Century City : Originally a Lot for Shooting Movies, Skyscraper Community Has Become Mature and Vibrant Symbol of L.A.

When 20th Century Fox Studio honchos trumpeted a plan to replace the creaky facades on their back lot with a gleaming, $500-million city of the future, many wondered whether it was just another Hollywood fantasy.

Over the decades, the rambling Westside filmmaking site had functioned as a cobblestoned French village, a dusty Western cow town, and a rustic New England community. But a space-age, city-within-a-city, with real skyscrapers, housing complexes and an open-air shopping mall?

To be sure, Century City, as the development was dubbed, proceeded to grow in fits and starts. For a time, businesses that could be cajoled to set up shop there were considered so flaky that national newsmagazines derisively referred to the 176-acre site as Century Silly.

But now, 30 years after the initial ground breaking, the last large office tower that can fit on the property--a 38-story elliptical structure--is under construction at 1999 Avenue of the Stars.

And this week, a former actor named Ronald Reagan, already a notable presence due to his frequent stays in the Century Plaza Hotel, takes possession of post-presidential office digs on the top floor of the exclusive new 34-story Fox Plaza.

With its sleek but antiseptic design, Century City remains the subject of a love-hate relationship. But as it settles into middle age, it is without question a vibrant symbol of Los Angeles, ingrained nearly as deeply in the collective consciousness as City Hall or the Hollywood sign.

Prestigious?

“My mother says, ‘Honey, put your diplomas on the wall,’ ” says Felipa Richland, a criminal lawyer. “I say, ‘Mom, my office is in Century City. I don’t need to put my diplomas on the wall.’ ”

Prosperous?

“I love it here,” says attorney Arnold L. Klein, whose office is in one of the landmark twin 44-story Century Plaza Towers. “The higher the clients go up the elevators, the more they know they are going to have to pay me. It’s a question of expectations.”

A stroll through Century City reveals a swirl of cosmopolitan sights and sounds.

On any morning, it is no surprise to glimpse Ronald Reagan Jr. hustling past a group of window-shopping foreign dignitaries on his way to an aerobics class at the Century West Club.

At lunchtime, fashionably dressed lawyers, brokers and secretaries wolf down corned beef sandwiches or Greek salads at the melange of food stalls in the Century City Shopping Center’s new Marketplace.

Throughout the day, shoppers in designer dresses and leather skirts browse in boutiques catering to expensive tastes. (A recent press memo for the open-air shopping center boasts that “even the toy stores are for upwardly mobile kids.”)

Below ground too, Century City reveals its character: its massive parking garages teem with foreign luxury cars sporting what may be the world’s greatest concentration of vanity license plates -- “WE ERNIT,” “MINK 4,” “ABA KING” and “40 SHARE,” among others.

Very Low Vacancy Rate

Century City’s 2,500 businesses employ 40,000 workers, and the vacancy rate for more than 10 million square feet of premium space in two dozen office buildings is virtually nil. Another 4,000 people reside in fancy condos and townhouses clustered between Olympic and Pico boulevards, the one-time site of the Peyton Place film set.

Meanwhile, the 145-shop-and-restaurant center, which suffered hard times with the opening of several enclosed Westside malls, is making a comeback with the addition of a 14-screen movie complex and a revised marketing plan aimed at Yuppies.

It’s a long way from the morning in 1959 when developer William Zeckendorf Sr., flanked by Mary Pickford and a bevy of politicians and press agents, gathered in front of a make-believe Western saloon for an old-fashioned ground breaking. After a round of speeches in which Zeckendorf labeled the development “an oasis in the midst of a great city,” a bulldozer demolished the facade of a small shack on Tombstone Street. Then, according to one account, “Everyone went to lunch.”

At the time, 20th Century Fox was financially strapped. But as it turned out, so was Zeckendorf, a New York real estate tycoon with ideas grander than his wallet. Within two years, Aluminum Co. of America (Alcoa), seeking to showcase the myriad uses of aluminum siding, stepped in, paying $43 million for the property.

Alcoa persevered during hard times, selling off most buildings as soon as construction was completed. As the demand for quality Westside office space skyrocketed, Century City, with its strikingly urbane, business-like look in a city of crazy quilt architecture, blossomed into a thriving center of commerce.

Alcoa sold out its remaining interests in four buildings and two undeveloped sites two years ago for $600 million to JMB Realty of Chicago. Other office towers are now owned by such firms as the Northrop Corp., Watt Industries, LaSalle Partners Ltd. and the Japanese-based Shuwa Investment Corp.

“Century City has achieved maturity,” says Joel Baker, executive vice president of the Century City Chamber of Commerce, which is planning a series of 30th-anniversary celebrations. “It’s gone through birth, infancy and adolescence and it is now a fully mature adult. The challenge for the future is to keep it youthful.”

There is also another challenge--maintaining a positive image. For if some see Century City as a sparkling jewel, detractors see it as one with a surfeit of flaws.

Some call Century City Los Angeles’ most prestigious business address. Others call it the city’s most snobbish, and sterile, business address.

Some boast that it is one of the safest areas of Los Angeles (“Who is going to pay $5 for parking in order to commit a street robbery?” asks Los Angeles Police Capt. Maurice Moore). Others question a lack of services and sensitivity toward the poor and elderly.

Some crow about Century City’s massive parking facilities. Others complain about the rush-hour traffic mess and the difficulty of finding one’s car in the outsized garages, particularly the six-level, 5,500-space structure under the ABC Entertainment Center.

Yet on one point all would agree: Century City has had a profound impact on the landscape of Los Angeles.

Conceived in an era when a Beverly Hills Freeway was counted on to provide easy access, Century City has nonetheless managed to flourish as one of the city’s major centers of legal, entertainment and business services.

Although there are no courthouses in its confines, an estimated 4,000 attorneys and 6,000 legal support staffers work in the sleek office towers. Some of the nation’s best-known lawyers, including Howard L. Weitzman and palimony specialist Marvin M. Mitchelson, call Century City home.

Another noted criminal attorney, Harland Braun, who frequently tries cases in downtown Los Angeles, says he would work nowhere else.

Century City, Braun says, is far more convenient to his Westside home and a far more comfortable setting for an office than corporate-laden downtown. Still, he adds, Century City is more strait-laced than its glitzy neighbor to the east.

“In Beverly Hills, I feel I’d have to wear Gucci shoes, a lot of hair spray and leather pants,” says Braun. “I don’t look good in gold chains. Here it’s more business-like.”

Still Used for Movies

Before its sale, the 20th Century Fox back lot served as the filming site for Tom Mix Westerns, Shirley Temple heart-tuggers and South Seas adventures. Now, a good deal of the business of Hollywood is carried out on the same property.

Regiments of publicity agents, managers and entertainment-oriented lawyers and accountants are clustered here. 20th Century Fox maintains 21 sound stages, corporate offices and a massive outdoor New York stage set on its remaining compound (which could eventually be replaced by up to 2,400 condos under a 1981 city planning agreement, although no plans are currently pending). The 190-employee West Coast headquarters of Tri-Star Pictures and the 300-employee headquarters of Orion Pictures are also based here.

“It’s centrally located in terms of where the agencies are and where people live,” says Orion production chief Mike Medavoy. “The access is rather easy and comfortable.”

The back lot, with its Southern mansions, tropical lagoons and 80-by-250-foot backdrop of a blue sky, may be gone. But the development that replaced it is now frequently used as an ultra-urban set for features ranging from “Planet of the Apes” to the recent Bruce Willis thriller, “Die Hard.”

In the latter, Fox Plaza doubled as a skyscraper seized by terrorists. Recently, decorators setting up shop for Reagan reportedly discovered empty blank cartridges left over from the production in his suite.

Century City is also home to a 195-bed private hospital, two luxury hotels (the Century Plaza and the new Lego-like, 375-room Marriott), the 1,850-seat Shubert Theatre, an Auto Club of Southern California headquarters, several book publishing companies, and the West Coast headquarters of Home Box Office.

“I feel like I’m in the Jetsons here--it’s like a realization of the cartoon series, with the look of the ramps and the lights and all,” says transplanted New Yorker Richard Licata, an HBO executive. “I like the duality of living in the Hollywood Hills in a 1937 house and then coming to work in a place that seems brand new.”

Another ex-Manhattan resident, Shubert Theatre general manager Ira Bernstein, is one of the handful of people who both live and work in Century City.

“To me, it’s the urban experience under very pleasant conditions,” he says. “To an old New Yorker, it gives a feeling of cleanliness and spaciousness. It’s a wholesome environment that is a relatively sophisticated business and recreation area.”

Yet, to others, it is a soulless canyon of corporate blandness.

“They’ve done a lot in terms of planning and paving to make it attractive, but it’s sort of artificial, it doesn’t really have a real life to it,” says landscape architect Emmet L. Wemple. “It’s sort of an island by itself--you don’t go there unless you have to go there.

“You drive from home to the office, drive your car into a protective place, go up the elevator, maybe go to the coffee shop at lunch, go back in your car at night and you’re gone. Maybe it’s successful for that reason. But I’ll take Larchmont any day.”

Wind Challenges Pedestrians

There is also another architectural quirk in this community of skyscrapers and superblocks--the wind-tunnel effect in the plaza outside the twin triangular Towers. The gusts are occasionally strong enough to blow over unwary pedestrians or, last month, the plaza’s 45-foot Christmas tree.

“You could provide all the electricity for the buildings here by putting windmills outside,” says Century City attorney Mike Joseph.

Then there are the parking garages.

“It’s somewhat of an intelligence test for clients to see whether from a phone call and directions if they can actually make it to my office,” jokes lawyer Barry A. Fisher. “They continually try to come up with new schemes for making it easier. For example, they recently color-coded parts of the parking area. But we still have three clients missing.”

The parking situation is probably what makes Century City seem hostile and impregnable to outsiders. With absolutely no on-street spaces available--and daily fees of up to $12--motorists rarely stop by on a whim.

Yet, once inside the fortress-like complex, one can sense a rhythm of community and witness management efforts to add a human element. At the Century City North office tower, for example, each level of the garage is decorated with posters from such classic films as “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone With the Wind.”

Elsewhere, business officials have attempted to loosen the starched-shirt image by sponsoring softball leagues and business networking seminars and by installing sculpture walks.

Another complaint focuses on the homogenization of the work, residential and shopping populations.

For two decades, the shopping center served as a meeting ground for hundreds of Westside senior citizens attracted by the moderate prices and wholesome food at Clifton’s Cafeteria. But the popular eatery was forced out of business last year when the shopping center, owned by Rosenberg Real Estate Equity Fund of San Francisco, doubled the rent.

The management “did not feel our customer was the kind they wanted in the center because they did not shop in other stores,” reflects Clifton’s President Donald Clinton. “But we did bring 3,000 people into our restaurant every day. I said, if we bring them as far as our door, it’s your job to get them into the other shops.”

Michael Strle, general manager of the shopping center, concedes, “It was probably the most difficult decision we’ve made.”

White and High-Income

As for the office towers, Chamber of Commerce head Baker says the average employee is “well-educated, white, high-income.”

“I had a class from a black school in the inner city call, and they wanted to come and do a tour of Century City, and they wanted to meet some black executives, and I could only come up with one,” Baker says. “(But) it’s a function of the (economic) world, not a function of Century City.”

During its planning stages, the development was meant to serve as a mini-city in which thousands of residents could walk to work. As it turned out, though, only a handful of film stars and executives have the wherewithal.

“Nobody would call it mixed housing, unless under $1 million and over $1 million is mixed,” says Jane Blumenfeld, planning adviser to Mayor Tom Bradley.

The development plan itself, prepared by Welton Becket Associates, was one of the first in which a private firm designed a mixed-use, mini-city. Nowadays, somewhat similar urban villages can be found from Virginia to Tokyo, though mostly in the suburbs.

City Plan Eased Tensions

Over the years, local neighborhood associations and the city of Beverly Hills battled Century City on traffic and development density issues. But an era of peaceful coexistence set in with the adoption of the landmark 1981 city plan, which provided strict limits on further development, based on the average flow of traffic for various business and residential uses.

“It was one of the most revolutionary land-use plans ever adopted by the city . . . (because) it radically cut development rights,” says Westside City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky.

“Century City is a land-use mistake, an anomaly,” he adds. “You shouldn’t have a high-density center in the middle of the city without any serious access. But leaving those problems aside, Century City is one of the classiest parts of Los Angeles. There is a cleanliness about it, a freshness about it that is unique in major urban centers.”

Perhaps the best example is the world-class Century Plaza Hotel.

The 1,072-room hotel plays host to kings, queens, presidents and prime ministers. Its 1,800-seat ballroom, the second largest in the city, is used almost nightly for charity functions and cultural events.

2-by-4 Upon Request

And lodgers receive the best of attention. An illustration: Earlier this month, the hotel hosted a national conference for TV station executives, featuring such exhibitors as the Gong Show and the World Wrestling Federation.

The latter had lined up wrestler Hacksaw Jim Duggan, whose trademark is a 2-by-4, to sign autographs. “But Hacksaw can’t travel through airports with his 2-by-4 for obvious security reasons,” says WWF executive Michael V. Ortman.

When he arrived at the Century Plaza, Hacksaw immediately sought out the concierge. Within 10 minutes, a hunk of wood had been located and sawed to the required size.

“Now that’s service,” says Ortman.