Redondo Beach Puts Dreams on Waterfront

Despite their community’s reputation as a classic Southern California beach town, Redondo Beach residents and city officials have long lamented their lack of a thriving downtown by their pier and harbor.

Redondo’s King Harbor area, at the city’s northern border, has never achieved the success of similar beachfront commercial districts in nearby Hermosa and Manhattan beaches. Despite millions in redevelopment dollars spent there since the 1970s, there are relatively few tourist attractions in the streets behind Redondo’s marina and its pier. The landscape is dominated by a hulking power plant and stretches of empty lots beneath transmission wires.

That all may be about to change. Officials say they are taking advantage of the scaling back of the 52-acre power plant and other potential developments east of the harbor to conjure dreams of tourist dollars, luxury hotels and high-tech businesses in an ocean-oriented downtown area.

An Urban Land Institute report made public recently sketched preliminary plans--with no price tags attached--for sunny plazas, bike paths and footpaths, parking, restaurants, shops and luxury housing in the mile-square area bounded by Herondo Street, Pacific Coast Highway, Torrance Boulevard and the ocean.

The goal is to rectify the city’s acknowledged mistake in tearing down much of its old, colorful but deteriorating downtown.

“This is a second chance, a second coming,” said City Councilman Gerard Bisignano. “This is a very, very big deal for our city.”

But before they can begin sipping cappuccinos at waterfront cafes, city officials and residents will have to get to specific plans and costs. Then the city will have to choose from among the many developers who have expressed interest in financing and building various portions of the projects. And they will have to deal with the reality that the Redondo Generating Station will remain, albeit in a reduced form.

Officials know this won’t be smooth sailing, especially in a city haunted by development missteps. Some residents already have begun grumbling that city officials are too focused on commercial and tourist projects and have not considered the community’s need for parks and affordable housing.

“The area is definitely an eyesore. We’re going to be living with what they do for a very long time. I hope they can build something that is good for residents and not just for the tourists and the businesspeople,” said Jeannette Boston, who has lived in Redondo Beach for 25 years and has watched as home prices in the area climbed.

“Improving the look of the community is good, but traffic is very bad already, and I don’t know how my kids are ever going to be able to afford to live in their own hometown,” Boston said.

She is one of more than 400 residents of Redondo and surrounding areas who attended a series of community meetings held this spring with Urban Land Institute planners.

The organization’s resulting plan, released last week, includes these suggestions:

* Turn Catalina Avenue, the area’s main, and now very unglamorous, north-south street, into a “grand boulevard” of shops and condominiums and some offices.

* Put in parks and plazas and open up ocean views in the area east of the harbor.

* Extend the Strand bike path that runs through Manhattan Beach and Hermosa Beach but cuts away from the ocean near the power plant.

Planners said the pier would probably experience its own revitalization, once the power plant area is gussied up. Some residents complain that the pier is tawdry and unsafe, despite some recent improvements and the presence of popular, upscale restaurants, which share the pier with bars, arcades and trinket shops.

Tim Bazley, a San Pedro engineer and planner who works with the Urban Land Institute, said revitalizing that section of Redondo “will not be easy” but he believes it can be done.

“The peculiarities of Redondo are the existing land uses. You’ve got the power plant and you’ve got intense residential areas immediately adjacent to what you’re trying to develop. Those limit the potential for tourism,” he said.

Small-scale projects, such as a new high-tech business center, are being constructed east of the power plant. Next to that site, a developer wants to begin work soon on a compound of 59 homes and offices.

City officials said they are determined to come up with a broad plan that has something for everyone--even an unpopular energy company.

When Southern California Edison, which had operated the Redondo Generating Station since 1948, announced four years ago that it would sell the station, city officials began eagerly planing the plant’s destruction.

Instead, Virginia-based AES Corp. bought the plant, which burns natural gas and creates enough steam energy to power 1.3 million homes. City officials were appalled to learn that a state agency had decided the plant could not be closed because it was needed during emergencies when other sources of power failed.

This set off months of tense negotiations, with city officials threatening to hit the plant with a new $2.5-million annual utility tax and plant officials suggesting that they might expand the facility.

Finally in 1998, plant officials agreed to scale back the plant, as long as city officials dropped their plans for a punishing tax.

“We compromised,” said C.J. Thompson, the plant’s general manager. Now plant officials are drawing up plans for a 10-acre upscale residential complex on what is now the north section of the plant and for an office complex in an unused turbine building.

In exchange for the city’s dropping plans for a tax, plant officials said, they have retained the right to expand one portion of the facility--although city officials hope that won’t happen.

“Anything will be better than what is there now,” said City Councilman Kevin Sullivan, who said he wants the columns of power lines to be put underground. “We have had some opposition to our plan . . . but most people are happy.”

Other coastal cities, such as Huntington Beach and Oxnard, have similar aging eyesores, left over from a time when ocean water was needed as a coolant and beachfront real estate was not in such high demand.

But development around Redondo’s harbor has been hindered by other factors as well, city officials said. After the old downtown shopping district and other historic buildings were razed, so many condominium buildings were built south of the pier in the 1970s that some locals dubbed the city “Recondo Beach.” Bitterness remains about the disappearance of an urban core.

“It was the loss of the community’s connection to the waterfront, and the loss of a primary business district,” said Aaron Jones, the city’s economic development manager.

Thirty years ago, Redondo was touted as the next Miami Beach, Bisignano recalled, but the redevelopment projects had “no vision and no consistency.”

In the debate ahead, he said, “The trick is to take the desires of the citizens of this city and translate that into a tangible, workable program.”

Bisignano said he is sure of one thing: “You won’t recognize this city in five years.”