By Jonathan Friedman
Lookout Staff

July 20, 2010 -- Two Downtown private development projects under construction and another two in the planning stages are expected to round out the Bayside’s offerings to visitors, workers and residents.

Two of the projects, both of them hotels, will bring affordable travel accommodations to the high-priced coastal zone and enliven the outskirts of the district on Wilshire Boulevard. The other projects will revitalize a City landmark damaged by an earthquake and make a night at the cinema a cutting-edge experience.

Following are brief descriptions of four projects that will help make the Bayside an even more complete and inviting urban destination:

Affordable Lodgings
If you want to stay near the Promenade and the beach but have to watch your pocketbook, check out the new Shore Hotel, currently under construction on Ocean Avenue not far from Santa Monica Place.

Slated to open next summer, the nearly 90,000-square-foot structure will offer 164 rooms, a swimming pool and 4,600 square feet of commercial space, including a restaurant on Ocean Avenue and a sushi eatery, café or pastry/ice cream shop on Second Street. A four-level subterranean parking garage with 294 spaces will also be included.

“It’s going to provide a lot as an addition to Downtown,” said Robert Farzam, Chief Operating Officer of Ocean Avenue Management, which owns the project. “ We will have a beautiful big lobby, exercise room and meeting room.”

Room rates “are subject to the market,” Farzam said. But the price is expected to be a bargain compared with other options in the high-priced coastal zone.

The elegant three-story facility will replace the old Travelodge Hotel and the adjacent Pacific Sands Motel owned by the Farzam family, who will own and operate the new hotel. The new Travelodge is expected to enliven the area by bringing retail shops to a strategic corner of Downtown.

This will be the first affordable hotel in the Bayside since the Farzam family built the Best Western on Ocean Avenue in 1992. While it may lack many of the amenities typical of luxury hotels, having an affordable place to stay Downtown near the beach is considered by many a fair trade-off.

A Landmark is Reborn
The building that once housed a movie theater during the silent film era is expected to finally come alive again after its battered walls were boarded up following the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. What’s left of the old Mayfair Theater at 212-216 Santa Monica Boulevard will serve as the cornerstone of a new mixed use development currently under construction.

The revitalized 49,000-square-foot structure will include 38 apartment units, ground-floor retail and two levels of subterranean parking. The historic theater's spruced-up façade will greet visitors walking to and from the Promenade, replacing the uninviting pathway shadowed by scaffolding that pedestrians have had to navigate for the past 16 years.

Called the Majestic when it opened in 1911, the theater built by Santa Monica pioneer Charles A Tegner showcased silent films that were all the rage at the time. When the silent film era ended, the facility was unable to compete despite a retooling to accommodate the talkies. The theater screened second-run films until 1975, when it became a venue for live acts. Plans to rent out the structure for occasional events and movie shoots died with the 1994 Northridge Earthquake.

Owner Karl Schober, a grandson of Tegner, proposed to redevelop the site after the earthquake, but his proposal to demolish the battered building was thwarted when the Landmarks Commission designated it a historic landmark. Plans to turn the structure into a commercial building were complicated by City guidelines, and Schober opted to go with the mixed-use residential complex currently under construction.

That's Entertainment
Although the Promenade movie theaters are responsible for helping make one of the world’s most famous outdoor malls what is today, the Santa Monica cinemas have fallen behind in the race to provide state-of-the-art entertainment. The result: Downtown theater attendance is down 30 percent this past decade.

Enter AMC Entertainment and Metropolitan Pacific Capital, which plans to lure back moviegoers with a proposed 83,000-square-foot complex that should also help enliven Fourth Street.

“For years, we’ve been working to expand the vitality and energy of the Bayside District beyond Third Street," said Kathleen Rawson, CEO of the Bayside District Corporation. "This is an opportunity to do that."

The proposed four-story-high IMAX with 3D capabilities would be part of a new complex built on a City-owned site off Arizona Avenue. The proposed complex includes 11 additional auditorium theaters with a total of 2,197 seats, 2,100 square feet of retail tenant space and an interior restaurant that would be open to the public. The auditoriums could be used for digital concerts and other events.

“This is going to be state-of-the-art,” John Warfel of Metropolitan Pacific Capital said of the AMC project during a recent presentation to the Planning Commission. “We are planning on having the best theater in Los Angeles. It’s going to have all the bells and whistles because we believe this market can support that.”

The project will involve a development agreement, so public benefits must be offered. What those benefits will be is currently under discussion. The project must pass City and California Coastal Commission review in an application process the developers say will take some 18 months. Construction would take about a year.

Life on the Edge
How to enliven the outskirts of Downtown has always posed a challenge. One solution is a proposed 284-room hotel slated to occupy an existing structure and its sprawling surface parking lot at 710 Wilshire Boulevard.

The proposal, which is still in the early stages, involves converting a landmark office building into a seven-story, 55-room hotel with nearly 7,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space and a 4,000-square-foot restaurant.

Additionally, developer Alex Gorby wants to construct an adjacent seven-story building with 229 guest rooms, 11,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space, a 3,500 square-foot restaurant and approximately 5,700 square feet of meeting rooms and hotel amenities such as a spa and gym on the surface lot.

The Bayside District Board last year voted to support the general concept for the development, saying it would generate activity near the Bayside's northeastern boundary. The homeowners group in the area withdrew its opposition after the initial proposal calling for a much larger facility was scaled-down. The City Council in May agreed to have municipal staff begin negotiating a development agreement that would include community benefits.