Meet the men intent on saving Long Beach’s structural history—and, in the process, the city itself, too

MICHAEL BOHN by RUSS ROCA

Fourth Street and Linden Avenue is a legendary intersection in Long Beach—the longtime home, on two corners, of the famous SST Records. The label’s roster when it rose to prominence during the 1980s was a who’s who of punk and alternative rock, from founder Greg Ginn’s band Black Flag, to Sonic Youth and Husker Du, and from Bad Brains to the Minutemen and Dinosaur Jr.

Records were pressed here, parties were thrown, and bands played on a stage inside—both legally and not, one suspects—burnishing SST’s acoustically sound reputation. By the end of this summer, though, these four corners will embark on an entirely new career.

A group of investors that includes developer Jan Van Dijs—who last year restored the 1925 Streamline Moderne Art Theatre—has purchased SST’s three conjoined buildings and is splitting them into office space for what’s referred to as the “creative class.”

And in a moment of great good luck this spring, as Redevelopment Agency Director Craig Beck happened to be visiting the site, Van Dijs’ workers uncovered—beneath years and inches of stucco—one of the most unusual surviving art deco facades in the region on SST’s western-most building. It had been totally hidden from view, most likely since the 1950s.

An organic blend of geometrically veined tropical leaves and fan shapes repeating across the front and spilling over the top, this still may not sound like much. But unearthing an architecturally significant facade in downtown today is the Long Beach equivalent of finding King Tut’s tomb—the 1922 discovery of which very probably inspired these decorations.

“I’ll tell you what it is: It’s one of the most significant design motifs that I’ve ever seen. Somebody—some great artist—sat down and thought of that,” says Redevelopment Agency board member John Thomas, who is also vice president of the Art Deco Society of Los Angeles.

“It’s very unique, very special to Long Beach, and I’m very thankful that a well-respected person like Jan had ownership and stewardship over this building, because he saw the great asset of the design and what it meant.”

Van Dijs, who called Thomas the day after first seeing the facade, was equally awed by his discovery—and, as a student of history, he’s wasted no time in analyzing the find.

“The leaf details and the fan details are very Egyptian-type motifs, as opposed to the Art Theatre, where they had five or six more years to redo them and Americanize them a little bit,” Van Dijs says as we regard the building, built in 1923 and 1924 and first opened in 1925 as the Citron Furniture store. (Opinions vary on whether this facade is from 1923—or, like the Art Theatre, was added after the 1933 Long Beach Earthquake.)

“The depth on these [leaves] is very thin, they were just experimenting on how to do them,” Van Dijs says. “You can tell they were just hand-applied, where it was like on the Art they had castings and things. I think, if this is not the most original—the earliest—deco building in Long Beach, it’s one of them. It’s neat.”

The investment group intends to preserve that quality. Studio One Eleven principal architect Alan Pullman and associate principal Michael Bohn have signed on to reconfigure the buildings into offices around a courtyard, with a good flow—and more of that quintessentially Southern California prerequisite: on-site parking. (Citron Furniture will remain largely intact.)

Having worked on the award-winning Courtyard Lofts—which adapted existing commercial spaces into residential units—and on incorporating the historic Acres of Books building into the Art Exchange project nearby, Studio One Eleven is known as a champion of sustainable, green architecture. But the SST project was a little personal for the team—and not just because its members have considered becoming a tenant here when their current lease expires.

“We wanted to practice what we preach. We always talk about adaptive reuse,” Bohn says, using the architect’s term for adapting and repurposing older, existing buildings into new developments. “Saving old buildings, you can create new spaces that are more dynamic and cheaper than just building new buildings.”
Those aren’t mere words; there’s a grassroots movement behind what he says. People familiar with the cycle of Long Beach development say the city—including officials in our oft-maligned city hall—is perhaps more ready and better equipped to re-examine its surviving historic commercial buildings, and to preserve them, than at any time in its history.

“I think we’re in a very, very unique time that we need to take advantage of,” Thomas says. “First of all, the economy’s presented any number of challenges to large-scale developments. And that’s good because sustainability becomes a big thing. Maybe now, all of a sudden, I can pencil out to reuse all or a portion of a historic structure.

“I think we’re getting back to basics, and I think the economy has presented an opportunity to take a breather and to re-evaluate these projects from a sustainability standpoint, as well as from a holistic, historic standpoint,” he finishes.

Still, Redevelopment Agency Director Craig Beck and Redevelopment Project Officer David White did not respond to several requests for comment from The District Weekly—and a Los Angeles eminent domain lawyer familiar with the Long Beach ebb-and-flow wonders how much city hall has really changed.

“Sometimes they will get on the bandwagon and support a historical design because it’s a popular thing to do and it’s not going to adversely affect the city financially,” says attorney Charlie Cummings, a partner in Sullivan, Workman & Dee, which years ago represented Nu-Pike Amusement Park owner the Long Beach Amusement Co. in its lawsuit against the city.

“In good times, people can afford to be generous. It’s much more difficult when they think, ‘Do we cut down on the hours you can have the swimming pool open in the summer? Do we cut down on the number of streets we repair the potholes on? Do we cut the number of police officers?’ ”

Cummings admits this school of thought doesn’t quite define projects like the SST buildings—where the city’s financial contribution thus far is around one-ninth the cost it might pay to retire the Long Beach Museum of Art bond debt this fall.

“I think small projects, where you’ve got someone that is creative, you can do,” Cummings says. “I really think it’s more just a case of, you know, it works at this time, so there’s some people who have found a way to make it work. Sometimes you can find ways to make things work.”

RDA spokeswoman Victoria Ballesteros says the agency agrees; it wrote the investors a $350,000 check for facade improvement to the Citron building.

“The RDA does a lot of supporting of the creative class,” Ballesteros says. “This is just part of our endeavor to improve the quality of life that goes beyond just infrastructure.”

Architect Jonathan Glasgow of Interstices—which also worked on the Courtyard Lofts, and on the Kress lofts, and which is now redoing the Newberry’s building on Pine Avenue—says today’s architects and city officials are infinitely more likely to talk about good design than they might have been a few years ago.

“Between [Studio One Eleven’s] Brian Ulaszewski and Alan Pullman and Michael Bohn, there’s a few of us who are interested in having more of a civic conversation about architecture,” says Glasgow, name-checking the RDA’s David White as someone with a significant interest in the topic. “I have this conversation with people, ‘What is art and what is good architecture?’ I don’t know how to answer the question, but I’m willing to discuss it.”

This conversation, as many people will tell you, would have been timely a half-century ago—but it’s welcome just the same.

Long Beach in the 1970s, says Thomas, was part of this “urban-renewal experiment where you mowed down blocks of historic buildings to build what they called ‘modern architecture,’ in order to incentivize people [into] coming back downtown. They did it not just in Long Beach, but in Anaheim and Los Angeles as well.”

As former Mayor Eunice Sato told me earlier this year, the city just didn’t see any other way to bring name-brand businesses and east Long Beach residents back downtown—and so, among other now-questionable decisions, city officials razed three square blocks of prime, historic downtown real estate to build a manila-colored mall with virtually no windows: Long Beach Plaza.

“It served its purpose,” Sato said. “When I was mayor, the Hyatt [Regency] came in. That was the first big one as far as hotels. Then we had the Arco [Center], the Renaissance Hotel and the Sheraton.”

Long Beach Plaza, however, went on to fail—and the city’s blasé attitude toward its own cultural and architectural history prompted a chorus of grumbling from residents, which has grown ever louder. This, in turn, has provoked some perhaps unforeseen responses from well-meaning city officials and developers.

“These days, many cities—not just Long Beach—are building buildings which resemble the buildings they tore down, which is called ‘fake historicism,’ ” Thomas says. Our obvious offenders include the Aqua condominium towers on Ocean Boulevard—built in a sort of neo-Miami deco style; and the CVS Pharmacy at Sixth Street and Long Beach Boulevard, a less lofty deco redux.

“We don’t need that,” Thomas says. “We don’t need any public apologies anymore for our demolition. What we need is brilliant contemporary architects doing what they need to do with their clients and the technology, to build something which, in 50 years, people will be looking back going ‘Look at what they were doing in 2009.’ ” (Just for the record, 2009 is half gone.)

“Let’s make anything new be great architecture, and give all this respect to the old buildings. You don’t really respect something by copying it and mimicking it,” Glasgow says. “Those old buildings—the Villa Riviera, the Farmers & Merchants Bank [at Third Street and Pine Avenue]—they were done by the best architects of their time. That’s what I keep pushing them to do: ‘Let’s get great new architects.’ ”

The SST Records buildings’ redesign is not new architecture; it’s a clever reinvention of existing styles. (More on this in a minute.) But the men behind it hope that by celebrating historic buildings throughout Long Beach, the city can become a destination for the creative class and someday attract good new architecture.

The remodel began with the impending death of another historic commercial building, the 1928 Julian Ship Supply; and the search by some of the SST investors—who include Ocean Center Building owner Mark Vidor and Van Dijs’ associate Richard Lewis—for a vacant lot on which to relocate it.

Another downtown icon that somehow escaped landmark status, the Julian stood—until this spring—in the path of the new Long Beach Superior Court building, on the northwest corner of Broadway and Magnolia Avenue.

Conceived by respected Long Beach architect Cecil Schilling as a drive-in market, it could—some said—have been incorporated into the court complex as a free-standing cafeteria. (Like the U.S. Army and other gastropods, our judicial system operates on its stomach.)

But state officials controlling the land swap at the deal’s heart reportedly proved uninterested, and so the Julian was flattened. Says Van Dijs: “That parking lot was linked to these buildings. And so, in trying to come up with a plan on the Julian, we kept coming back to this.”

“We created this company, and we bought these buildings, and we’re all having a hand in recreating them,” says Studio One Eleven’s Alan Pullman. “It’s the project we want to do. We wanted this to be creative office space, and we wanted to create a sense of community within that environment.”

“It attracts a different type, the creative class. Richard Florida spoke a lot here in Long Beach about having a creative class here in your city,” Bohn says. “When we walked through the building again with all the investors, we just thought this thing could really hit.”

Florida is the Canadian university professor who wrote the 2003 best-seller The Rise of the Creative Class, positing the rise of a new social class—including scientists, engineers, architects and entertainers—who create new ideas, technology and, er, content.

City fathers reportedly paid Florida $50,000 for a speech in late 2007—and his ideas are not without merit. As Bohn points out, regions with economic specialties—like Long Beach, which once specialized in aerospace (gone) and other people’s vacations (the Pike: gone)—tend to lose big. But not Long Beach, not this recession, the architect says—making a pitch for the creative class.

“Class A buildings, if you look in the Long Beach Business Journal [ads], they’re close to 90 percent occupancy,” Bohn says. “It didn’t take a huge hit the way it did in Orange County, with the mortgage brokers, where it was a huge part of their economy.” (Long Beach did take a financial hit this recession, but not because it lost an industry.)

So, what does the creative class want? Studio One Eleven’s remodel leaves the former Citron Furniture store virtually extant, with the addition of more skylights. The corner building has been resurfaced, and—with new windows—transformed into a neat white stucco-and-glass cube.

It’s the middle building of the three, most recently a cat shelter, which has seen the most changes. Its rear has been opened up and shortened, creating parking spaces; and its front and western sides have been pushed inward, shrinking the footprint to create a walkway and garden that Pullman calls a “paseo.”

“We use that term whenever we’re talking about an open-air sort of connection. It’s not necessarily a Spanish thing,” Pullman says. “And we use that space. That was a really important part of Courtyard Lofts when we were doing it. You’re not going directly into your unit, and we wanted to foster this sense of community and getting to know your neighbors.”

If you don’t geek out over art deco, that will be possibly the complex’s most noticeable feature—visually punctuating the two buildings on either side with drought-resistant greenery.

“We think it could draw people who are working out of their home or maybe are contracting—they need something small but they want the ownership. It’s designed in a way that when they buy it, it’s still cheaper than renting,” Bohn says. “We think this would be a great complement to the East Village Arts District. Not one thing is a silver bullet [development] for the East Village, but we think this could help bolster it.”

Is the SST complex the future for Long Beach development? Not entirely; this city, like almost every other major Southern California metropolis, will always have its larger developments—like the county courthouse we’re getting and whatever will wind up probably replacing our existing, historically significant 1960 Edward Killingsworth-designed county building.

Yet the SST buildings’ redesign does carry a strong message—aesthetically and economically—about how smaller and greener can be better.

“Ninety percent of developers are flippers,” Van Dijs says. “They want to go in there, find—you know, maybe they have a tenant in mind or something like that—they want an easy, quick deal, and they just want to get in and get out and make their money. And this is about a lot more than that. This is not an easy project; it’s not a safe project.” Pullman agrees.

“I don’t think we could build our way out of this recession or this economy,” the architect says. “I think what we have to do is build a city that’s attractive to a creative class, attractive to people to live in and work in. To focus on historic buildings, on a bicycle master plan, on quality of life. Those are the things that I think will create a sense of place. That’s the only way I think we’re going to get out of it.”

Tags: art deco, art theatre, Jan van Dijs, Long Beach, redevelopment, sst records, studio one eleven