Hollywood & Highland Shopping Center:

Nov. 9

Kodak Theatre:

Nov. 9 with a performance by opera singer Russell Watson. Melissa Etheridge performs on Dec. 7 and 8. The American Ballet Theatre performs “The Nutcracker” from Dec. 14 to Dec. 23. Barry Manilow sings from Dec. 28 to Dec. 31

The Grand Ballroom:

Nov. 8, a fundraising event for The Fulfillment Fund honoring entertainment mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Renaissance Hollywood Hotel:

The renovated hotel with 640 rooms opens Dec. 26.

The Debbie Reynolds’ Hollywood Motion Picture Collection:

More than 3,000 costumes from Hollywood movies. The museum opens after the beginning of 2002.

Developer Hustles As Opening Nears

After four years of planning, public hearings and construction, it has come down to this: A round-the-clock dash to get the $615 million Hollywood & Highland complex ready for its Nov. 9 debut.

TrizecHahn Corp. has dispatched its “Crunch Team” 60 employees brought in from the developer’s centers in Las Vegas, Thousand Oaks and San Diego to help get the job done.

An army of 1,400 construction workers, engineers and architects are at it nonstop. At 9 p.m., work on the project’s exterior comes to a halt, only because nearby residents insist upon it. Then the focus shifts to the expansive interior, where generators, electric saws and sanders hum throughout the night. At 7:30 a.m., the exterior activity cranks back up.

Workmen wielding trowels slap cement onto walls and under arches. Paint-speckled, hard-hatted men and women hoist sheets of drywall in still-empty store spaces that consist of nothing more than aluminum frames and cement floors.

“If they bust real good, they might get it done,” observed one subcontractor, installing telephone lines at a store inside the center.

Emilie Davidson Hoyt, owner of Lather, a small specialty store at the center, is less confident.

“I was thinking there’s no way they are going to be ready in a week,” said Hoyt, whose own shop space is much closer to being done.

Overseeing the action is Russell Joyner, TrizecHahn’s vice president of operations, who concedes that the center was originally scheduled to open more than a year ago. But he’s been through this before.

From his sixth-floor office across the street at the El Capitan building, which offers a bird’s eye view of cranes hoisting signs and workers cutting boards, Joyner has been watching the retail landscape take form, day by day. “Those are good signs. The drywall is going in,” he says, looking across the street to an empty shell where a Banana Republic store is to open in a week.

As of last week, most of the 50-odd retail shops slated to open were barely more than shells, let alone stocked with any merchandise.

Business as usual

The orchestrated chaos is not unusual in the days before the opening of a major center. “It always gets hairy at the end, no matter what you do to avoid it,” said developer Rick Caruso, president of Caruso Affiliated Holdings. (Caruso is developing The Grove at Farmers Market a few miles away from Hollywood & Highland.)

“Every project we have done has always come down to the wire,” he said.

For Hollywood & Highland, the rush is especially intense. It’s a 640,000-square-foot center with dozens of stores, cafes and fast-food joints. There also is the 3,600-seat Kodak Theatre, which will be the new home of the Academy Awards ceremony, a six-screen cinema, a 25,000-square-foot ballroom whose d & #233;cor is fashioned after the perfume department of the old Bullock’s Wilshire department store, and a 22-story hotel that opens Dec. 26.

“The scope of the project changed,” Joyner explained, noting that the Kodak Theatre was not an original part of the proposal. “We had to add elements to the Kodak Theatre to give it the level the Academy (of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences) needed for production capabilities.”

Much of that involved installing cable and wiring needed to transmit the Academy Awards to viewers around the world. A cable pathway must be installed under Hollywood Boulevard from the theater to a parking lot behind the El Capitan building across the street so that satellite dishes can be set up for transmission of the awards ceremony.

The theater is completed now, awaiting an opening-night performance by opera singer Russell Watson. The ballroom is ready for a Nov. 8 fundraising dinner.

But the retail ingredient, which will make or break the center, still needs work.

Retailer responsibility

While TrizecHahn stripes the parking lots, tests the pay telephones and adds the last of the mosaic tiles, the onus for finishing a store falls on the retailers, who are responsible for hiring their own contractors.

Hoyt, the owner of Lather, which will sell hand-made soaps and other toiletries, said her store is almost complete. The store walls are up, the furniture is in and as of late last week she was ready to stock her shelves.

While Lather was the exception last week, Joyner was optimistic that other merchants including Ralph Lauren, Brookstone, Sport Americana and The Gap would be ready in time. “If there are things we can do to help a certain tenant make the opening,” he said, “we’ll support them in any way we can.”

Retail consultants believe that a successful soft opening for the stores would pave the way for a solid holiday season.

“They will have a few weeks to get the bugs out, which will mean they will have a good Thanksgiving,” said Aubie Goldenberg, a retail expert with Ernst & Young. “There should be some significant traffic because people will be shopping close to home this year and not traveling as much.”

One problem that has not been completely resolved is employee parking. Hollywood & Highland has an underground parking lot for slightly more than 3,000 cars. But those are for customers.

Because the L.A. Community Redevelopment Agency kicked in $100 million for the subterranean parking and other parts of the project, the city owns the parking facility. And due to an agreement with local homeowner associations concerned about traffic, employees must park elsewhere. Until the end of the year, they will be shuttled from the Hollywood Bowl parking lot, but after that Joyner has to figure out other parking options.

Because the Red Line subway stops in front of the project, Joyner envisions employees parking at other subway stops, such as Universal Studios or North Hollywood, and taking the subway to work from there. Hollywood & Highland might subsidize or purchase subway and bus passes for its employees, but no decision has been made yet one of the many decisions yet to make as opening day looms.