Soaring Dream for an Old Church

Tom Gilmore is either a genius or a madman. Or maybe he’s a bit of both. The developer has a gutsy new vision for the crumbling, 123-year-old St. Vibiana’s Cathedral, in a gritty part of downtown.

Gilmore, who is spending big bucks to rehabilitate a series of dilapidated buildings on 4th Street, this week announced his intention to repair the earthquake-cracked historic structure and make it, along with the adjacent school and rectory buildings, the centerpiece of a multiuse complex. Cathedral Place, as he’s calling the project, could include a school, a small hotel and an adjacent building with 150 apartments, all of which would surround a performing arts center in the old church.

Until now, the future of St. Vibiana’s and its skid row neighborhood looked as bleak as its recent past. After the cathedral was severely damaged in 1994’s Northridge earthquake, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese wanted to demolish it and build a new one on the site. But preservationists who saw St. Vibiana’s as an important link to the city’s past won court battles to save it from the wrecking ball. Meanwhile, the archdiocese found another location downtown and is building its new cathedral there. For three years St. Vibiana’s sat in quiet decline, until Gilmore signed a deal to buy the property for $4.6 million.

Can Gilmore carry off this big plan? He has wide property development experience, from Santa Monica to CityWalk to Pershing Square, but the obstacles are obvious, starting with the $40 million he’ll need to raise for the project’s construction. Given the dreary neighborhood, it’s an open question whether he can find tenants, let alone customers, for the project’s commercial elements, though the adjacent Little Tokyo and Gilmore’s 4th Street redevelopment could provide synergy. Still, it’s good to see that even one of the saddest parts of downtown can spark dreams.