J. Albert Garcia; Head of Equestrian Center

J. Albert Garcia, controversial creator and longtime president of the Los Angeles Equestrian Center who furthered the popularity of polo in California, has died. He was 71.

Garcia, who in 1984 helped organize Olympic polo games at Fairbanks Ranch in San Diego County, died of cancer in Encino on Jan. 19, it was announced Wednesday.

At the behest of the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks, Garcia opened the center in 1982 on 70 acres of city land at the north edge of Griffith Park. From his early planning in 1980 until he lost the facility to foreclosure in 1988, Garcia accumulated $27 million in debts.

Along the way, he garnered praise for building what city officials rated one of the finest equestrian centers in the nation, established and was president of the Professional Polo Assn., helped organize the National Polo League and attracted such polo fans and riders as actress Stephanie Powers and the maharajah of Jaipur.

“Al Garcia has put up an incredibly beautiful facility, and that’s why the mayor and other officials have put up with all the problems out there this long,” Richard Riordan said shortly before the 1988 foreclosure, when the current mayor was president of the city Recreation and Parks Commission.

Garcia’s center at 500 Riverside Drive included a 4,300-seat enclosed Equidome where the Los Angeles Colts played polo, an outdoor arena for horse shows, rental stables and exercise areas. Training for horses, riders and polo players was also provided.

Over the years, Garcia proposed several innovative ways for the center to make money--serving Ma Maison box suppers and champagne at equestrian events, staging rock concerts with such groups as Three Dog Night and the Beach Boys, building a luxury hotel, adding a health club, building a medieval-theme restaurant with jousting matches, and selling rental stalls as $30,000 “horse condominiums.”

Few of the plans came to fruition. In 1984, Garcia declared personal bankruptcy. The center never realized a profit.

When he finally lost the facility to the center’s largest creditor, Gibraltar Savings (which itself went bankrupt a year later), Garcia told The Times he had invested “seven-day weeks, 16- to 18-hour days” in trying to make the facility successful.

“I’ve always said,” he added, “this place needs a magician, not a manager.”

After the foreclosure, Garcia and his Equestrian Centers of America Inc. unsuccessfully sued the city and parks and recreation officials, charging that they reneged on an earlier promise to permit sale of the rental stalls. The city maintained that it could not sell public land for private purposes.

Profiled in such tony publications as Town and Country, Garcia prided himself on business studies at Columbia University and Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, and a founding role in the shrimp industry in Panama and the rock salt industry in the Dominican Republic.

Before taking on the equestrian project, he headed Diversified Earth Sciences, where he managed 21 merger and acquisition deals in two years. He sold the operation to the Irish conglomerate Cement Roadstone.

He is survived by his wife, Ruth, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Holly.