With the ink dry on the County of Los Angeles’ $200-million purchase of the Gas Company Tower office building downtown, a fight is brewing over what to do with the 1960s-vintage headquarters it plans to leave behind.
Supervisor Janice Hahn and preservationists are pushing back against a plan to move workers into the newly purchased skyscraper on Bunker Hill and raze the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, which was renamed after Hahn’s father and is a centerpiece of the government-oriented Civic Center neighborhood.
“It came as a big shock to me when I realized what was happening,” she said, blaming county administrators for quietly pushing through what she called a closely held plan to move the seat of county power and thousands of workers, then knock down a prominent public building.
“I thought it was a little bit of a secretive process, a little bit of they knew what they were doing, but didn’t exactly reveal it,” she said.
County officials, however, plan to start moving staff from the Hall of Administration and other county buildings into the downtown skyscraper next summer, the start of a process that could take three or four years.
Los Angeles County’s $200-million purchase of the Gas Company Tower in downtown L.A. is complete and county workers are slated to start moving in next summer.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Preliminary county plans call for razing the Hall of Administration but keeping the building where the Board of Supervisors convenes in public sessions. That building is connected to the Hall of Administration but is a separate structure that could stand on its own.
The plan to raze the Hall of Administration is not set in stone, county officials said. Formal planning for the future of the site will begin in early 2025 and a master plan should be complete in about a year, followed by an environmental review of the plan that may last into 2027. But keeping the building would raise budget challenges because a large portion of the funds used to buy the Gas Company Tower came from money that had been earmarked for seismic retrofits and other necessary fixes to the Hall of Administration and other county buildings.
Hahn cast the sole “no” vote on the county’s purchase of the Gas Company Tower last month. When she first learned of the proposal to buy the 52-story building, which faced foreclosure, she thought it was an opportunity for the county to make a favorable investment in a down market. The county could potentially consolidate some of its many offices there and then sell it later at a profit when the office real estate market recovered.
Then, she said, “it was revealed” that the plan was to move the the Board of Supervisors offices and county services to the Gas Company Tower, and ultimately demolish the Hall of Administration.
“It’s really still unnerving to me, and a bit of a shock, that this was their plan all along,” Hahn said. “I think the public is still a little in the dark about what the plan is.”
The Hall of Administration was a source of civic pride when it and other key buildings in the Civic Center, including the Los Angeles County Superior Court — Stanley Mosk Courthouse, were being built starting in the 1950s.
“What the Acropolis was to Ancient Greece during her Golden Age, the new Civic Center now being hewn from the shabby slopes of Bunker Hill will be to Los Angeles,” The Times wrote in 1957.
The Hall of Administration was being built to last a century, it was reported. The capital projects analyst in the office of the county’s chief administrative officer was “ready to wager the Hall of Administration will still be in service by 2059,” The Times said
The building was renamed the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration in 1992 in honor of Hahn’s father, who was the county’s longest serving supervisor and a former Los Angeles city councilman.
Hahn said she is not driven by his legacy to save the building.
“Hey, if you want to take the name off, if that makes you feel better about preserving it,” she said, “I’m OK with that.”
The head of the Los Angeles Conservancy, which advocates for the preservation of meaningful local structures, said the Hall of Administration is “definitely historic” and significant. It was designed by a prominent team of midcentury architects including Paul R. Williams, the first licensed Black architect west of the Mississippi, who designed movie stars’ homes and prominent public buildings.
Knocking the Hall of Administration down would be “a misstep for a lot of reasons,” conservancy President Adrian Scott Fine said.
Among the reasons to keep it, he said, is its position across Gloria Molina Grand Park from the Mosk Courthouse. The two are a pair that frame the park connecting City Hall with the Music Center.
“These two buildings are integral” to the Civic Center, Fine said. “You can’t lose one without losing the function that they were intended to do.”
The Hall of Administration public spaces are filled with light brown marble and terrazzo that can make the halls feel institutional. There are spots in the building that appear to need painting, patching and other maintenance.
“It’s kind of a bleak place,” acknowledged frequent visitor Will Wright, director of government and public affairs for the L.A. chapter of the American Institute of Architects. “Which tells me you really need to invest in its upkeep.”
With investment the county could “restore and uplift” the interior to make it more appealing to employees and visitors, he said.
Ideally, the county would own both the Gas Company Tower and a restored Hall of Administration, Wright said, a position Hahn supports.
“I believe the amount of money that it would take to retrofit this is still an amount of money that we could easily find in a $50-billion budget,” Hahn said in an interview in her office. “I don’t think it’s too big of an ask for what this has meant for decades to the people of Los Angeles County.”
Los Angeles County oversaw the renovation of the Hall of Justice a decade ago. The historic building was seriously damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The Hall of Administration is less flashy than other downtown landmarks such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall, City Hall and the LADWP headquarters, but it doesn’t need to be eye-catching to be important, real estate developer and preservationist Dan Rosenfeld said.
“Not every public building needs to scream for attention,” he said. “It would be a very discordant city if they did.”
Rosenfeld worked on preserving other significant historic downtown buildings that were seismically unsafe and threatened by the wrecking ball, including City Hall and the Hall of Justice, both of which date to the 1920s and remain in use after renovations.
“It would be relatively simple to reinforce the building for lateral seismic strength and to modernize the interior,” Rosenfeld said of the Hall of Administration. “The building can and should be saved.”
The Hall of Administration is part of a Civic Center with public spaces and state, local and federal buildings “that defines Los Angeles,” he said, and should not be abandoned by the county. The Civic Center “is a symbol of our democracy,” he said, a place where citizens gather to celebrate, protest and mourn.
“A civic center is more than a collection of buildings,” Rosenfeld said. “It is a symbol of what a community believes in.”
The county will not neglect the Civic Center, Chief Executive Fesia Davenport said.
“We understand the importance of a vibrant and well-functioning Civic Center and are committed to maintaining the County’s presence in this vital public space,” Davenport said in a statement. “As we embark on our Civic Center master planning process over the next year, we will be inviting extensive public input to help shape our recommendations to the Board of Supervisors to help guide their decisions on how best to reimagine our Civic Center buildings for optimal public use.”
The 52-story tower Gas Company Tower at 555 W. 5th St. was widely considered one of the city’s most prestigious office buildings when it was completed in 1991. It has nearly 1.5 million square feet of space on a 1.4-acre site at the base of Bunker Hill.
Slightly more than half of the building is leased to a diverse mix of tenants including law firm Latham & Watkins and accounting firm Deloitte, real estate brokerage JLL said. Its namesake tenant, Southern California Gas Co., said in September that it will move from the tower where it has been a primary tenant since the building was completed to another skyscraper a block north at 350 S. Grand Ave.
Times staff writer Rebecca Ellis contributed to this report.