Marque and JESUS SAVES Sign damaged by winter stoem

03/02/2014

Encore performances for two L.A. architectural landmarks

Critic's Notebook: The architecture of downtown L.A.'s United Artists Theatre, now part of the Ace Hotel, and the Forum was preserved when they were owned by two religious groups. They have new owners and new life as concert venues. By Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times Architecture Critic February 12, 2014 Laugh all you want at those old public-access television clips of the late Dr. Gene Scott, the eccentric televangelist who sometimes wore two pairs of glasses at once and shouted at viewers to "Get on the telephone!" whenever his fundraising totals ebbed. He and his Los Angeles Universal Cathedral, operating from the 1927 United Artists Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, turned out to be surprisingly good friends to historic preservation. And say what you will about the quixotic plan hatched in 2000 by Bishop Kenneth Ulmer of the Faithful Central Bible Church in Inglewood to turn the Forum, once home to Magic Johnson's "Showtime" Lakers and Wayne Gretzky's Kings, into a thriving combination of mega-church and high-end arena. It was precisely the ambition, even the folly, of that strategy that ultimately helped keep the 1967 Forum from falling into disrepair once the teams left for shinier quarters downtown. As the United Artists Theatre and the Forum come back to life this winter as concert venues — the first as part of a new Ace Hotel on Broadway and the second run by the Madison Square Garden Co. — we have a rare chance to savor a victory in Los Angeles for architectural character and eccentricity over the forces of sleek homogenization. COMMENTS: From Cobain to KISS: Remembering the Forum For decades the trend in concert-hall and movie-palace architecture in Los Angeles, even accounting for the triumph of Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall, had been pointing toward placeless design, efficient profit-making and stacked rings of luxury boxes. A remarkable architectural lineage that included the Hollywood Bowl, the Wiltern, Mann's Chinese and the Cinerama Dome, among many other effusive and singular landmarks, had petered out by the turn of the millennium with the arrival of Staples Center and its anodyne neighbor, the Nokia Theatre. Now the Ace and the Forum are making a stand for a certain kind of architectural authenticity. What really binds these two buildings, though one dates from the Jazz Age and the other from the tail end of L.A. modernism, is that both navigated paths from architectural ambition to decline to comeback. And in both cases they stayed intact, even pristine, thanks to congregations that took over spaces never designed with worship in mind — and then took remarkably good care of them. The United Artists complex, which Connecticut investment firm and hotel developer Greenfield Partners bought in 2011 for $11 million, sits on the southern edge of the Broadway Theater District, near Olympic Boulevard. It combines a 12-story tower by the architects Walker & Eisen (who also designed the Oviatt and Fine Arts buildings downtown) with an attached theater with a riotously decorated interior by the Chicago architect C. Howard Crane. From the start it was an unconventional project. The stars who'd founded United Artists in 1919 — D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks — wanted a showpiece of a movie house that would compete with the better-established theaters up the street. Then as now, the stretch of Broadway where they settled had the feel of a frontier, a lonely edge. The building made up for that peripheral location with over-the-top ornament and a height that nearly surpassed that of City Hall, the 454-foot-high tower that until the 1950s ruled as the tallest in Los Angeles. Inside the tower, U.A. shared space with Texaco on floors that now hold the Ace's hotel rooms. In the theater next door, Crane produced a Spanish Gothic fantasia. Dripping with ornament, the auditorium and its lobby combined nods to the cathedral in the Spanish city of Segovia with murals by the artist Anthony Heinsbergen, who also worked on the Wiltern and the Paramount Theater in Oakland. The theater has had a tumultuous history. It closed briefly during the Depression and over the years has booked stage shows, Spanish-language films and the 70 millimeter widescreen movie format called Todd-AO. Scott bought the United Artists building and theater in 1986, after first trying and failing to take over the 1914 Church of the Open Door on Hope Street (it was demolished in 1988). He brought the Open Door's "Jesus Saves" neon sign with him and installed it on the roof, facing the new skyscrapers on Bunker Hill. Soon he was televising Sunday sermons from the stage of Crane's theater. Scott had more than his share of critics, many of whom said he was using church funds to support a lavish lifestyle. A long Los Angeles Times profile in 1994 described "chauffeured limousines, Lear jet travel, a Pasadena mansion, 'round-the-clock bodyguard protection and scenic horse ranches in Kentucky and the San Gabriel Valley." But Scott, who died in 2005 at age 75, poured more than $2 million into restoring the theater. He had work crews tear up carpeting to expose original tile floors. He paid to clean the ornate columns in the lobby. His ethnically diverse congregation, many of them exiles of one kind or another from more traditional churches, saw the preservation of the theater as God's work. In Walker and Eisen's tower, which had been remade and subdivided over the years and where the firm Commune has designed the new hotel rooms with nods to R.M. Schindler and Frank Lloyd Wright, the team of designers and architects assembled by the Ace had a huge amount of work to do. But the theater, with its tapestry-like curtain reading "The picture's the thing," a twist on the Shakespearean phrase, was remarkably well-preserved, a kind of burnished time capsule. The history of the Forum is better known to most Angelenos. Scouting in the mid-'60s for a location to build an arena for the Lakers and a new professional hockey team, Jack Kent Cooke settled on a piece of land in Inglewood, not far from Los Angeles International Airport, and hired the architect Charles Luckman. Luckman, a former partner of William Pereira and before that an executive with Lever Bros., the soap company, designed for Cooke a streamlined modern riff on the Forum in Rome. White concrete arches march around the exterior of the building, marooned in the center of a giant parking lot. When Staples Center opened in 2000, the Lakers and Kings moved east and the Forum was left with only its concert revenue. Ulmer, looking for an investment vehicle and a place to house his growing Inglewood congregation on Sunday mornings, seized on the idea of taking over the Forum, which seats roughly 18,000 people. Scott had more than his share of critics, many of whom said he was using church funds to support a lavish lifestyle. A long Los Angeles Times profile in 1994 described "chauffeured limousines, Lear jet travel, a Pasadena mansion, 'round-the-clock bodyguard protection and scenic horse ranches in Kentucky and the San Gabriel Valley." But Scott, who died in 2005 at age 75, poured more than $2 million into restoring the theater. He had work crews tear up carpeting to expose original tile floors. He paid to clean the ornate columns in the lobby. His ethnically diverse congregation, many of them exiles of one kind or another from more traditional churches, saw the preservation of the theater as God's work. In Walker and Eisen's tower, which had been remade and subdivided over the years and where the firm Commune has designed the new hotel rooms with nods to R.M. Schindler and Frank Lloyd Wright, the team of designers and architects assembled by the Ace had a huge amount of work to do. But the theater, with its tapestry-like curtain reading "The picture's the thing," a twist on the Shakespearean phrase, was remarkably well-preserved, a kind of burnished time capsule. The history of the Forum is better known to most Angelenos. Scouting in the mid-'60s for a location to build an arena for the Lakers and a new professional hockey team, Jack Kent Cooke settled on a piece of land in Inglewood, not far from Los Angeles International Airport, and hired the architect Charles Luckman. Luckman, a former partner of William Pereira and before that an executive with Lever Bros., the soap company, designed for Cooke a streamlined modern riff on the Forum in Rome. White concrete arches march around the exterior of the building, marooned in the center of a giant parking lot. When Staples Center opened in 2000, the Lakers and Kings moved east and the Forum was left with only its concert revenue. Ulmer, looking for an investment vehicle and a place to house his growing Inglewood congregation on Sunday mornings, seized on the idea of taking over the Forum, which seats roughly 18,000 people. His plan: run it as a place of worship and as a concert venue. But he clashed with every promoter he brought in to book the building, and stopped holding services there by 2009. Three years later, when Madison Square Garden Co. offered him $23.5 million for the Forum, he decided to end his experiment and cut his losses. Madison Square Garden is familiar with arenas of this vintage — and with Charles Luckman. Its anchor venue, the much-pilloried Madison Square Garden in New York, is another Luckman design, from 1968. The company hired the same firms that had overseen the Garden's recent renovation, Toronto's BBB Architects, to overhaul the Forum. As with the Ace, the architects found in the Forum a building in surprisingly good shape. Some of the additions by BBB don't quite mesh with the building's original sensibility; the carpet on the concourse, already presumably absorbing plenty of spilled Bud Light, is less Luckman Modern than Convention Center Contemporary. But on the whole the architects have proceeded with an admirably light touch inside. As these two venues welcome a broad public once again, they produce some thorny questions about gentrification and what new investment means for urban neighborhoods accustomed to being overlooked. The stretch of Broadway where the Ace has set up shop occupies the bleeding edge of downtown L.A.'s transformation. For now the revival of the block is entirely encouraging and raises hopes that a developer will invest in the shuttered Los Angeles Herald-Examiner building down the street, designed by Julia Morgan for William Randolph Hearst, the same way Ace has invested in its new home. But it will be worth watching to see just how soon the revival of this part of Broadway tips from surprising to precious. Inglewood, soon to see both a giant development on the Hollywood Park site and an economic boost from the new Crenshaw Line light-rail route, is asking similar questions about the promise and perils of gentrification. The recent decision by Stan Kroenke, owner of the NFL's St. Louis Rams, to buy 60 acres between the Forum and the racetrack site as a possible location for a football stadium has intensified the spotlight on the city. One issue to keep in mind, as new investment pours into Inglewood, is whether the Forum parking lot, which does set off Luckman's design to dramatic effect, can be redesigned to be a more pleasant place to be (or walk through) in its own right. Another is whether Inglewood can build on the commitment Madison Square Garden is making by stitching together some new pedestrian links between the arena and a planned Crenshaw Line station at Florence and La Brea avenues, due to open in 2019. Inglewood's handsome if struggling downtown, stretching along Market Street, is nearly as well-preserved as the Forum. The city's next step should be trying to make sure that the economic spillover from the Forum's rebirth moves not just south to the new Hollywood Park megaproject but also north to Market and toward the new stations. The city, after all, could be well-positioned for a comeback given its attractive, affordable housing stock, the new connectivity the Crenshaw Line will bring and its location between the beach and Culver City. For the moment, though, it's worth pausing to celebrate the fact that two of Southern California's quirkiest and most charismatic architectural landmarks are not just back in action but looking better preserved than we had any reason to expect. christopher.hawthorne@latimes.com

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Downtown Rejoices as Ace Hotel Opens

photo by Gary Leonard By Donna Evans Los Angeles Downtown News DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES - The latest signal of Broadway’s renaissance stands in front of the 1927 United Artists Theatre building, clad in a newsboy cap and wool vest. The lithe doorman, young, bearded and smiling, welcomes those swarming about the sidewalk at 929 S. Broadway, where hip and history have converged to form the Ace Hotel. It’s a dramatic turn for a 12-story edifice that opened the day after Christmas in 1927 as a theater for a group of independent-minded actors and directors. The Ace and its 182 guest rooms and adjacent 1,600-seat theater/concert hall is the latest incarnation for a building that did time as the West Coast offices for Texaco, a Spanish language film house and eventually a church for televangelist Dr. Gene Scott. The 87-year-old theater’s strikingly preserved condition in an area where long-darkened marquees are slowly flickering to life made it the exact kind of property, at the exact right time, for Ace to purchase, said Brad Wilson, president of the Portland, Ore.-based chain. “Ace is about building neighborhoods,” Wilson said last week while standing in the theater’s lobby. “We go across the world and look for interesting neighborhoods with interesting buildings. I don’t know that you can do better than this one.” Originally scheduled to open Jan. 15, the hotel moved up the date to accommodate lodging for the Jan. 12 Golden Globes. The full hotel is set to operate this week. City officials and community stakeholders credit the announcement two years ago to bring a boutique hotel to the formerly desolate stretch of Broadway as paving the way for the area’s renewed interest in retail, residential and restaurants. Last month, Urban Outfitters and Swedish retailer Acne Studios opened outposts a block north. About two blocks south, developer Forest City is preparing to build two apartment structures adjacent to the historic Herald-Examiner building, and a joint venture including developer the Kor Group plans to turn the Case Hotel at 1106 S. Broadway into a 107,000-square-foot, four-star boutique hotel. Fourteenth District City Councilman José Huizar is among those enthusiastic about the hotel and its potential to usher further advancement onto the street. Last week, he called the Ace both the “gatekeeper” to Broadway and a “game changer” for the neighborhood. “This is a meshing of historic L.A. to new Downtown L.A., a direction we’ve been striving for in terms of a city vision,” said Huizar, who six years ago launched the Bringing Back Broadway initiative in an attempt to upgrade the faded corridor known for its collection of historic movie houses. Bruce Baltin, senior vice president of PKF Consulting, a hospitality industry consulting firm, said the Ace will help fill the void of hotel lodging in Downtown Los Angeles. He called The Standard the only other nearby “lifestyle hotel,” and believes the Ace will bring the leisure business and group business that has few other area options. “I think they’ll do well,” he said. “Broadway is filling in nicely, it’s maturing along with Spring and Main streets with a nice combination of residential and retail. There’s a lot happening Downtown.” Stay the Night The United Artists building has counted numerous owners, operators and tenants since film star Mary Pickford joined with Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith and Douglas Fairbanks to break away from the entertainment heavyweight of the day, Paramount Pictures, and form their own studio and build a Spanish-Gothic style theater in Downtown. The theater itself opened and closed many times over the decades, and had different lives as a first-run movie house, a showcase for older films and even a long period as a home for Spanish-language pictures. More recently it was owned by Scott, who erected the massive “Jesus Saves” sign on the roof. The building has been empty since Scott died in February 2005. Ace worked with local collective Commune Design to restore the building and theater. The rooms run from $200 a night to $600 for a 633-square-foot terrace suite (the presidential suite, at $900, offers a patio beneath the Jesus Saves sign). The minimalist decor features concrete ceilings with planks of soundproof fiberboard affixed to the walls. Electrical outlets abound near the dark gray-tinted furniture. All rooms offer free Internet access. Some include acoustic guitars and Ace’s own brand of turntables. On the roof is an indoor/outdoor lounge with sweeping views of the city and a pool roughly the size of a hot tub. There’s a fireplace, salvaged theater lights and cascading bougainvillea and Boston Ivy, which likely would’ve been found in the estate gardens of Pickford and her United Artist contemporaries. Guests enter through a lobby dominated by a reception desk made of wood reclaimed from the office building before the restoration. The reception area, which gives way to a gift shop, features large, hand-drawn murals. Nikolai and Simon Haas' cartoonish images and realistic illustrations of icons and California topography dot the walls. Private meeting and event rooms are adorned with a mix of Golden Age Hollywood glam and 1970s Los Angeles punk rock. The hotel also features a Stumptown Coffee bar. Its in-house restaurant, LA Chapter, opens Jan. 17 and has indoor space as well as a patio on Broadway separated from passersby by a line of planters. Ace partnered with restaurateur Jud Mongell, owner of Brooklyn’s Five Leaves, to open the eatery that will serve locally sourced vegetables and seafood. The Downtown location is the second California Ace, and the fifth in the United States (there are also outposts in Panama and London). Indoors and out, the proprietors want the hotel to be a focal point for Downtown, where people socialize and collaborate, said Yael Greenberg, whose title is “cultural engineer.” She explained the design concept as using the building’s “physical canvas” to tell a story of what happened in the past, as well as to create a space for the stories yet to be told. “The next phase of L.A. is now,” she said. Perhaps nowhere is that mix of past and present felt more than in the theater, where the highlight of the breathtaking features — which include wall murals depicting Pickford and other actors as semi-mythic heroes and villains — is the ceiling dome, dominated by hundreds of hanging crystal pendants. As part of the upgrades, the original murals and intricate plasterwork were restored, while theater seats were reclaimed and reupholstered. The new carpet boasts a yin/yang pattern that references the ceiling design. The theater opens Valentine’s Day weekend with a pair of concerts by English band Spiritualized. Perhaps fittingly for the restored venue, it won’t be a regular concert. Instead, the band will be accompanied by a full orchestra and choir. At 929 S. Broadway, (213) 623-3233 or acehotel.com/losangeles.