City of Champions no more
Jonathan Kendrick | 5-16-2010 | Comments |
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With historic Hollywood Park race track in the midst of what could be its last full season of horse racing and the one-time sports mecca Forum arena playing host only to concerts and church services, the era of professional sports in Inglewood is coming to a close. Nicknamed the “City of Champions” because of its prominent sports franchises, the city of Inglewood was home to the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team and the Los Angeles Kings hockey club for 32 years, from 1967 to 1999.
With the expected closure of Hollywood Park
in mid to late 2011 to make way for a massive development featuring residential, retail and office space, the city will be left without a major sport tenant for the first time since the race track opened in 1938. “We now need to redefine champions,” said City Councilman Daniel Tabor. “I don’t think we give up champions at all. I think now champions in the context of businesses weathering the economic storm and still being successful.”
In the 1970s and 1980s, many people knew about the city of Inglewood only because it was the home of the Lakers, who won five championships during their stay at the Forum.
“Just the fact that the Lakers were here was quite prominent for the city,” said Wanda Brown, the city of Inglewood’s treasurer for the past 23 years. “What we got out of them being here was the championships they provided and the notoriety that they provided to the city itself.”
Despite the fame that playing host to athletes like Magic Johnson, Wayne Gretzky and Shaquille O’Neal brought to Inglewood, the professional sports model didn’t bring much cash into city coffers.
During the 1996 to 1997 fiscal year, the Lakers and Kings contributed about $1 million in ticket and parking tax revenue to the city, less than one percent of Inglewood’s $158 million total revenue for the year.
“It was also very costly for the city to provide services there, like police for the Forum,” Brown said.
Erin Aubry Kaplan, an Inglewood resident and community activist, said the city failed to capitalize on the visitors that the Lakers and Kings attracted to Inglewood. “It was the sports center of L.A. but the city never seemed to be able to turn that into a good thing for the city,” Aubry Kaplan said. “All these people came and went. There was a restaurant across the street and that was about it.”
While the Hollywood Park race track generated over $7.8 million in tax revenue for the city in 2008, developers from the group Wilson Meany Sullivan project that upon its completion in 2016, the Hollywood Park Tomorrow project will generate $20.9 million for the city in annual tax revenue.
Still, Inglewood’s transition away from major sports wasn’t its own decision.
The beginning of the end for professional sports in Inglewood came in 1996, when the city of Los Angeles began development of a world-class arena.
Inglewood’s city council responded by putting four tax hikes on the next ballot, hoping to raise public money to fund a new arena in Inglewood on the Hollywood Park property and keep the Lakers and Kings in town.
The citizens rejected the measures, however, and both teams moved to the $375 million Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles in 1999.
“We committed a substantial amount of money and thought we had a shot,” then-Inglewood assistant city manager Norman Cravens told Los Angeles Magazine at the time. “But in retrospect, I think they wanted to go downtown from the very beginning.”
With the Lakers and Kings gone, Faithful Central Bible Church purchased the Forum from Anschutz Entertainment Group in 1999 for $22.5 million.
The church created Forum Enterprises Inc., a for-profit company, to run the property.
Gerard McCallum, who was the general manager of Forum Enterprises Inc. from 1999 to 2004, led the church’s acquisition of the Forum.
“The primary goal of it was actually to operate as a church,” McCallum said. “In its non-event hours, to operate in whatever capacity: concerts, community events.”
Faithful Central Bible Church, with a weekly Sunday morning attendance of between 7,000 to 8,000 congregants, now only uses the Forum for special events. The church holds multiple Sunday services at the Tabernacle, a 2,500 seat warehouse-turned-sanctuary on Eucalyptus Avenue.
When the church is not using the Forum for congregational gatherings, it rents out the building to entertainers, musicians and film studios.
“We do a lot of band rehearsals for quite a few weeks or sometimes months at a time,” said Tina Suca, the Forum’s general manager. “We do a lot of commercial and film shoots and we still do between 12 and 15 major concerts a year.”
Marc Little, the chief operating officer of Forum Enterprises Inc., said that the church has selected Wilson Meany Sullivan as a potential development partner to eventually incorporate the Forum property into the Hollywood Park Tomorrow project.
“There is no time frame because with the Hollywood Park Tomorrow project, I think the bandwidth for large projects in the city is at its max,” Little said. “It makes more sense now for the Forum to focus on its business, let values increase and then make a play in the near future that makes sense for the building.”
City officials also hope the Forum property can become part of the larger mixed use development.
“The Forum sits on a high-traffic corner that could be the northern end of a commercial, office and retail development on par with Century City,” Tabor said.
The centerpiece of Inglewood’s economic redevelopment plan is Hollywood Park Tomorrow, the undertaking that will tear down the city’s 72-year-old race track.
Planners for the project, which was approved by the Inglewood city government in 2008, are making improvement drawings and could begin construction as early as August 2011.
“That’s going to be very, very important,” Brown said about the Hollywood Park Tomorrow project. “That has to happen in order to generate some of the revenues that we’re losing.”
Brown said the city has seen a decrease in revenue from utility and property taxes because of the suffering economy.
The project calls for the construction of a 300-room hotel; 2,995 houses; a 16-screen movie theater; 620,000 square feet for restaurants and retailers; 75,000 square feet of office space and a renovation of the Hollywood Park Casino, all on the 238-acre site on the corner of Century Boulevard and Prairie Avenue.
“The land the race course is on is not too far from downtown [Los Angeles] and not too far from the beach,” said Tridib Banerjee, a USC urban planning professor who has studied Inglewood. “It is a very attractive site for housing and a good candidate for a shopping center.”
McCallum, who is now the project manager for Hollywood Park Tomorrow, also said the 66-acre property located between the Forum and Hollywood Park, owned by Wal-Mart, has been on and off the market for several years.
The giant retailer originally wanted to build one of their Supercenters on the property, but Inglewood voters rejected the possibility in a 2004 vote because of concerns that local businesses wouldn’t be able to compete with Wal-Mart’s prices.
“When it was put on the ballot, the voters said, ‘Wal-Mart, you’re not welcome,’” said City Councilman Ralph Franklin. “And they’re still saying that today.”
Wilson Meany Sullivan, a real estate investment and development firm based in San Francisco, has looked into purchasing the Wal-Mart property and incorporating it into the Hollywood Park Tomorrow development.
“What they are expecting in terms of a sale price, it’s just not realistic for us to consider at this time,” McCallum said.
The Hollywood Park Tomorrow project, as currently planned, will also establish 25 acres of park space for community use and land for an elementary school.
“The thing cities are doing increasingly is this community benefit district,” Banerjee said. “Cities are requiring developments to be more green and more sustainable.”
Despite the feeling that the new economic developments are more on par with sustainable growth for a city the size of Inglewood (population 115,000), Banerjee said the current financial climate could delay the construction.
“No big projects are being funded,” Banerjee said. “All over the country, all large projects are on halt. Banks are just not going to finance them at this point.”
McCallum said the project is still on schedule but that the company is monitoring the economic risks involved.
The city is approaching the massive economic redevelopment with cautious optimism, hoping the projects will help Inglewood close a $10 million budget deficit.
Still, some yearn for the days of bright lights and big stars.
“Bring the Lakers and Kings back,” Tabor said when asked what future he sees for the Forum. “If I had my druthers, I’d rather just do that.”
Tags: forum hollywood park hollywood park tomorrow hollywood park tomorrow inglewood inglewood jonathan kendrick wilson meany sullivan
