John Cushman won’t be running his own show when Cushman Realty Corp. officially merges with Cushman & Wakefield Inc., but he promises he’ll neither slow down nor stay put.
The 60-year-old L.A. real estate industry stalwart said his new role as chairman of Cushman & Wakefield’s board of directors will, thankfully, relieve him of daily operational duties.
He will maintain offices in Los Angeles and will continue traveling as much as 8,000 miles a week, just as he has for the past 30 years. He said his role would be to develop Cushman & Wakefield’s local and global strategies, as well as expand the company’s business. The term of his new contract is five years, but even after that he has no plans to stop.
“My battle plan is 10 years,” Cushman said. “I expect to be doing this for 10 years, and then people will have a chance to take a stab at the business we’ve built up over the years and over this next 10 years.”
So he’ll be retiring then? Hardly.
“I didn’t say I’m going to retire,” he snapped at the notion. “I’ll do something else then. I’m going to leave that decision for later.”
Eye-Catching Attraction
As if having 645,000 square feet of space and being the new home of the Academy Awards weren’t enough, the Hollywood & Highland project is about to get a full-motion video screen installed that developer TrizecHahn Corp. hopes will become a world-renowned source for entertainment news.
The 6-foot-5-inch-tall, 85-foot-long entertainment ticker, similar to the stock ticker on Times Square One, is being designed to broadcast entertainment news 17 hours a day, with updates for the morning and afternoon rush hours, according to company David Malmuth, president of TrizecHahn Development Corp.
“We plan to establish the corner of Hollywood & Highland as the epicenter of the entertainment world,” he said.
TrizecHahn will program the screen’s content, but is working out a contract to bring partners into the deal.The technology will be provided by a European company and will cost “millions of dollars,” Malmuth said.
Anchor Landed
At long last, Developers Diversified Realty Corp. has landed a theater anchor for its Queensway Bay project in downtown Long Beach, the latest of several developers to stage a comeback after losing theater anchors last year.
According to DDR, Crown Theatres will operate a 15-screen theater complex with state-of-the-art digital sound, automated projections, stadium seating and gourmet concessions.
Crown Theatres is a privately held chain of cinemas run by Daniel Crown, its president and CEO since 1991.
DDR spokesman Scott Schroeder said the developer has a letter of agreement with Crown, which will be finalized within 30 days.
The 18-acre Queensway Bay project site is a 450,000-square-foot development designed to have a mixture of entertainment, dining and retail uses. It’s scheduled to break ground this summer and open in July 2002.
The deal with Crown Theatres comes after DDR lost Edwards Theatres Circuit Inc. and Resort Theaters of America to bankruptcy, the latter jumping out the very week that DDR was to break ground last October.
Several mixed-used developments around the region were forced to scale back, reconfigure or delay development last year because theater operators, having gone whole hog putting up multiplexes around the country, were having a hard time paying bills with some, like Resort, seeking bankruptcy protection.
J.H. Snyder Co. landed a new theater development concept from National Amuse-ments Inc. after booting Edwards in summer 2000.
OliverMcMillan lost AMC Entertain-ment as the anchor of its Culver City Town Plaza project in November 2000. The developer has reached a tentative agreement with Pacific Theatres Corp.’s real estate arm to replace AMC, but that deal has yet to be finalized.
Santa Fe Springs Into Action
Clif Fincher, a broker and owner of Lee & Associates Inc., reported some big doings in Santa Fe Springs two industrial real estate projects totaling more than $16 million and covering more than 16 acres.
The first project is a $3.5 million world headquarters for Coast Aluminum & Architectural Inc., which will be moving from its home four blocks away.
The company is building a new 110,000-square-foot building at 10609 Norwalk Blvd. A second building a $1.6 million, 40,000-square-foot manufacturing facility at 10607 Norwalk Blvd. is being built on spec and will be available for lease.
Coast Aluminum, which has outgrown its present 52,000-square-foot Santa Fe Springs headquarters, bought the six-acre property on which it will build from O’Donnell Property Services of Newport Beach, Fincher said.
The second project is called the Mission Business Center, a $13.5 million, seven-building development on the 10.5-acre former Mission Clay Products site, also in Santa Fe Springs.
The developers will create the series of manufacturing and warehouse buildings ranging from 8,200 square feet to 82,000 square feet.
Fincher and Biff Smith of Collins Commercial Corp. of Irvine will market the project for Mission Clay and builder, Rosetta Development.
Staff reporter Christopher Keough can be reached at (323) 549-5225 ext. 235 or at [email protected].
