LA Weekly Abandons "The Hollywood Reporter" Building On Sunset

LA Weekly goes Westside (From LA Observed)

Kevin Roderick • Bio • Email

Talk about culture shock. The LA Weekly is leaving its longtime physical and spiritual home on Sunset Boulevard in the heart of Hollywood for a sad stretch of Sepulveda Boulevard in Culver City, hard against the Venice Boulevard on-ramp to the northbound 405 Freeway. Nobody else wanted the building, apparently, but the Weekly grabbed it for ten years. Move-in is scheduled for next May, says the L.A. Business Journal.
Beth Sestanovich, publisher of LA Weekly, said that the new offices, which will feature prominent LA Weekly signage, are a significant upgrade from the newspaper’s current digs at 6715 Sunset Blvd.
“It is dated and old and it is a very difficult layout and as a result there is a lot of unusable space,” said Sestanovich. The newspaper has been at the Hollywood offices for about 15 years.
The new building is located in Culver City, just south of Venice Boulevard. The property backs up to the freeway, affording the newspaper signage that faces the freeway.
“It is a highly identifiable building on the 405 and it is an excellent opportunity,” said Blake Mirkin of CB Richard Ellis Group Inc., who represented the landlord. Mirkin said the building was on the market “for some time” because of its challenging location on the edge of two office submarkets.
Considering how many commutes will drastically change, not to mention after-work hangout habits — is this the end of LA Weekly bashes at Boardner's? — you have to wonder if it's Mike Lacey's revenge on the Weekly's pre-New Times staff. Lacey is known to prefer the Westside when he visits the L.A. outpost of his Village Voice Media empire

Columbia Square Developements (From The LA Weekly)

Molasky Pacific Leaves Columbia Square

by Patrick Range McDonald
April 30, 2008 8:09 AM

Molasky Pacific, a real estate development firm based in Las Vegas, will no longer take part in the effort to build a 40-story skyscraper on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Instead, the company asked its New York City-based partner, Apollo Real Estate Advisors, to buy them out for an undisclosed sum of money. "It was a timing thing," says Mark Cassidy, president of Molasky Pacific. Dean Pentikis, a partner at Apollo, says the developer will move ahead with the humongous project, which will dramatically alter the Los Angeles skyline and obscure views of the Hollywood sign and Hollywood Hills.

While many Angelenos know little about the big plans to build a 40-story skyscraper and a 14-story office tower on the site of the old CBS TV-and-radio complex at Sunset and Gower--it is currently being showcased on MTV as the fancy digs for the cast of the "Real World"--Molasky Pacific, the acknowledged day-to-day operator of the development project still working its way through City Hall, has been quietly seeking a major height limit change, among other things, for the studio lot since it delivered its approval application to the city's Planning Department in March, 2007. The firm and Apollo Real Estate Advisors bought the property in 2006 for a reported $66 million, and they have yet to release an "environmental impact report," which details traffic and environmental impacts on the surrounding neighborhood and what the developer wants from the city.

City Council President Eric Garcetti, who represents the 13th District, where the project has been proposed, was informed last week on April 22. Staffers received a phone call from Molasky Pacific in the late morning, while Garcetti was presiding over a City Council meeting. He later released this statement to the LA Weekly: "No matter who is the owner or developer of this project, I have the same concern: how is this going to impact the community, the environment, and traffic?"

Sounds good, but this Thursday the Weekly will publish an investigative story on how the reportedly $850-million project, the largest and most expensive in Hollywood to date, has moved through City Hall in a stealth-like way, with Garcetti and his staffers working closely with the developers and offering little information to the public he claims to care so much about.