ms. Bornstein. . . . When Mr. Taylor presented himself, with the proposals for developing the property, we were both impressed with his backing and his acumen.”

Before Taylor moved in, Westwood’s future seemed to hinge on two proposals for large-scale commercial developments that are being pitched for opposite ends of the village.

Village Center Westwood, on a five-acre Glendon Avenue site, would be a $100-million, Mediterranean-style complex with a football-field-size public plaza at its heart.

At the other end of the village, Cineamerica, owner of Mann Theaters, has pitched a separate movie theater project, also hoping to capitalize on Westwood’s once-solid reputation as a movie mecca.

City officials, neighbors and others worried aloud about the two projects’ impact on traffic and the rest of village life. But even as they did, Taylor and the new guard of Westwood developers moved in. For example:

* The Westwood Marquis Hotel was in bankruptcy and in need of improvements in December 1996, when Starwood Lodging Corp. paid $35 million for the property and planned to spend $5 million more on sprucing up the 16-floor hotel on tony Hilgard Avenue.

* Arden Realty said earlier this month that it expects to close escrow on the village’s biggest high-rise, which houses Monty’s restaurant, by the end of September.

From there, Arden intends to spend “tens of millions of dollars” gutting and completely rehabbing the building that now is only 50% occupied, said one source close to the deal, who asked not to be named.

A similar boom is taking place in another previously declining area, the Wilshire Boulevard office corridor, helping to fuel investor interest in the village.

Built mostly in the 1970s, the Westwood office market was beginning to show its age when the late-1980s real estate explosion spurred new office development in Century City, Brentwood and elsewhere in West Los Angeles.

Entertainment-related industries, eager for more and newer space, moved to Burbank and other surrounding areas; law firms and other businesses gradually drifted away as well.

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Once the ‘80s boom went bust, increasing numbers of businesses fled Westwood office buildings, and building owners, unable to refurbish because of declining revenue, lost their properties to their banks, said Todd Later, head of leasing and marketing for Hines Interests, a national high-rise developer.

Later said occupancy in two Wilshire office buildings his firm took over has risen to 95% from 50%.

Entertainment giants such as Viacom/Showtime, unable to expand at its Universal City Texaco Building site, came to one of those two buildings, Oppenheimer Tower, in the spring of 1996.

Showtime promptly took up two floors in Oppenheimer Tower and Viacom took another floor. After a few of the big companies moved in, others followed suit. Americast, a joint venture between Disney and four of the Baby Bells, took 65,000 square feet in the tower in mid-1996. Marvel Entertainment moved into 18,000 square feet of the Westwood building late last year.

“It gives Westwood a great opportunity,” said urban economist Kotkin. “These investors are people who are used to being successful and they don’t have to go to Westwood. They’re choosing to make a business decision.”

In the village, purchases have generated new ventures along the once too-quiet streets.

Just south of Copeland Sports, in the space that once housed Old World Restaurant, owners of the new Maui Beach Cafe have ripped down most of the previous structure to build new space.

Novelty store Aahs is opening a new Westwood Boulevard store in November, featuring home decorations.

“It’s very gratifying to see people invest in the village again for projects we hope will bring the neighbors back,” said Laura Lake, a 21-year resident of Westwood and president of the homeowners group Friends of Westwood. “We want to be the best customers for the village, but it hadn’t been serving us.”