Hollywood Pins Revival Hopes on Major Project

Fireworks and champagne marked the official start of construction Thursday on a closely watched Hollywood redevelopment project billed as the beginning of the district’s long-awaited revival.

About 800 people turned out for an event that bore little resemblance to a conventional groundbreaking ceremony.

Instead of dirt and shovels, there were red carpet runways for arriving guests, a performance by Broadway musical star Savion Glover, breakfast catered by Wolfgang Puck and showers of golden confetti.

It was all designed to impress, to signal that the developers of the $385-million retail-entertainment project at the corner of Highland Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard will succeed where others have for years stumbled and failed.

The city’s oft-frustrated hopes for a Hollywood renaissance are in good part riding on the development, which is receiving an up-front infusion of $90 million in public funds for an underground parking garage and a 3,300-seat, live broadcast theater that will host the annual Academy Awards starting in 2001.

Rising next to Mann’s Chinese Theatre on two blocks that are now largely vacant, the complex also will include restaurants, music clubs, studio stores, live broadcast space and a movie theater complex.

It all means that the millions of disappointed tourists who wander Hollywood Boulevard every year “will be disappointed no more,” promised Hollywood Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg.

She was one of several officials blowing verbal kisses at one another for their efforts to get the project off the ground. Goldberg, Mayor Richard Riordan’s staff, the Community Redevelopment Agency and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority--which is leasing land above a subway entrance to the project--all came in for repeated praise, along with David Malmuth, who is spearheading the project for TrizecHahn Development Corp.

Speaking from a large, draped stage flanked by two-story-tall palm trees trucked in for the event, both Goldberg and CRA chairwoman Christine Essel noted the history of false development starts in Hollywood.

“Frankly, there are a lot of doubting Thomases as to whether anything would happen again,” Goldberg said. Essel recalled that a decade ago a groundbreaking was held on the same spot for a large project that was never built.

TrizecHahn, a multibillion-dollar, Toronto-based real estate firm, cleared its last major construction hurdle Wednesday, when the City Council voted 12-2 to grant the company a zoning change and reject an appeal filed by Hollywood Heights residents objecting to the development’s size and impact on traffic.

Though the company scored a major coup in wooing the prestigious Academy Awards to the site, it still has to fill much of the 640,000-square-foot complex. Aside from a letter of intent from Eastman Kodak Co. signaling its interest in the project and a lease with entertainer Quincy Jones to open a large, live-music club and restaurant, TrizecHahn remains in the talking stage with a number of big-name potential tenants.

Rocky Delgadillo, deputy mayor of economic development, nonetheless expressed confidence that tenants soon will be signing.

“The deals aren’t closed, but we know they’re there.”

Loralie Ogden, a commercial real estate broker for CB Richard Ellis and a board member of the Hollywood Economic Alliance, was similarly optimistic.

“Until all the ducks were in a row, I don’t think anybody wanted to jump in,” said Ogden, who has dealt in Hollywood real estate for a decade. “ There’s a long history to that corner. I think everything will fall in place.”