Barbera Urges City Council to Save His Old Studios

Animation legend Joe Barbera is hoping to save the studios and offices where cartoons such as “Tom and Jerry,” “Huckleberry Hound” and “The Jetsons” were created.

Barbera, 92, wrote a letter to the Los Angeles City Council opposing a development proposal to raze two of three buildings that once housed Hanna-Barbera Studios in Cahuenga Pass to make room for a mixed-use project of stores and about 160 apartments.

“I sincerely hope that we can protect the legacy and keep the roots of Hollywood animation history firmly secured for the ages,” he wrote in the letter, which was presented at a neighborhood meeting earlier this week..

Los Angeles developer William McGregor said his four-acre project along Cahuenga Boulevard would have retail stores on the ground level and three floors of apartments.

It also may include an onramp to the southbound Hollywood Freeway, a feature that some residents say they favor.

There are now two southbound onramps within a half-mile of the proposed site.

At a meeting of the Hollywood Hills West Neighborhood Council on Wednesday night, McGregor told about 40 people that “we are here to get on track to utilize the property in a way that works for you and works for us.”

He said the project would enhance the area by attracting stores such as Starbucks and a Wild Oats specialty grocery store.

Dan Bernstein, president of the neighborhood council, said those stores would keep people from driving to the San Fernando Valley to do their shopping.

“I don’t see anything classic” about the Hanna-Barbera buildings, he said.

But Ken Bernstein, director of preservation for the Los Angeles Conservancy and no relation to Dan Bernstein, said, “It would be an irreplaceable loss.”

Some at the meeting questioned the need to demolish the Hanna-Barbera buildings. They also voiced concern about parking in the area and criticized the prospect of more traffic congestion.

“The project is too big and it has too many cars,” said Joan Luchs, president of the Cahuenga Pass Neighborhood Assn., another residents group. The Hanna-Barbera structures do not have historic status that could preclude their immediate destruction.

In 1997, the city Cultural Heritage Commission rejected cultural-historic status because, it said, the structures were not architecturally distinguished.

Hanna-Barbera artists and producers have moved to studios in Sherman Oaks.

The proposals are scheduled to be considered Tuesday by the City Council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee.