Another Retail Center Planned for Hollywood
A Beverly Hills developer today will unveil designs for a $50-million Hollywood retail project that would also redevelop the venerable Doolittle Theatre as a center for locally based productions.
Regent Properties, which has been working on plans for a retail complex at Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street for months, has secured its first tenants and will present designs for an Art Deco-style structure at a Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency hearing. The project was designed by the Venice-based Jerde Partnership, which also planned Universal CityWalk.
The CRA will examine the environmental impact of Regent’s project, which already has the support of Mayor Richard Riordan and Jackie Goldberg, Hollywood’s City Council representative. Regent will seek the approval of the CRA board and the City Council at a series of hearings that will conclude in March.
If Regent clears those hurdles, it will begin construction in June, complete the project by summer of next year and open the first major retail complex in Hollywood in nearly a decade.
Regent has negotiated lease agreements with Good Guys, Borders Books & Music and Mann Theatres for the planned three-level center, dubbed Hollywood Marketplace. The complex is to have about 30 shops and restaurants. Regent is negotiating with other potential tenants--apparel retailers and restaurant operators among them--for remaining space in the planned 225,000-square-foot complex.
The site is ripe for new projects because Hollywood is underserved by retailers, said Jack Kyser, chief economist of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.
“There is a lot of buying power in Hollywood and the Hollywood Hills,” Kyser said. “Many of these residents currently travel to the Beverly Center or to Glendale Galleria. Any broad-based retail development in Hollywood would be successful.”
Hollywood Marketplace would replace a vacant two-story strip mall and the fire-ravaged TAV Building, the former home of the Merv Griffin Studio. The site is bounded by Sunset on the south, Selma Avenue on the north, Morningside Street on the west and Vine on the east.
The site is just south of the Doolittle Theatre. Under the Regent plan, the CRA would buy the Doolittle from UCLA and convey it to the developer as part of the price the city would pay to acquire a 1,000-vehicle parking structure Regent hopes to build at the Marketplace retail site.
Regent plans to install 5,000 square feet of retail space along Ivar Street and Selma Avenue, just west of the Doolittle. The company also plans to erect two buildings with 20,000 square feet of office space just north of the Doolittle, the current site of Doolittle’s surface parking. A pedestrian walkway lined with 5,000 square feet of restaurant space linking Ivar and Vine streets would separate the new office buildings and the theater. That part of the project would be designed by M2A, a Hollywood-based architecture firm.
Regent also plans to refurbish the 72-year-old Doolittle and make it available to local theater companies for productions four to five days a week. A play called “Art” is currently at the theater, but the facility has not been regularly used since the Ahmanson Theatre subscription series ended a six-year run at the Doolittle in 1995.
If approved and built, Regent’s Marketplace complex would be the first major retail project since the 1991 opening of the Hollywood Galaxy, a retail and theater complex on Hollywood Boulevard at Sycamore Avenue. That largely vacant complex has been a failure, but its prospects are improving as Hollywood shows signs of economic recovery, real estate observers say.
For example, TrizecHahn, a Toronto-based real estate firm, recently started work on a $385-million retail and entertainment complex on Hollywood next to Mann’s Chinese Theatre. Many believe that project, scheduled to open late next year, will be a major tourist draw.
Regent’s Hollywood Marketplace will complement the TrizecHahn project by providing much-needed retail services to Hollywood residents, said Deputy Mayor Rocky Delgadillo.
“Retail developers have focused largely on the tourism dollar in the past,” he said. “This focuses on neighborhood dollars.”
Another planned Hollywood development was announced Wednesday. Chris Breed, a former principal of West Hollywood’s popular Roxbury night club, signed a lease to open a high-end restaurant called Mezzo Supper Club in a former warehouse on Cahuenga Boulevard--two blocks from the proposed Hollywood Marketplace site. A spring opening is anticipated.
