Another Landmark on a Fast Track to Desecration

There are places in Southern California where people go for transcendence. The track, it can safely be said, ain’t one of ‘em. Still, there was always something about the Santa Anita racetrack that could leave a visitor transported. You didn’t have to like betting or racing or even horses to love its friezes of galloping thoroughbreds and ornate balconies. It was--if such a word can be applied to a haven for chain-smoking gamblers in really bad sport coats--elegant.

Notice the past tense. This is because, even as you read, dear Southern Californian, construction workers are running around the gem of Arcadia--a state historical landmark--busily obliterating Santa Anita’s sweeping green-and-tan Art Deco facade. A preliminary face lift that the new owner, Canadian auto parts mogul Frank Stronach, sold to the city as “remodeling of the interior of the grandstand area,” turns out to involve big-time--and possibly unlawful--uglying up.

You have to go out to the place to experience the full uglification, to get the true flavor of what’s at stake. You have to drive, say, east on Colorado Boulevard, where the street is flanked by tall pines and palm trees and thick, pink and white oleander hedges, so lush you could believe you’re in some grander era when--whoops!--the foliage parts to jerk you back into the present era of strip malls and stucco motels.

But then there’s the sign for Santa Anita Park, so understated and fancy there behind the beds of marigolds on its low green wall. You turn in, and you get, again, that fleeting sense of something old and grand and palmy--which fades again as you hit the massive parking lot. And just as you’re starting to think again that this is how the past is here, a mirage in a desert of asphalt and futon outlets, it’s back: the Depression-era gamble that was named for the daughter of another mogul, the long-ago Lucky Baldwin, who created Arcadia.

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Green grass, greener benches, long white fences, fountains. And behind them, a kind of racetrack palace, designed by Gordon H. Kaufmann, the architect who did the Hoover Dam, the Times Mirror building, the Greystone mansion. A track so classy that, when it opened in 1934, the Times’ sportswriter wrote of its Turf Club that “if you scratched someone, they would bleed purple.” The track where the Marx Brothers’ classic, “A Day At The Races,” was filmed.

This is the feeling you get, and it’s that rarest and most valuable of sensations for a Southern Californian--a genuine sense of history and place. It’s an experience that, increasingly, is available only to the rich and the connected--members of, say, the old-money California Club downtown, or those who can summer in stately Montecito or buy 1920s movie star estates.

For the rest of us, there are only drives down the occasional historic block, and visits to landmarks like Santa Anita and the Coliseum (another treasure that moguls keep insisting is impossible to save unless it’s destroyed). And a glimpse of what happens when the moguls aren’t forced to be as public-spirited as Lucky Baldwin is now available at the south entrance to Santa Anita Park.

For there, to the right of the famous Art Deco entry, two six-story concrete monstrosities are being grafted onto the gracious facade. Picture Rita Hayworth with two concrete blocks coming out of her cheekbones. These are elevator towers that will eventually carry patrons to a new finish-line restaurant. City documents imply that they’re inside the grandstand. They ain’t.

And, according to the Los Angeles Conservancy, which flipped when it got wind of the construction, they ain’t legal either. By law, changes to state historical landmarks can’t even be approved without an environmental impact review. “A stealth project,” is how the $20-million first phase of the Santa Anita renovation was described by the conservancy’s director of preservation issues, Ken Bernstein. Though the conservancy had planned to protest the rehab’s second phase, which involves, among other things, a massive amphitheater and a Wild West-theme restaurant, they’d figured this first part would be pretty tame.

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City officials who OKd the towers say they are, too, legal, and will be painted and decorated to blend in. This I gotta see. Yes, the track needs spiffing up, and attendance has plummeted, and that’s a big deal in a small city. But talk about docile. No wonder the track management donated $25,000 to the current state Assembly campaign of one Arcadia councilman and put another councilman on its board.

All for an absentee big shot who, when he last pitched his project, kept using words like “Vegas” and “suck people in.” The conservancy should sue. There’s too little public grace here, and too much is being left to the whims of private moguls who seem increasingly able to think only in the present tense.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.