You have to tear something old down before you can build something new.
That’s pretty much always the case in built-out cities like Long Beach, and really the Southland in general. It’s just that it seems like I’ve been seeing a lot more of it lately.
I drive the far eastern (southern?) stretch of PCH in Long Beach at least a couple of times a week heading for Grace Community Church in Seal Beach. That has provided me the opportunity to watch as they demolished the Congressional Place office building on the corner of PCH and that weird Studebaker Road stub leading to the Alamitos Bay Marina.
It’s tight quarters there, and the demolition required some finesse. Building the new apartments/condos/townhouses looks pretty claustrophobic too. But it’s going fast.
Along the same route, I’ve been watching the slow emptying out of the Marina Shores Center just to the west of the Congressional Place project and east of 2ND & PCH (another story I’ll get to in a minute). I used to shop at the PetCo in that center, and the Mimi’s restaurant on the east end was the go-to place for business breakfast until COVID. Mimi’s has been boarded up for years now.
At any rate, the shops in the long commercial building in Marina Shores slowly disappeared over the last year, presumably because their leases were up. The last one took the sign down at the end of February, I think.
What’s coming? Supposedly about 600 apartments, with restaurant space on the ground floor. I am beyond curious to see how they are going to fit that much housing, and the parking it should require, on that little plot of land.
But that’s why I’m a lot better at demolition than building, I guess.
If you’ve read about some of my DIY home improvement projects, you know that I’m happiest when I’m tearing out a floor, pulling down old cabinets, or clearing brush. When it comes to the build-something-new part, I struggle to simply make whatever it is functional, let alone looking good.
But back to the major demolition the big boys do. On my daily pleasure drive down the 405, I pass by what was once the headquarters of the Trinity Broadcast Network before I get to the Irvine office. The ornate grounds designed like a Greek or Italian Palazzo were gorgeous, and a decade or so ago we made a special trip each Christmas season to see the amazing lights Trinity put up.
But Trinity’s days are over, and the new owners have struggled to make a dime on the property using it as an event space. So it sold again. More housing on the way.
And in less than a week, the round arena-looking building was rubble, along with at least half of the main building. I have no doubt the land will be scraped and building materials on the way by mid-April.
It’s a sign of the times. We need more places for people to live, and they’re shopping on line anyway.
It was a sign of the times a decade ago in the same area when the SeaPort Marina Hotel closed. Once a glitzy hostelry by the water where important people stayed, the hotel had fallen on hard times, ultimately renting rooms by the week and month.
Tear it down and build something new, right? Only it wasn’t that simple back then. Zoning was an issue, and environmental activists held sway. An original proposal for housing and a boutique shopping center was shot down, and when developers finally gave up the lucrative residential component, environmental fights delayed the shopping center that is there today for more than two years.
It also prompted the city to scrap the ancient development plan called SEADIP, replacing it with something called the Southeast Area Specific Plan (SEASP). It allowed for all that housing going up now, but it also included environmental protections. They, we, tore something down to build something new.
I’d like to point out that in each of these cases – and many more we’ve seen in downtown Long Beach over the last couple of decades – there was a concrete plan for the “something new” before the demolition of the “something old” began.
This is a lot different than destroying something for the sake of the destruction. Just because you can tear something down does not mean you should. Some of our leaders might do well to remember that.
Just sayin’.
Now where’s my sledge hammer?