Setting Out for New Sites

This will be the year Southern Californians can view a new version of the future from Disney, walk among sharks at a world-class aquarium, ride a high-wire bicycle without fear of falling and dance again to big-band music at classy nightclubs, including one that was a hangout for spies during World War II.

It will be the year a Russian submarine docks in Long Beach as a tourist attraction, the new Getty Center offers a whole new array of performing arts events and the California Museum of Science and Industry reinvents itself with a new exhibit and a new name.

Besides the billion-dollar Getty, the new entertainment venues that will be unveiled in 1998 will include dozens of others built at a collective cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Among these are a host of combination entertainment and shopping centers, known as “urban entertainment centers” and “suburban entertainment centers,” that will make 1998 one of the biggest years yet for new “shoppertainment” attractions.

The new venues will rank this as one of the biggest years in recent memory in terms of new attractions opening in Southern California, says Carol Martinez, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau.

“It’s like the city is reinventing itself,” in terms of attractions, Martinez said.

According to Martinez, the Convention and Visitors Bureau each year looks for new attractions to help it sell L.A. as a destination--both to first-time visitors and to those who have already been here. She said one of the toughest jobs in recent years has been wooing back former visitors.

“Now we can say to them honestly that if they haven’t been here lately, they haven’t seen everything we have to offer because there are going to be so many new places to go and things to do,” Martinez said. While big attractions have opened in other recent years, including the Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studios in 1996, Martinez could recall no recent year that offered such a variety of impressive new attractions.

The new entertainment venues range from small projects like the Loretta Theater in Santa Monica, with a $1.5-million budget for construction and first-year operating expenses, to the $1-billion Getty, already open and scheduled to begin a performing arts and special events schedule in February.

Among the new attractions will be Disney’s new vision of the future, which will be unveiled in the spring when Disneyland opens an all-new Tomorrowland. The revamping, designed to keep Tomorrowland a step ahead of the present, includes a new rocket car ride, an Astro Orbitor, on which visitors can pilot themselves through simulated space, and a “Honey, I Shrunk the Audience” show.

Another total revamping will be unveiled in February at the former California Museum of Science and Industry, renamed the California Science Center, which includes a new 3-D Imax theater and a whole new set of exhibits. Among these will be a high-wire bicycle on which visitors can learn some laws of physics firsthand by pedaling across a guide wire four stories above the floor. The bicycle is rigged with a counterweight to keep the rider from flipping over, plus a harness for the rider and a safety net below.

Another all-new venue this year will be the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific, billed as “the first world-class aquarium to be developed in Southern California.” The aquarium’s 157,000 square feet of exhibits will include an underwater tunnel where visitors can walk among sharks, a tank where they can swim with presumably non-lethal fish and a “Kid’s Cove.”

The new Getty Center will offer a broad spectrum of events and performances throughout the year. These will range from outdoor family festivals to Friday nights designed for young adults to free live performances by some of L.A.’s most accomplished musicians.

Other new venues slated to open during the year range from a planned but not yet formally announced new ride at Magic Mountain to a new magic theater in Santa Monica to at least two nightclubs specializing in big-band music. Among these is the Sky Room, atop the former Breakers Hotel in Long Beach, a place once rumored to be a hangout for the cloak-and-dagger crowd.

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It wouldn’t be a new year in Southern California without new movie theaters. Scores, if not hundreds, will open across Southern California at new and existing shopping centers and at stand-alone multiplexes.

The multiplex phenomenon is a continuation of a trend that has added hundreds of new screens in recent years and helped to create new buzz phrases like “urban entertainment centers” and “suburban entertainment centers.”

Developers, on the theory that shopping and entertainment go together like movies and popcorn, have already built a spate of new centers combining shops, movie theaters and entertainment-oriented restaurants. Perhaps the epitome of these is Dave & Buster’s, where customers can eat and be entertained by video games, billiards and various other amusements.

The wave of new theaters and entertainment-oriented shopping centers raises the obvious question: How many are too many?

“When will the market become saturated is a good question. Unfortunately, it seems we always have to cross the line before we know we’ve crossed it,” said John Ecklein, publisher of the Novato-based newsletter Entertainment Real Estate Report.

Ecklein said the concept of entertainment-oriented shopping centers is only a few years old but that centers are sprouting so fast throughout Southern California and the rest of the United States that tracking them is a full-time job. He knows of 35 that are either open or planned in Southern California, but those could be “just the tip of the iceberg” if developers keep on announcing new centers at their current pace, he said.

“Southern California will probably be one of the first places to let us know when we’ve seen too many of these,” Ecklein said.

Asking how many entertainment shopping centers are too many is “sort of like asking when there will be too many restaurants,” said Paul Jacob, vice president of RTKL Associates Inc., an architectural and planning firm that has worked on the Irvine Spectrum and Valencia Town Center among others.

In Jacob’s view, entertainment centers need more than just movie screens. He said the three basic components of such a center are well-known: entertainment, restaurants and retail shops. But the success or failure of the centers is determined by what kind of entertainment, restaurants and shops.

“As we go forward, it just can’t be another 24-plex,” he said. “There have to be some other components, such as an Imax theater or some other entertainment showpiece. And it can’t be just restaurants. You have to plan the demographics of the restaurants and who would go to them.”

Jacob said the urban and suburban entertainment centers that succeed will be those that develop “a sense of place” such as that of Third Street Promenade, Old Town Pasadena or the Irvine and Valencia projects. But achieving that distinction will be more difficult as more centers are built because “it will be harder to create a center that doesn’t look like the one across town.”

According to Doug Brown, managing partner of the Beverly Hills-based development firm Regent Properties, urban entertainment centers can’t be created by simply plunking down a bunch of shops and movie theaters wherever a developer finds vacant land.

“It’s still a question of real estate as much as entertainment,” Brown said. “You know: location, location, location.”

Brown said Regent believes in attempting urban entertainment centers “only at places where you have some of the biggest intersections in town.” An example is Glendale Marketplace, a center his firm is developing at Brand Boulevard and Broadway in Glendale, next to the Glendale Galleria.

Newsletter publisher Ecklein has a theory about why the entertainment-oriented shopping centers are proliferating and why the timing could be propitious for pure entertainment venues and attractions like Tomorrowland, the new Long Beach aquarium, nightclubs and the like.

“Part of it is that entertainment has become the saving grace for retail centers, many of which were suffering until the entertainment concept came along,” he said.

Another part is that the acquisitive 1980s have given way to a 1990s, in which “people are less concerned about the stuff they have and more concerned with finding experiences they can enjoy,” Ecklein believes. He said the 1980s era of “cocooning,” in which so many consumers supposedly preferred to stay home and bond with their possessions, has given way to an old-fashioned desire to go someplace and be entertained.