Neighbors of Van de Kamp’s bakery want to throw book at community college district

Is it well done or half-baked?

The latest thing to come out of Los Angeles’ landmark Van de Kamp’s bakery isn’t to everyone’s taste.

The Los Angeles Community College District has completed a $72-million renovation of the Glassell Park home of the now-defunct Dutch-themed bakery that was known for its windmill-shaped cookies and Danish pastries.

But budgetary problems have prevented district officials from opening a college satellite campus at the 4-acre site near Fletcher Drive and San Fernando Road as they had planned. Instead, they are leasing the site to a charter school and several job-training groups.

That has prompted a lawsuit alleging that officials misused voter-approved bond money by pulling a bait-and-switch on those who had anticipated having a community college in their Northeast L.A. neighborhood.

The college district denies it has done anything wrong and insists it hopes to eventually turn the former bakery into a college campus.

In the meantime, officials scheduled a grand opening ceremony for what they call the Van de Kamp Innovation Center on Wednesday. Descendants of the bakery’s co-founders have been invited to attend.

For architecture fans, restoration of the abandoned bakery marks a significant milestone. Some had doubted that the bakery’s Dutch Renaissance Revival-style headquarters with its distinctive Flemish gables, brick arches and tile roof could be saved.

Built in 1931, the bakery resembled a 16^th-century Dutch row house. It was designated a historic cultural monument by the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission in 1992.

But baking operations ended there in 1990. For the next 10 years it sat empty. In 2000 plans to demolish the bakery and replace it with a big-box home improvement store and fast-food restaurant were proposed.

Preservationists protested that plan. A group called the Van de Kamps Coalition was joined by then-state Sen. Richard Polanco to find funding to acquire the site for an auxiliary college campus. When the city refused to authorize the bakery’s demolition, planning for the college conversion began in earnest.

Even though it has not become a real college campus, locals will come to appreciate what the college district has done for the area “once the community understands we’re here,” said Richard Arvizu, director of the Van de Kamp facility.

A few Los Angeles City College evening courses are being taught and various non-credit nighttime community services classes are also held there, Arvizu said.

During the day, the center is used by charter high school students and for several vocational-training programs. They include a youth employment services center run by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, a City College job development service and a center that specializes in training for jobs in medical and “green” technology fields.

The year-old Alliance Environmental Science and Technology Charter High School has an enrollment of about 300 ninth- and 10^th-graders, Principal Howard Lappin said.

Adriana Barrera, the district’s deputy chancellor, said City College officials discovered that they did not have the money to operate a satellite campus at the bakery after the renovation project was already underway.

Although construction bond money financed repairs and major upgrades to the original bakery building and paid for construction of an adjoining classroom building, that cash cannot legally be used to cover the $5 million or so a year that an auxiliary campus would cost to operate, she said.

Barrera blamed “the economic downturn” for what she described as City College’s “deficit situation.”

She said the district’s plan is to rent the center out during the day for the next four years. After that one of its other colleges will operate the center as a satellite campus if City College can’t, Barrera said.

The college district is in escrow to acquire adjacent property fronting San Fernando Road that will eventually be used for another classroom building, Barrera said.

Those upset that the bakery site has not been turned into a satellite campus say college officials have misused taxpayers’ money and deceived the public.

One of the lawsuits’ plaintiffs, community activist Miki Jackson, is a member of the Van de Kamps Coalition, which earlier helped block the bakery’s proposed demolition. She said college officials “engineered the situation” so they could lease its property to the city.

Critics charge that the college district improperly spent bond money to construct and equip office space for the city.

In response, Larry Eisenberg, executive director of the district’s facilities and development, said the office space can easily be remodeled for future college use. The equipment and furnishings will be used by the district “long after the temporary tenants leave,” he said.

Nonetheless, Jackson criticized what she labeled the “layers of lies” spun by the college district. “It started out with them sincerely wanting to build a college there. Then they decided to turn it into a tenant-based facility rented out to the mayor’s pet projects,” she said.

A second lawsuit contends that college officials are in violation of state law because they failed to do a required environmental assessment of the bakery project when they changed their plans for the property.

Others have also voiced skepticism over the bakery’s transformation. College district Trustee Mona Field earlier this year complained at a public bond oversight committee meeting that City College had “no master plan, no focused interest in handling or running” a satellite campus there.

“I’m very sorry, but frankly it was a money pit. The doggone building was rotten,” Field said. “This was not a well-thought-out plan.”

At the same February meeting, Polanco criticized what he described as “shenanigans” in the bakery conversion. “Who gets hurt by the bait-and-switch are the taxpayers who have supported the development of Van de Kamp,” he said.

College officials indicated they hope to win over critics with Wednesday’s 9:30 a.m. opening ceremony. There will be an exhibit of photographs of the bakery and tours will be offered of the refurbished old building and the new one.

Officials said they searched for windmill cookies to serve at the event, but they couldn’t find any.

bob.pool@latimes.com