Business
After Los Angeles County bought a skyscraper, a fight over whether to tear down its historic headquarters
With the ink dry on the County of Los Angeles’ $200-million purchase of the Gas Company Tower office building downtown, a fight is brewing over what to do with the 1960s-vintage headquarters it plans to leave behind.
Supervisor Janice Hahn and preservationists are pushing back against a plan to move workers into the newly purchased skyscraper on Bunker Hill and raze the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, which was renamed after Hahn’s father and is a centerpiece of the government-oriented Civic Center neighborhood.
“It came as a big shock to me when I realized what was happening,” she said, blaming county administrators for quietly pushing through what she called a closely held plan to move the seat of county power and thousands of workers, then knock down a prominent public building.
“I thought it was a little bit of a secretive process, a little bit of they knew what they were doing, but didn’t exactly reveal it,” she said.
County officials, however, plan to start moving staff from the Hall of Administration and other county buildings into the downtown skyscraper next summer, the start of a process that could take three or four years.
Los Angeles County’s $200-million purchase of the Gas Company Tower in downtown L.A. is complete and county workers are slated to start moving in next summer.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Preliminary county plans call for razing the Hall of Administration but keeping the building where the Board of Supervisors convenes in public sessions. That building is connected to the Hall of Administration but is a separate structure that could stand on its own.
The plan to raze the Hall of Administration is not set in stone, county officials said. Formal planning for the future of the site will begin in early 2025 and a master plan should be complete in about a year, followed by an environmental review of the plan that may last into 2027. But keeping the building would raise budget challenges because a large portion of the funds used to buy the Gas Company Tower came from money that had been earmarked for seismic retrofits and other necessary fixes to the Hall of Administration and other county buildings.
Hahn cast the sole “no” vote on the county’s purchase of the Gas Company Tower last month. When she first learned of the proposal to buy the 52-story building, which faced foreclosure, she thought it was an opportunity for the county to make a favorable investment in a down market. The county could potentially consolidate some of its many offices there and then sell it later at a profit when the office real estate market recovered.
Then, she said, “it was revealed” that the plan was to move the the Board of Supervisors offices and county services to the Gas Company Tower, and ultimately demolish the Hall of Administration.
“It’s really still unnerving to me, and a bit of a shock, that this was their plan all along,” Hahn said. “I think the public is still a little in the dark about what the plan is.”
The Hall of Administration was a source of civic pride when it and other key buildings in the Civic Center, including the Los Angeles County Superior Court — Stanley Mosk Courthouse, were being built starting in the 1950s.
“What the Acropolis was to Ancient Greece during her Golden Age, the new Civic Center now being hewn from the shabby slopes of Bunker Hill will be to Los Angeles,” The Times wrote in 1957.
The Hall of Administration was being built to last a century, it was reported. The capital projects analyst in the office of the county’s chief administrative officer was “ready to wager the Hall of Administration will still be in service by 2059,” The Times said
The building was renamed the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration in 1992 in honor of Hahn’s father, who was the county’s longest serving supervisor and a former Los Angeles city councilman.
Hahn said she is not driven by his legacy to save the building.
“Hey, if you want to take the name off, if that makes you feel better about preserving it,” she said, “I’m OK with that.”
The head of the Los Angeles Conservancy, which advocates for the preservation of meaningful local structures, said the Hall of Administration is “definitely historic” and significant. It was designed by a prominent team of midcentury architects including Paul R. Williams, the first licensed Black architect west of the Mississippi, who designed movie stars’ homes and prominent public buildings.
Knocking the Hall of Administration down would be “a misstep for a lot of reasons,” conservancy President Adrian Scott Fine said.
Among the reasons to keep it, he said, is its position across Gloria Molina Grand Park from the Mosk Courthouse. The two are a pair that frame the park connecting City Hall with the Music Center.
“These two buildings are integral” to the Civic Center, Fine said. “You can’t lose one without losing the function that they were intended to do.”
The Hall of Administration public spaces are filled with light brown marble and terrazzo that can make the halls feel institutional. There are spots in the building that appear to need painting, patching and other maintenance.
“It’s kind of a bleak place,” acknowledged frequent visitor Will Wright, director of government and public affairs for the L.A. chapter of the American Institute of Architects. “Which tells me you really need to invest in its upkeep.”
With investment the county could “restore and uplift” the interior to make it more appealing to employees and visitors, he said.
Ideally, the county would own both the Gas Company Tower and a restored Hall of Administration, Wright said, a position Hahn supports.
“I believe the amount of money that it would take to retrofit this is still an amount of money that we could easily find in a $50-billion budget,” Hahn said in an interview in her office. “I don’t think it’s too big of an ask for what this has meant for decades to the people of Los Angeles County.”
Los Angeles County oversaw the renovation of the Hall of Justice a decade ago. The historic building was seriously damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The Hall of Administration is less flashy than other downtown landmarks such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall, City Hall and the LADWP headquarters, but it doesn’t need to be eye-catching to be important, real estate developer and preservationist Dan Rosenfeld said.
“Not every public building needs to scream for attention,” he said. “It would be a very discordant city if they did.”
Rosenfeld worked on preserving other significant historic downtown buildings that were seismically unsafe and threatened by the wrecking ball, including City Hall and the Hall of Justice, both of which date to the 1920s and remain in use after renovations.
“It would be relatively simple to reinforce the building for lateral seismic strength and to modernize the interior,” Rosenfeld said of the Hall of Administration. “The building can and should be saved.”
The Hall of Administration is part of a Civic Center with public spaces and state, local and federal buildings “that defines Los Angeles,” he said, and should not be abandoned by the county. The Civic Center “is a symbol of our democracy,” he said, a place where citizens gather to celebrate, protest and mourn.
“A civic center is more than a collection of buildings,” Rosenfeld said. “It is a symbol of what a community believes in.”
The county will not neglect the Civic Center, Chief Executive Fesia Davenport said.
“We understand the importance of a vibrant and well-functioning Civic Center and are committed to maintaining the County’s presence in this vital public space,” Davenport said in a statement. “As we embark on our Civic Center master planning process over the next year, we will be inviting extensive public input to help shape our recommendations to the Board of Supervisors to help guide their decisions on how best to reimagine our Civic Center buildings for optimal public use.”
The 52-story tower Gas Company Tower at 555 W. 5th St. was widely considered one of the city’s most prestigious office buildings when it was completed in 1991. It has nearly 1.5 million square feet of space on a 1.4-acre site at the base of Bunker Hill.
Slightly more than half of the building is leased to a diverse mix of tenants including law firm Latham & Watkins and accounting firm Deloitte, real estate brokerage JLL said. Its namesake tenant, Southern California Gas Co., said in September that it will move from the tower where it has been a primary tenant since the building was completed to another skyscraper a block north at 350 S. Grand Ave.
Times staff writer Rebecca Ellis contributed to this report.
Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.
In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”
“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”
Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.
In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.
The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.
“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.
The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.
Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.
Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.
A bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to homeowners who take steps to reduce wildfire risk on their property died in the Legislature.
The Senate Insurance Committee on Monday voted down the measure, SB 1076, one of the most ambitious bills spurred by the devastating January 2025 wildfires.
The vote came despite fire victims and others rallying at the state Capitol in support of the measure, authored by state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena), whose district includes the Eaton fire zone.
The Insurance Coverage for Fire-Safe Homes Act originally would have required insurers to offer and renew coverage for any home that meets wildfire-safety standards adopted by the insurance commissioner starting Jan. 1, 2028.
It also threatened insurers with a five-year ban from the sale of home or auto insurance if they did not comply, though it allowed for exceptions.
However, faced with strong opposition from the insurance industry, Pérez had agreed to amend the bill so it would have established community-wide pilot projects across the state to better understand the most effective way to limit property and insurance losses from wildfires.
Insurers would have had to offer four years of coverage to homeowners in successful pilot projects.
Denni Ritter, a vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Assn., told the committee that her trade group opposed the bill.
“While we appreciate the intent behind those conversations, those concepts do not remove our opposition, because they retain the same core flaw — substituting underwriting judgment and solvency safeguards with a statutory mandate to accept risk,” she said.
In voting against the bill Sen. Laura Richardson, (D-San Pedro), said: “Last I heard, in the United States, we don’t require any company to do anything. That’s the difference between capitalism and communism, frankly.”
The remarks against the measure prompted committee Chair Sen. Steve Padilla, (D-Chula Vista), to chastise committee members in opposition.
“I’m a little perturbed, and I’m a little disappointed, because you have someone who is trying to work with industry, who is trying to get facts and data,” he said.
Monday’s vote was the fourth time a bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to so-called “fire hardened” homes failed in the Legislature since 2020, according to an analysis by insurance committee staff.
Fire hardening includes measures such as cutting back brush, installing fire resistant roofs and closing eaves to resist fire embers.
Pérez’s legislation was thought to have a better chance of passage because it followed the most catastrophic wildfires in U.S. history, which damaged or destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 31 people.
The bill was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles advocacy group Consumer Watchdog and Every Fire Survivor’s Network, a community group founded in Altadena after the fires formerly called the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.
But it also had broad support from groups such as the California Apartment Association, the California Nurses Association and California Environmental Voters.
Leading up to the fires, many insurers, citing heightened fire risk, had dropped policyholders in fire-prone neighorhoods. That forced them onto the California FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort, which offers limited but costly policies.
A Times analysis found that that in the Palisades and Eaton fire zones, the FAIR Plan’s rolls from 2020 to 2024 nearly doubled from 14,272 to 28,440. Mandating coverage has been seen as a way of reducing FAIR Plan enrollment.
“I’m disappointed this bill died in committee. Fire survivors deserved better,” Pérez said in a statement .
Also failing Monday in the committee was SB 982, a bill authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, (D-San Francisco). It would have authorized California’s attorney general to sue fossil fuel companies to recover losses from climate-induced disasters. It was opposed by the oil and gas industry.
Passing the committee were two other Pérez bills. SB 877 requires insurers to provide more transparency in the claims process. SB 878 imposes a penalty on insurers who don’t make claims payments on time.
Another bill, SB 1301, authored by insurance commissioner candidate Sen. Ben Allen, (D-Pacific Palisades), also passed. It protects policyholders from unexplained and abrupt policy non-renewals.
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Politicians in Washington and the reporters who cover them have an often adversarial relationship.
But on the last Saturday in April, they gather for an irreverent celebration of press freedom and the First Amendment at the Washington Hilton Hotel: The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
Hosted by the association, an organization that helps ensure access for media outlets covering the presidency, the dinner attracts Hollywood stars; politicians from both parties; and representatives of more than 100 networks, newspapers, magazines and wire services.
While The Times will have two reporters in the ballroom covering the event, the company no longer buys seats at the party, said Richard W. Stevenson, the Washington bureau chief. The decision goes back almost two decades; the last dinner The Times attended as an organization was in 2007.
“We made a judgment back then that the event had become too celebrity-focused and was undercutting our need to demonstrate to readers that we always seek to maintain a proper distance from the people we cover, many of whom attend as guests,” he said.
It’s a decision, he added, that “we have stuck by through both Republican and Democratic administrations, although we support the work of the White House Correspondents’ Association.”
Susan Wessling, The Times’s Standards editor, said the policy is a product of the organization’s desire to maintain editorial independence.
“We don’t want to leave readers with any questions about our independence and credibility by seeming to be overly friendly with people whose words and actions we need to report on,” she said.
The celebrity mentalist Oz Pearlman is headlining the evening, in lieu of the usual comedy set by the likes of Stephen Colbert and Hasan Minhaj, but all eyes will be on President Trump, who will make his first appearance at the dinner as president.
Mr. Trump has boycotted the event since 2011, when he was the butt of punchlines delivered by President Barack Obama and the talk show host Seth Meyers mocking his hair, his reality TV show and his preoccupation with the “birther” movement.
Last month, though, Mr. Trump, who has a contentious relationship with the media, announced his intention to attend this year’s dinner, where he will speak to a room full of the same reporters he often derides as “enemies of the people.”
Times reporters will be there to document the highs, the lows and the reactions in the room. A reporter for the Styles desk has also been assigned to cover the robust roster of after-parties around Washington.
Some off-duty reporters from The Times will also be present at this late-night circuit, though everyone remains cognizant of their roles, said Patrick Healy, The Times’s assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust.
“If they’re reporting, there’s a notebook or recorder out as usual,” he said. “If they’re not, they’re pros who know they’re always identifiable as Times journalists.”
For most of The Times’s reporters and editors, though, the evening will be experienced from home.
“The rest of us will be able to follow the coverage,” Mr. Stevenson said, “without having to don our tuxes or gowns.”
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