A Chicago developer wants to build a three-story retail, office and gym complex on one of L.A.’s most prominent corners, the former home of legendary Tower Records on the Sunset Strip.

Other businesses nearby mostly welcome the development. But residents are fighting it.

The long battle between the developer and project opponents is scheduled to return to West Hollywood’s Planning Commission on Thursday. The commission can send it to the City Council for possible approval or back to the drawing board for more revision.

Chicago developer Sol Barket first planned a five-story building with a supergraphic and two video billboards at 8801 W. Sunset Blvd., which is at Horn Avenue. But he has agreed to scale it down to three-stories with video billboards but no supergraphic.

Residents say: sorry, still not good enough. They want the developer to cut the project down another story, find a tenant that isn’t a gym, eliminate the video signs and add parking.

However, the Sunset Strip Business Association favors the project, called Centrum Sunset. Todd Steadman, the association’s executive director, said that new development is crucial along that part of Sunset.

“Something needs to change there,” he said. “That corner is iconic and it’s a project that I think will bring some life. Business brings business.”

Wolfgang Puck’s famous Spago restaurant closed across from that corner in 2001; Tower Records closed in 2006. The building now houses a clothing store. There hasn’t been any retail development at the intersection in recent years.

So the association sees the new project as necessary.

“The strip, just like any destination, continues to need to have exciting new things,” Steadman said. “By having new and exciting projects, it draws attention to the boulevard.”

Burket believes his project is a great match.

“It wasn’t necessarily L.A. that I was looking to do a development in, it was West Hollywood,” he said. “(This project) is going to totally revitalize and transition that area of the Sunset Strip, which is an amazing boulevard with a lot of history.”

This week’s meeting will be the second time the project goes to the commission. About 50 residents showed up to speak in opposition to the project at a July meeting, and the commission asked city administrators to get more information on their concerns.

Centrum Sunset

Centrum Sunset would be the first L.A. project for Barket and his company, Centrum Properties Inc., which builds residential communities and mixed-use projects, and develops Walgreens stores in the Midwest.

To clear the way for Centrum Sunset, Barket would demolish the one-story building on the site, now home to clothing retailer Live! On Sunset, and replace it with a three-story, 52,000-square-foot building. Plans call for office space on the top floor, gym and spa space on the second floor, and retail on the first. The project includes a 12,000-square-foot public park on its north side as a kind of buffer zone for residences.

The project will include a David Barton Gym, a fitness center with spa facilities. The Miami chain has a gym in one of Barket’s Chicago properties. Barket said it’s an integral part of the Sunset project.

He is proposing an 11-foot-by-128-foot electronic billboard that wraps around the top of the building, as well as a 36-foot-by-14-foot billboard on the Sunset side of the structure.

The project will also provide two floors of underground valet parking for a total of 238 spaces, about 40 fewer than is typically required for a project of this size by the city.

The site has commercial buildings on three sides and residential homes to the north.

Years of opposition

Since the Centrum Sunset plan was unveiled five years ago, residents have sent in hundreds of letters to the city and have organized against the project at nearly all public meetings where it was discussed.

The resident group, led by Elyse Eisenberg, who has lived in the city for nearly 25 years and heads the West Hollywood Heights Neighborhood Association, said that she is not opposed to the building itself. Her group wants to eliminate electronic signage, make the building one floor shorter, add parking and an entrance at Sunset and Horn. The group also wants Horn to be widened.

What’s of most concern to neighbors is the traffic. An environmental impact report estimates the project will add 1,161 car trips a weekday, mostly to and from the gym.

Jerome Cleary, a stand-up comic and writer who lives next to the site, said businesses that support the project are not considering the increased traffic.

“I think other Sunset Strip businesses will lose a lot of business when customers cannot make it down Sunset timely and will turn around and go somewhere else instead,” he said.

“We’re not saying don’t build,” Eisenberg said. “What we are saying is put in a responsible project that is not at the level of traffic impacts this project is. We have a lot of common goals in wanting to revitalize the strip. There are uses that are not as (parking intensive) as a gym. He has never not considered a gym and he has never reduced the size of the gym.”

But Barket disagreed; he said he has listened to the neighbors carefully and made many modifications to the project over the years in response.

“We came to what we believe is a really great compromise,” Barket said. “It may not have gotten to the level that certain people would have liked to have seen, but I truly think it’s a compromise from where we started.”

If the project is approved, a development agreement gives West Hollywood 10 percent of revenue from the project’s sign advertising. While Barket declined to estimate an amount, the proposal indicates the city could get at least $450,000 from the project annually.

But that doesn’t mean the commission is ready to rubber-stamp the project.

“I think there are a lot of questions about the billboard and a lot of questions of parking,” said Planning Commission Chairman Alan Bernstein. “There’s a lot of traffic on Sunset and obviously new construction does have impact.”