Rebirth for Old Car Factory Site

In a noisy arcade on a recent Saturday morning, Benjamin Osuyos expertly pounded the buttons of his favorite video game, pummeling superhuman foes with steely precision.

The 15-year-old boy with spiked hair was too young to remember another era, filled with its own precise mechanics, that once played out on the spot where he stood.

Ten, 20, even 50 years ago, the sprawling Van Nuys Boulevard complex that now houses the shopping center where Benjamin dukes it out with animated gladiators was a living symbol of the Valley’s industrial might. There, on a 100-acre parcel owned by the General Motors Corp., a massive automotive plant with an overhead conveyor belt more than three miles long spit out 50 cars and trucks an hour.

Once a car-making hub second only to Detroit, Los Angeles is now better known for driving automobiles than building them. Today, some of the young parents roaming the aisles of Home Depot or Babies R Us at the former site of the GM factory know nothing of the dreary days after the plant closed in 1992, taking 2,600 jobs with it.

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With a cluster of big-box stores, restaurants, a 16-screen movie theater and 800,000 square feet of industrial space at the new center--called “The Plant” in honor of its past--Panorama City is on the rebound, residents and real estate brokers say. With 1,175,000 square feet of space, only 1,500 remains to be spoken for.

“This is a very exciting part of the Valley,” said Bert Abel, a retail specialist at Grubb & Ellis. “The market is very strong. Rents have gone up dramatically there.”

Since the 375,000-square-foot shopping center opened last fall at the former auto plant site, rent and sale prices for commercial space in the surrounding neighborhood have jumped at least 25%, according to Abel and other brokers.

Home Depot, meanwhile, has refurbished a park on nearby Blythe Street--a strip made infamous by gang warfare--while crime has largely failed to materialize at the mall.

“I think the whole thing has just been a marvelous improvement,” said Robert Hampton, a frequent customer at the new HomeTown Buffet restaurant, where a line of patrons stretched out the door. Business has increased steadily as more customers realize The Plant is there, retailers said.

At Home Depot, an anchor store for the shopping center, sales are up 20% from a year ago and the store has added about 20 new employees, said Carol Schumacher, a company spokeswoman.

OfficeMax, another prominent business at the mall, is also “pleased with the performance at that store,” said Mike Weisbarth, vice president of corporate communications. As did Home Depot, OfficeMax refused to release specific sales data for its Panorama City store.

With brick-lined sidewalks, palm trees, and an outdoor food court tucked between the stores and the theater, the mall has become a popular destination for families.

“We patronize a lot of the stores and we’ve gone to the movies here,” said Don Buth, a Van Nuys resident who was buying lightbulbs at the giant hardware store with his son. “It’s just very convenient.”

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There is only one vacancy in the retail area--a small 1,500-square-foot spot--and all of the original tenants remain, said Daniel F. Selleck, president of Selleck Development Group, which built the retail portion of the property.

All of the space earmarked for industrial development has been claimed. Three buildings are now under construction, under the direction of developer Robert D. Voit. A manufacturer of wheelchair equipment has already opened.

The city committed about $4 million in federal funds to spur the renaissance, and the private developers invested about $75 million.

“To get a brand new building, we would have had to go 20 miles from here,” said Dale Talbert of Veratex, a Van Nuys company that makes bed linens and window treatments. Instead, Veratex is spending $7 million to build a 140,000-square-foot factory to its specifications at The Plant.

Founded as a planned community in 1947, Panorama City has long had its fortunes entwined with the GM plant, which opened in 1948.

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For decades the area thrived as a suburban enclave of low and middle-income families, many of whom worked in the manufacturing sector. At its peak in the late 1970s, the GM plant employed more than 5,100 workers. But the distance from Midwestern suppliers and most of GM’s customers drove up shipping costs in the Valley. Poor sales of the racy Camaros and Firebirds led to layoffs in the mid-1980s, and the plant finally closed in 1992 in the midst of a recession.

Nelson Belanger worked at the plant for 30 years, hiring workers and supervising computer systems in the company’s personnel department. Today, the 61-year-old Mission Hills man reports to the same location on Van Nuys boulevard for work--only now he’s selling screwdrivers and power saws in the hardware section of the new Home Depot.

“It’s like coming home again,” said Belanger, who came out of retirement to take the sales job. Selleck, the developer, estimates The Plant’s new stores and factories will generate 2,000 jobs. Still, many of the retail positions don’t pay nearly as well as the GM jobs did.

Belanger said while most GM workers were making about $20 an hour when the plant closed, the starting wage at Home Depot is about $8 an hour. At the nearby Mann movie theater, some workers said they make less than $6 per hour.

Despite the brightening economic picture in Panorama City, some residents are still nursing a sore spot over a $10-million police and fire complex that city officials proposed, but never delivered, for the mall.

Then-City Councilman Richard Alarcon, now a state senator, announced the planned public safety hub alongside Police Chief Bernard Parks and Fire Chief William Bamattre at an upbeat press conference two years ago. But the 5-acre parcel officials said GM would donate to the city remains vacant.

“If there’s one dark spot . . . it’s that GM has not upheld their commitment to give that property to the city,” said Alarcon, a longtime supporter of redeveloping the site. Alarcon and city officials said the company insisted on keeping environmental reports about the site confidential, a stipulation the city, a public entity, could not agree to.

Gerald Holmes, a GM spokesman, said the confidentiality agreement is a standard part of the company’s land transactions and that the property is not contaminated.

Don Schultz, president of the Van Nuys Homeowners Assn., contended the city simply would prefer to build a police station elsewhere--such as the Mission Hills site for which the council recently approved a $4-million down payment.

“The community was promised that 5 acres [at The Plant] for a police presence,” Schultz said. Los Angeles Police Department bicycle patrols and the community service center, staffed by a private security firm, are inadequate, according to Schultz.

But so far, crime at the resurrected plant site has been confined to a few car burglaries and shoplifting incidents, Sgt. Rudy Lopez of the LAPD’s Van Nuys Division said.

The only noticeable “violence” at the mall last week was the karate chops Benjamin, the video game junkie, was dealing his cartoon attackers.

“I come here all the time, because of this game,” Benjamin said between punches.

In a quiet office a few doors down, a guard keeping an eye on the security cameras throughout the mall agreed that all in all, life at The Plant is less than eventful.

“There haven’t been a whole lot of problems,” guard Edgar Bonilla said. “I thought I was coming into a war zone, but it’s been a pretty mellow place to work.”