Our first annual list of the Buildings Most Likely to Win a Date with the Wrecking Ball

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES

It’s on, Long Beach: This year, you’re going down! We say this every year, and every year someone makes it happen—knocking over a few more buildings just for little old us. Thanks, mysterious stranger! Didn’t know we still had this many buildings that needed tearing down. And yet? Still nothing, especially now the real estate market is in the toilet.

We have that empty feeling you get when the toilet won’t flush—when nothing replaces something, the way it has at Long Beach Boulevard and Anaheim Street, where we’re still waiting on that condominium project.

Or over at the West Gateway site in deep downtown—where, someday not soon enough, they’ll probably build us a new superior court, years after flattening out an old liquor store with a solid oak soda fountain and stools.

Or even over at Redondo and Stearns avenues, where a new housing tract on some of the last undeveloped land in the city has gone unfinished for months.

But what the hell—that’s how it is here: They tear things down, but nothing ever really changes. With that in mind, here are our predictions for 2009: the buildings we think are most in danger of getting an extreme Long Beach makeover. You know—like the Pacific Coast Club.

BURTON W. CHACE CIVIC CENTER, PACIFIC AVENUE AND OCEAN BOULEVARD We’d hate to be the guy in charge of making all this concrete disappear, but somewhere out there is the man for the job. Maybe.

Mayor Bob Foster and City Manager Pat West’s plans to shutter Main Library last summer were a dismal failure, but someday soon—they’re saying it could be a day in February—city fathers may finally agree on a plan to replace this intact example of Brutalist architecture with . . . something else.

According to West, the city hopes to bring Long Beach City Council its plans to replace Main Library—the first Civic Center domino. They’re not saying what it will be yet, or where the money will come from, but we’re betting that if they’re not warming up the bulldozers by December 2009, the Council will at least have ordained Main Library’s fate.

That’s not exactly a good thing. We need a library there. A Main Library. And so far, there’s no indication what will replace it.

COLOR WORLD, 233 E. ANAHEIM ST. Everyone on our street in the ’80s—Elm between 15th and 16th—called this place Color King, but it doesn’t look so regal anymore. Hard to say what this faded but still fully operational body shop was originally—but it has the vintage neon sign and the furrowed Streamline Moderne brow of, well, anything from a department store, to a theater, to . . . some sort of market.

It could even have been a body shop, but now it’s directly across the street from where they want to build those aforementioned condos. We’re betting this 1946 building—which could be gorgeous again in the hands of a Jan “Art Theatre” Van Dijs—gets urban-renewaled out of business eventually.

ROBERTS DEPARTMENT STORE, 4400 BLOCK OF ATLANTIC AVENUE Once a sparkling example of Mid-century Modern commercial architecture, Atlantic Avenue through Bixby Knolls is now a patchwork of restored buildings, modified structures—and this former Roberts store, which looms off the street like a spook with dead eyes and an immense cranium.

Most recently briefly revived as a temporary Halloween costume shop, the city’s Redevelopment Agency Board approved third-stage design plans for a new Marshalls store here back in May—but now? Still nothing. It sits empty.

SUMITOMO BANK BUILDING, 600 REDONDO AVE. Built in 1964—when Midcentury Modern was slowly getting transmogrified into something a little more swinging—this stucco box is punctuated by wraparound ground-floor windows and pointy support columns (some real, some not) that grip it like a giant alien hand.

Vacant for years now, it’s easily one of Long Beach’s most exuberant remaining examples of 1960s architecture—chain-link fenced off so our homeless population can’t, well, live there. Now here’s the bad news: Unless another bank buys it (and right now, banks aren’t buying anything), what could possibly go in there? Another thrift store? We like thrift stores, but they don’t have any money, either.

LONG BEACH FLOWER MARKET, 1085 LONG BEACH BLVD. You have no idea what we’re talking about, because this 1928 brick building is in a redevelopment area and has been vacant for years—but the former Long Beach Flower Market has one of the greatest surviving facades in this area of Long Beach Boulevard.

Crafted of stucco over all that brick, it features the kind of deco detail that should make you think of another brick building with similar construction: the former Acres of Books, at 240 Long Beach Blvd. The difference, of course, is simple: The city wrote an ordinance that made just the front facade of Acres of Books historic—so it will be saved and theoretically reused some day.

As for the Long Beach Flower Market—which wears an eyebrow of Spanish tile like a visor—no one deemed it worthy of anything, and so it will disappear entirely one day soon.

So, take a picture—take pictures of all these buildings, and the American Hotel on Broadway at the Promenade, and the former Acres of Books building, and even that tiny old Albertson’s at Sixth and Redondo. Then, one day, you can show people what this city used to look like.

Tags: Burton W. Chace Civic Center, Long Beach, Roberts department store, sumitomo bank