By Jason Islas
Staff Writer

November 13, 2013 -- Centennial Real Estate Company has begun exploring plans to revamp its property, situated on one of eight opportunity sites in Downtown Santa Monica.

Working with Santa Monica-based architect firm Koning Eizenberg and the Copenhagen-based Gehl Architects, Centennial Real Estate Company began this week looking into how best to redevelop its one-acre piece of land, currently home to an office building, at Fifth Street and Olympic Drive.

Across the street from the Big Blue Bus yards and sandwiched between the 10 freeway and 2.5 acres of City-owned land, the property needs an upgrade, said Scott Schonfeld, a partner with Centennial Real Estate Company.

At a Tuesday meeting with Downtown Santa Monica, Inc’s District Issues Committee, he called the current building on the site an “eye sore” and “a Class B office building.”

And with the Expo Light Rail station less than a block away at Fourth Street and Colorado Avenue scheduled to open in 2016, revamping the stretch of Fifth Street from the freeway exit to Colorado Avenue to make it more welcoming to pedestrians and bicyclists could be the right move.

“There are very few places in Santa Monica I’d call blighted, but that’s one of them,” Downtown Santa Monica, Inc. CEO Kathleen Rawson said at the Tuesday meeting, referring to the stretch of Fifth Street.

While the short stretch of road is a heavily-used corridor for visitors arriving in Downtown by car, it feels like Santa Monica’s “back door if it feels like a door at all,” said one member of the Committee.

Though most agreed that improvement is needed in the area, some on the Committee were concerned that over developing the southern side of Downtown would further draw business from the district’s northern end.

That’s why, Rawson said, she’d like to see the area transformed into place that “got people in and out in a really terrific Santa Monica way.”

The area currently offers very little to pedestrians or bicyclists.

Boardmember Julia Ladd, who is also vice president of property management for Santa Monica Place-owner Macerich, said, “Right now, there’s nothing getting people in and out of the Expo site.”

One possibility to help ease the flow of traffic and allow for wider sidewalks in the area would be to work with CalTrans to realign the freeway exit, an undertaking that Schonfeld admitted would cost in the “tens of millions” of dollars.

Much of what Tuesday’s discussion, Schonfeld said, was to get an idea of what stakeholders might want to see at the site.

And, he said, Centennial’s project would depend on what its neighbor, the City of Santa Monica, wants to do with its parcel, also situated on the opportunity site, one of eight locations in Downtown Santa Monica the City planners have identified possible locations for more intensive development in exchange for robust packages of community benefits from the developers.

The Big Blue Bus property across the street is also among the opportunity sites.