PARKING—The Loneliest Parking Lot in L.A. Prepares for Concrete Makeover

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What happens if you build the largest parking structure west of Chicago and nobody uses it?

Turn it into a school, perhaps.

That’s just one of the proposals that developer Rob Maguire is considering in unloading the 15-level, 2,072-stall structure built in 1992 on the fringes of downtown at 17th Street and Grand Avenue.

As part of Maguire’s entitlement process for the development of the Library Tower and the Gas Co. Tower in the early 1990s, the city required that he build the garage as part of L.A.’s initiative to move traffic to the fringes of downtown and alleviate congestion on inner city streets.

“We were the only ones who built a garage that served the peripheral parking ordinance, and we built the biggest parking structure west of Chicago,” Maguire said. “Shortly after, they abandoned the ordinance and we’ve been looking for alternate uses for a while.”

Since the $30 million parking structure opened, hardly anyone has parked there, according to Peggy Moretti, vice president of MaguirePartners.

Only 400 of the spaces are leased on a monthly basis, with another 600 occupied by daily users during the course of an average month. Spaces go for $45 per month, which is about one-fifth of the cost of a monthly space at the typical downtown Class A office building, Moretti said.

“It has not been a revenue generator for us,” she said.

A plan to shuttle people from the garage to Staples Center fell through, Moretti said, although Maguire officials again are talking with developers of an entertainment/retail district around Staples about coordinating the movement of people from the parking structure to the new development.

One possible use is for the structure to be used by developers who want to build downtown, but don’t have room or money to build parking and are required to have a certain number of spaces. Walter Beaumont, assistant project manager at the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency, said a number of developers are interested in securing about 100 of the spaces to meet parking requirements.

The plan has not drawn much attention, however, since developers suspect that MaguirePartners would sell the structure and they would lose their parking credit, Beaumont said.

Now it’s possible the building could take on a completely different use, including converting it to a Los Angeles Unified School District high school.

Maguire said he is in negotiations with LAUSD officials. Other potential uses include apartments and an office building. He said he would make an announcement about a new use in the next few months.

The school district is giving the idea serous consideration, though there’s no timetable for a decision. “It fits our demographics,” said Nader Farnoush, senior project manager for the school district. “It’s not a crazy idea.”

That said, Farnoush said he had no idea how long school district officials would consider Maguire’s proposal before making a decision.

“We are doing studies and whatnot for the design possibilities and whether the idea is do-able or not,” he said. “They are going back and forth. The timeline is as soon as possible, but there’s no deadline.”

LAUSD officials recently identified 82 of 85 sites they need for a first wave of school construction. Maguire’s garage was not on the list. Overall, LAUSD officials have said they need to build between 100 and 150 schools at a cost of $2 billion to $3 billion.

Christopher C. Martin, chief executive of architects AC Martin Partners Inc., who has drawn up plans for conversion of the site to a school, said because of its design every other floor of the garage could be removed and the structure would still be structurally sound. Martin and Maguire declined to disclose the price at which the garage could be delivered as a high school, but Martin said it would be less expensive than building a new school and solves the district’s main problem of finding land on which to build.

“If you can deliver those at a real economic rate and put elevators in you have a lot of potential uses,” Martin said. “One of those is high-density, such as a high school with 1,520 seats.”

Martin said the garage never had a chance to succeed because the peripheral parking plan was doomed from the beginning.

“It was a great concept that never worked out very well,” he said. “Free enterprise and people as individuals prevented it from working. If you can park for less money closer to work or take public transportation, you probably will.”

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