Segerstroms Offer Land for Concert Hall

In a major step toward a full-scale Orange County cultural arts center, the Segerstrom family has tentatively agreed to donate land for a $100-million concert hall and museum complex.

The Orange County Performing Arts Center has a “verbal agreement in principle” with the Segerstroms to transfer a nearby 7-acre parcel--worth about $16 million--to the center.

“We need to work out the details. . .that will be consistent with their extraordinary vision and desire for a world-class facility,” Mark Chapin Johnson, the center’s chairman, said Thursday.

Henry Segerstrom, co-managing partner of C.J. Segerstrom & Sons, which developed the landmark South Coast Plaza retail center and donated the property to launch the Performing Arts Center, couldn’t be reached for comment.

About half of the 7 acres at Town Center Drive and Avenue of the Arts in Costa Mesa would be devoted to a concert hall, with the remainder earmarked for some type of world-class art museum, Johnson said.

“It could be a Getty, it could be a Metropolitan Museum of Art, it could be an Orange County Museum of Art,” Johnson said. “We’re not presuming anything at this point.”

Johnson estimated that once the property is deeded to the center sometime this spring, it would take about two years to raise enough money--he declined to say how much--to begin construction of the project.

“If the doors were to open five years from this spring, we’d be the happiest people in the country,” he said.

The biggest challenge to building the new complex, Johnson said, will be the fund-raising drive to gather the estimated $100 million.

“An expansion of this magnitude is going to have the support not only of the arts community, but from big corporations, like we’ve never seen before,” Johnson said.

“This isn’t going to be Bill Lyon, Tim Strader and George Argyros sitting down for coffee and each coming up with a couple of million apiece,” he said, referring to three prominent Orange County developers.

The Performing Arts Center, made up of 3,000-seat Segerstrom Hall and 300-seat Founders Hall, was built entirely from private contributions. The $72.3-million complex opened in 1987.

Officials at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach have discussed relocating to a larger building at a more accessible site, perhaps near South Coast Plaza, for roughly two years.

But President Charles D. Martin said Thursday that the museum had received no offers from center officials to use the Segerstrom land.

A museum committee has been analyzing the feasibility of relocation, Martin said, and if such an offer were presented, “it is one we will need to really consider very seriously.”

Center officials have long included in their expansion talks the local organizations--Pacific Symphony, the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, Opera Pacific and others--that would use a new hall. Officials with those groups reached Thursday had not heard about the land transfer, but cheered the news.

“We’re delighted,” said Janice Johnson, president of the Pacific Symphony, the county’s most prominent musical ensemble. “We’ll work real hard to make sure this concert hall is built.”

In fact, the board of the orchestra, which would likely be a major tenant of a second hall, drafted a resolution a year ago to help fund the building, Johnson said. However, neither the orchestra nor the Philharmonic Society, which presents musical groups from around the world in the center’s two halls, had been asked for any formal assurance of how often they might rent an additional venue.

Dean Corey, the Philharmonic Society’s executive director, said the group probably could expand by 20 its current slate of 35 performances.

“We could survive without” a second hall, Corey said, “but I don’t think the center thinks the center can do without it. That’s the thing.”

The new project would expand what is now Orange County’s unofficial theater district. The South Coast Repertory Theatre is across Town Center Drive from the Performing Arts Center. .

The new complex likely won’t require additional parking if its events are coordinated with the Performing Arts Center, Johnson said. Patrons of center events park in the five-level garage at Center Tower and at the Westin South Coast Plaza hotel.

The addition of a concert hall and museum has been discussed for years, but “we wanted to ensure that the center has a very strong foundation in both its financial resources and operations, as well as its professional and board leadership,” said Johnson, founder of Chapin Medical Co., a Corona pharmaceuticals maker.

“Within the past several months, I feel we have accomplished those goals,” he said.

An architectural firm has not yet been chosen to design the new complex, Johnson said.

Times Staff Writer Jan Herman contributed to this report.