Monthly Archives: December 2013

Taking circumstances into account

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Wednesday night the Planning Commission approved a draft development agreement (DA) to allow the developer Hines to tear down the old 203,000 square foot Papermate factory on Olympic and build a 767,000 square foot office and residential project. This vote represented good work by the four commissioners who voted for the project and by the three who voted against it.

Last week’s hearing was the commission’s fifth on the Papermate project. I have heard people say that this was excessive, but it wasn’t for a project of this magnitude. I don’t remember exactly how many hearings the Planning Commission, when I was on it in the ’90s, held on the St. John’s Hospital DA, but there were many and we even had the City hire an architect to give us a second opinion about some aspect of it. It’s reasonable for the commission (and staff) to spend this kind of time on a big project — I bet that on a per-square foot basis it’s not so many minutes.

Why do I say that both the commissioners who voted for the project and those who voted against it did good work? To begin with, the entire commission worked to improve the project and achieved improvements that even the developer acknowledged. When the project goes before the Architectural Review Board, it can benefit from input there, too.

As for the four commissioners who voted in favor, in a difficult political climate they did the responsible thing and voted for a project that the city must have. It would be disastrous for the Bergamot Expo line station to have to face the massive bulk of the Papermate factory, sitting as it is on a 310,000 square foot superblock. The Papermate site is the key site for the connection of the whole Bergamot plan area to the light rail. This has been acknowledged at previous hearings before the commission and before City Council.

An aerial showing the location of the Papermate factory on Olympic, across from Bergamot Station. (From the S.M. planning staff's PowerPoint presentation.)

An aerial showing the location of the Papermate factory on Olympic, across from Bergamot Station. (From the S.M. planning staff’s PowerPoint presentation.)

It was interesting that Wednesday it was Commissioner Richard McKinnon, one of the three commissioners who ultimately voted against the project, who made this point most forcefully. McKinnon pointed out that the worst result would be that Hines would simply turn the factory into offices. If you don’t think this would happen, consider that this is what Red Bull did with another big industrial building next to Papermate. If Hines did that, we would get all the traffic of office development, with none of the residential development and new streets the area needs, and without any of the traffic mitigations and other benefits included in the DA.

What the four-person majority did was to recognize that the commission had negotiated as much as the commission could negotiate, and it was time to send the project to City Council for final negotiations. As I said, in the current climate, this took courage. But when it comes to those final negotiations, I hope it will be the ideas of the minority who voted against the project that the council will be able to use.

Going back to the six years during which the LUCE was being developed and the Papermate development was taking shape, which was when I was writing my Lookout column, I always took the view that ideally all new development in the old industrial areas would be residential (with only incidental, neighborhood-oriented commercial development). More housing is needed to balance the overwhelming amount of office development that was built in the ’80s and ’90s. (Because I’ve discussed it so often, I won’t go into here why residential development not only would not exacerbate our traffic problems but also would have many benefits.)

But ideals have to take into account circumstances, and the circumstance here, as Commissioner McKinnon and others noted, is that Hines already owns a 203,000 square foot commercial building. Moreover, even under the pre-LUCE zoning, which allowed a floor-to-area-ratio of 1.0, and I suspect now under what’s called a “Tier One” development (not that I pretend to understand the rules), Hines could add a mezzanine with about 100,000 more square feet of development inside the existing building. This would give Hines 300,000-plus square feet of office — nearly equal to all of the office development in their current proposal.

Commissioner McKinnon’s proposal was to allow Hines to build 233,000 square feet of office, plus about 30,000 square feet of retail; this would mean that 142,000 square feet of office in the plan would be converted into more housing. His motion failed on a 4-3 vote, but I don’t know if this position was ever taken up in negotiations with Hines.

I hope that planning staff (and Hines) look into something like McKinnon’s proposal before taking the DA to City Council, and, if they don’t, I hope that the council members insist they do so. But I would rephrase and remake McKinnon’s proposal slightly, for the purpose of making a deal. What seems fair is to allow Hines the 310,000 square feet of commercial development they would have under the pre-LUCE zoning (about 45,000 square feet more than what McKinnon was proposing). The rest of the project would be residential: a net change of about 100,000 square feet from commercial to residential.

Not so long ago, when the office market was stronger than the residential market, I can imagine that this would have been a deal-breaker for Hines, but I would hope that it wouldn’t be one now, given that the residential market, both for rentals and condos, is now so strong.

A lot of people (including myself!), observing the morning and afternoon gridlock generated by commuters coming into the Bergamot area, wonder how it’s possible to consider any more office development there. But the fact is — 203,000 square feet already exist on the Papermate site. I know it’s cold consolation, but 300,000 square feet of offices is not a lot when compared to the many millions of square feet already in existence in Santa Monica and West L.A., and the location across the street from the Expo line is the best place for the development.

Thanks for reading.

When art becomes history, save the history

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If all politics are local, as Tip O’Neill said, that only means that politics that appear to be local, at times are not.

Take the controversy over what to do with Paul Conrad’s Chain Reaction, a sculpture that has stood in a triangle of grass in Santa Monica’s Civic Center, wedged between a parking lot and a drive-by stretch of Main Street, for more than 20 years.

Chain Reaction before the fence went up.

Chain Reaction before the fence went up.

About two years ago a City staffer saw children playing on the sculpture, became alarmed, and all of a sudden — even though an engineer’s report later determined that the sculpture was in no imminent danger of falling down — City staff was saying that Chain Reaction had to go unless hundreds of thousands of dollars could be raised — privately — to restore it.

In the aftermath, the Landmarks Commission declared the sculpture to be a historic landmark, while the Arts Commission voted not to spend public money saving it. The City Council told pro-sculpture partisans to raise the money. About $40,000 has been raised — a good showing for a campaign like this when no one knows just how much is truly needed, but not what the City has required.

City Council will take up the future of Chain Reaction in February.

The face-off between the Arts and Landmarks Commissions is the key to understanding why it’s important to preserve Chain Reaction, and why this dispute over a local monument implicates broader issues, and what the historic meaning of it includes.

From the start, namely 22 years ago when Conrad offered the sculpture to the City, Chain Reaction was controversial because it pitted political activists, who loved how the chains metaphor communicated visually the tyranny of nuclear weapons, against some members of the arts community who variously thought that the metaphor was too obvious to be good art, or that the sculpture was plain ugly.

While appreciation of a given work of art, or even how one defines art, has subjective, “eye-of-the-beholder,” aspects, the history of art is more objective, and the dispute between political people and arts people reflects certain aspects of the history of art in the 20th century.

Up until the emergence a century ago of modernism in general and abstraction in art in particular, it was taken for granted that art would, could or might reflect social, political, religious or other cultural contexts, ideas, and mores, as much as the artist’s inner, and art’s formal, dialogues. But even in the context of modernism, at least through the ’30s and ’40s, many artists (think Mexican muralists) worked in an explicitly political manner.

In the ’50s, however, abstraction triumphed — not only was political art out, but representational art of any sort. Critics declared that this was the necessary progress of art, but I always thought that abstraction, at least in the American context, regardless of the quality of work of any given artist, was a convenient response to the Blacklist. Left-wing artists could declare their radical politics by insisting that the formal radicalism of their work was a challenge to the society as a whole, while avoiding persecution as leftists. (Meanwhile big business could embrace abstract art and modernist architecture, as evidence of “forward thinking,” without undercutting their interests. Nelson Rockefeller famously said that modern art was “free enterprise painting,” and the CIA in promoted modern art abroad.)

Where did that leave political activists looking for support from the arts? Often, out-of-luck, and that’s why, post-abstraction, a political graphics movement arose outside of the mainstream art world. (And if you visit MOCA or the Broad collection at LACMA, you’ll see that the worlds of art and politics are still for the most part conveniently separate even as art has moved on from pure abstraction and become big business itself.)

Chain Reaction, and the disputes about its creation (and now preservation), arose from the sundering of mainstream art from social engagement, and the existence of Chain Reaction is important tangible evidence of this historic moment. Paul Conrad was a Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonist, but he was an outsider artist. When critics of the sculpture criticize its message as being simplistic one might ask them what they think about the recent unearthing and conservation of Siqueiros’ América Tropical. Was depicting “a Mexican Indian, crucified on a double cross beneath an American eagle, with two sharpshooters taking aim at the eagle from a nearby rooftop” (as the Getty describes the work) too obvious?

The Landmarks Commission has done an exceptional job in documenting its reasons for declaring Chain Reaction a Santa Monica landmark, and I support all the commission’s reasons and reasoning. I want only to add that to me the importance of the sculpture transcends local history and heritage. It’s a case of local politics being not all local.

(There’s been a lot written about Chain Reaction, most of which is accessible from the Save Chain Reaction website. I particularly recommend Christopher Knight’s article for the Los Angeles Times and Paul Von Blum’s article for Truthdig (the latter placing Chain Reaction in the context of political art). While pressure is building on the City not to let the sculpture go, and the City has ultimate responsibility for saving it, there are good reasons for the City to solicit private funding to help do so (think Annenberg Beach House). A fun way to support the preservation effort is to attend Jerry Rubin’s 70th birthday party/benefit at Rusty’s on the Pier December 11. Tickets, benefiting the Chain Reaction fund, are $70. For ticket information, go here.)

Thanks for reading.