‘Quality Is Remembered After Cost Is Forgotten,’ Beverly Hills Mayor Says : Lush Civic Center Slowly Coming Along

It’s bigger than Union Station, bigger than the Sports Arena and when its pieces are added up, it’s bigger than almost every other public building in Southern California. What is it? A hint: The parking structure can hold as many as 553 Mercedes-Benz convertibles.

Yes, it’s the new Beverly Hills Civic Center, now taking shape over 10 acres and spanning Rexford Drive at a cost of $83 million. Even Mayor Max Salter says the structure is, well, a bit much.

“There’s no question in my mind that it is overbuilt somewhat,” Salter said. “But as against piddling around for another 20 years until you’ve finally decided on something, I’d opt for what we have. Quality is remembered long after cost is forgotten, and that’s what people should remember.”

Made up of city offices, a library, a firehouse, police station, jail and parking facilities, the complex totals nearly 600,000 square feet. By comparison, there is 507,715 square feet of usable floor area in the Los Angeles City Hall.

1985 Ground Breaking

The new civic center has been long in coming. There was a ground-breaking ceremony in 1985, and the project was originally scheduled for completion in 1987. It was held up for redesign after a theater and a cafeteria were dropped to save money, and delayed again after the discovery of asbestos in the walls of the existing library building.

Some of the work is finished: The parking structure and the fire station, complete with two shiny brass poles, have been in business for two years.

But the police station, library and a pedestrian bridge over Rexford Drive are still under construction, and work is also under way at the 58-year-old City Hall, a Mexican baroque landmark that sticks out above the low-rises on Santa Monica Boulevard.

“God Bless This Job,” says a graffito spray-painted onto a bare girder at the job site. “Go Lakers,” says another.

The Lakers went, but Salter is determined to move into his new office by December. This December.

Serve the People

“Every day I take out the whip and give them a few lashes here and there,” he joked. “We’re going to have a sensational City Hall when it’s all completed, and it’s going to serve the people for the next 100 years.”

Inside the old City Hall building, which also housed a courthouse, police station and morgue when it opened in 1931, the City Council chamber has been expanded by removing a small room that was once used for study sessions.

Craftsmen from A. T. Heinsbergen & Co., the same firm that created the elaborate ceiling in 1931, are about to restore the gilded paint job and duplicate its floral motif in the extension and in the old courtroom down the hall, where it was hidden for decades by a false ceiling.

The Council chamber, which once seated 80, will now have room for 130. Two-way audio-visual links with other meeting rooms will enable as many as 400 people to take part in debates. This is a prospect that members of the current City Council, who are proud of their briskly run meetings, may find daunting.

Workers are about to restore the colorful tile work and reapply gold leaf to a knob atop the cupola of the eight-story tower, but A. T. Heinsbergen, son of the man who did the original job, said he wanted no part of that assignment.

Gold Work Is Tricky

The gold work is especially tricky, he said. The gold leaf is just one two-thousandth of an inch thick and can easily blow away. The glue that holds it on has to be applied the night before and it can be too sticky or too dry, depending on the humidity, he said.

“They didn’t ask me to do it and if they did I wouldn’t have, because my dad told me he lost his shirt on it in 1931,” Heinsbergen said. Another contractor, Pacific Coast Painting, has taken on the job.

Building codes were considerably less stringent when the old City Hall was built, but tests have shown it to be structurally sound, said John Hartsock, the consultant who is managing the construction project for the city.

The architectural details--leaves, flowers and other delicate forms cast into concrete from hand-carved wooden molds--were also a testimony to the workmanship of those days, he said.

But the building’s interior walls, made of hollow clay tiles for fire safety, had to go for fear they might collapse in an earthquake. The new walls will be made of steel studs and dry wall, Hartsock said.

Seal Off Four Floors

Safety also figured in the decision to seal off four top floors of the City Hall tower. There would have been virtually no room for office space if the upper stories were fitted with the elevator and two staircases required by law, city officials said.

An argument could be made for an exemption because the tower was in place long before the latest building code, but that would be wrong, said Howard Rattner, economic development manager for the city.

“How do you justify saying we’re above the code? It’s important to comply with the code, that the City Hall be the example, not the exception,” he said.

Across Rexford Drive, the new police station, complete with the latest in communications equipment, full-scale locker rooms for officers of both sexes, 10,000 square feet for evidence storage, 35 individual jail cells and a firing range in the basement, will finally match the image of the Beverly Hills cop shop depicted in the movies.

Dark Warren

Until recently, when the Police Department moved to temporary quarters, the reality had been a dark warren of offices in the old City Hall. Detectives interviewed suspects in a closet; there was only 1,500 square feet for evidence, which piled up when trials were delayed, and female officers had to shower in a trailer parked behind the building.

“From our perspective, the talk about this thing being too large doesn’t hold water,” said Police Capt. Bill Hunt. “We were so cramped (before) that it definitely impacted our ability to provide service. When people come in and see how we’re utilizing it I don’t think it’ll leave much question.”

City officials are just as proud of the library, which has been gutted and revamped to make way for video facilities, an electronic book retrieval system, and a two-story-high reading room illuminated by skylights.

“If you remember the old library and its cramped quarters, this will be what the public sees the most, and it’ll be a show-stopper,” Rattner said.

Architect Charles Moore used three oval courtyards to link the two city blocks that make up the Civic Center.

A Wonderful Solution

The palm-lined courtyards are strung together on a diagonal line, with traffic flowing through a central ellipse on Rexford Drive. The two smaller ovals will be for pedestrians.

“I thought that was a particularly wonderful solution to what seemed to be an intractable problem,” said Eugene J. Johnson, a professor of art at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., who has written about Moore’s work.

“It was inspired in part by (17th century Italian architect Francesco) Borromini, who had the problem of a client who owned land on two sides of a street and wanted to build one palace.”

Moore, a professor at the University of Texas and UCLA who is involved on other projects in cities from Santa Fe, N.M., to Eugene, Ore., was not available for an interview, but one of his associates acknowledged the debt to the Italian master.

“Borromini is an Italian baroque architect whose work Charles is very fond of,” said Stephen Harby, c) Moore’s design manager for the Beverly Hills project.

Squiggly Ornaments

The new buildings will lack the rich ornamentation of the original City Hall. The squiggly ornaments that architects call “toothpaste tube” detailing are not only out of fashion but prohibitively expensive.

But accents of tinted tile are meant to echo the tile work on the 1931 tower: red for the firehouse, blue and light green for the police station and dark green for the library.

Precast concrete capitals and other architectural details on the new buildings are also intended to recall the look of an earlier time.

Moore’s vision of a Civic Center was picked from a field of six finalists in a competition in 1982.

“It’s been sheared somewhat; it’s been cut and pruned, but from what I’ve seen, I’m confident that a nice complex of urban architecture will take place,” said Thomas Hines, a professor of history and architecture at UCLA.

Spirit of Beverly Hills

While some critics might have looked for a more radical statement, Moore made “an obvious effort to make a connection to the existing building and the spirit of Beverly Hills as rendered in other buildings,” Hines said.

Frank Dimster, a professor of architecture at USC, acknowledged that Moore was faithful to the vision of the original builders, but asked, “Is it still appropriate to do so in today’s context?”

“What I’m trying to raise is, if that display of values for a City Hall is an appropriate one,” he said. “In some ways, to have a building that is very ornate and very opulent, you could structure an argument that it might not be the best display of service to the community.”

Originally estimated to cost $70 million, the project grew as city officials asked for more durable concrete walls instead of stucco, and for more expansion room to serve a city with a daytime population estimated to be as high as 200,000. There are only about 31,000 residents.

Demand for Space

“If I look back at it as a Monday-morning quarterback, the thing is that we did not have a budget after the design competition was over and stick with it,” said Benjamin H. Stansbury Jr., who was mayor in 1983 and who claims to be the “godfather” of the project.

“We never really had a budget, but just sort of floated with the demand for space (by city departments),” he said.

Stansbury said most of those decisions were made by city staffers, but Public Affairs Director Fred Cunningham said that City Council members were “kept up to date, briefed and they were in the loop, just as they are now.”

In any event, Stansbury said the city can easily afford the project, which was funded by issuing tax-exempt certificates similar to bonds.

‘A Mistake’

Others differ, most prominently City Councilman Robert K. Tanenbaum, who railed against the Civic Center during his campaign three years ago and sought with no success to scale it down once he was elected.

“At this stage, I say let’s get it done and get people into it so we can use it. But I think it was a mistake from the inception,” Tanenbaum said last week.

“If this staff and this Council had to deal with this issue right now, we would have come up with a different project. It would have been state of the art, but it wouldn’t be this grandiose,” he said.

Estimating that the real cost, including interest payments, will total $155 million by the year 2004, Tanenbaum said the city has been finding it that much harder to meet other needs such as parks, schools and public parking.

No Regrets

But Stansbury said he has no regrets, except for the loss of the cafeteria and theater, which were dropped after appeals for a private donor to fund them drew no response. He wants to see his name on the building.

“The plan was that every council person that ever voted on it would have their name on it,” he said. “That was the deal. I hope they (members of the current Council) stick with it.”