Rebuilt From the Inside Out, City Hall Prepares to Reopen

Officials will be moving back into Los Angeles City Hall in July on schedule after a $299-million, three-year project that has been as much a modernization as a seismic retrofitting.

Mayor Richard Riordan and City Controller Rick Tuttle wanted to limit the project to retrofitting, which was spurred by the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

Five years ago, Riordan and Tuttle named a panel of experts that recommended a $165-million budget confining work to earthquake safety, and probably would have postponed occupancy of the upper stories for years.

But the City Council, and especially its president, John Ferraro, wanted no part of such restricted work, reasoning that it was also important to update the building for the 21st century.

The council mandated a more extensive project, originally pricing it at $273 million, to include new food service facilities, computer-ready offices, additional staircases, central air conditioning and other renovations. Later the city quietly added $26 million more, some of that for converting the fourth floor to council office suites.

Federal grants totaling $126 million and municipal seismic bonds approved by voters financed most of the work.

A tour of the building recently found hundreds of workers putting the finishing touches on what Chief Legislative Analyst Ronald F. Deaton, who has overseen the project for the council, called “rebuilding the building inside-out.”

Richard Heim, regional executive officer for the company that has done most of the work, Clark Construction Group, said that up to 400 people are working overtime to finish the job. “We have been focused on getting this building done on time,” he said.

City Hall was built in 1928, five years before the Long Beach earthquake awakened officials to the need for seismic safeguards in construction and the weaknesses of brick as a building material.

Still, with some damage, City Hall survived the Long Beach quake, the Sylmar-San Fernando quake of 1971, and Northridge. The epicenters of those temblors, as strong as magnitude 6.7, were miles away.

In designing the seismic retrofitting, Nabih Youssef adopted redundant protections: not only 526 seismic base isolators and 64 viscous dampers--devices that serve as shock absorbers--but also shear walls and other buttressing.

City Hall, at 27 stories, is the tallest building ever protected with base isolators, and that has been controversial among some earthquake engineers who believe that the system works best in shorter, mid-size buildings.

Still, Stan Morimoto, the city Department of Public Works engineer who has been everyday manager of the project, contends that City Hall will be able to withstand an 8.1 quake on the San Andreas fault and a 6.8 quake on the Elysian Park fault.

The San Andreas fault, as it runs through Southern California, is at its closest point about 40 miles from City Hall. Shaking from a quake on its closest segment would be considerably moderated by the time it reached City Hall.

Some scientists believe that the Elysian Park fault--little more than a mile north of the building--is capable of a quake in the magnitude 7 range. Still, though such a quake could strike tomorrow, odds are that it will not hit during the useful future life of City Hall.

Scientists have estimated the recurrent interval--the time between the biggest earthquakes--at 1,000 to 2,000 years, and the designers of City Hall and the Roman Catholic cathedral being constructed two blocks away have stressed that the odds of such a quake occurring during the functional life of the buildings are not great. Still, they say, magnitude 6 quakes will probably occur at lesser intervals and the protections will be excellent for those.

Deaton and Morimoto stressed during the City Hall tour that even though the project is not quite complete, its seismic protections already are.

“The trusses are done, all shear walls are done, the building is now isolated,” said Deaton, showing off the moat that will allow the building to move from side to side as much as 24 inches during a quake.

Meanwhile, they expressed pride in the modernization, such as the acoustic system that will allow everyone to be heard much better in the renovated City Council chambers. The acoustic work was donated by Project Restore, a trust fund established by the city 15 years ago that also raises private money and has contributed more than $2 million to the project.

Its president, Ed Avila, said last week that new elevator cabs are now being delivered and a contract has been let for restoration of the Lindbergh beacon that has crowned City Hall. In addition, Project Restore has paid to refurbish paintings in the rotunda and elsewhere.

Besides consolidating council offices on one floor, renovation also will mean new conference rooms for municipal departments on the 10th floor and safer staircases to the observation tower on the 27th floor.

Careful inspection on some upper floors will reveal that the older bricks are still there, but now surrounded by walls that fortify them considerably against the quake danger.