No to unneeded work at county HQ

The Gas Company Tower on Bunker Hill in Los Angeles is actually one of the more interesting skyscrapers in Downtown, home to a mostly indifferent skyline of Modernist and Po-Mo high-rises.

Designed by Richard Keating of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, rising 52 stories, it’s topped by an homage to the Gas Co.’s trademark blue flame, a cutout through its top floors that also looks like an ovaloid Alvar Aalto glass flower vase. It was completed in 1991 as the second tower that innovative developer Robert Maguire, who helped transform Downtown, was able to erect by buying air rights from the Central Library, whose restoration and expansion — and creation of new open space — he oversaw.

Needing office space, the County of Los Angeles bought the building after the tower’s owner defaulted in 2023, and this year moved public employees in. The purchase was for the bargain-basement price of $200 million, a third of its former value — the pandemic and working remotely has hit commercial real estate hard. So that was a good deal for taxpayers, with the current Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration “widely viewed by county employees as a death trap during the next major earthquake,” the L.A. Times reports.

A good deal, that is, until someone in the county decided that the 1991 building codes weren’t good enough, and came up with plans to seismically retrofit the tower to the tune of $234.5 million. Or maybe $400 million. How about $700 million? All those numbers have been thrown around.

So good for the Board of Supervisors for immediately ordering a stop-work on the “voluntary seismic upgrades.” Supervisor Janice Hahn had cast what she called a “hell no” vote on the building’s purchase. “I think the bureaucrats had a plan and they made their numbers fit to sell this ill-conceived project,” she said.

The building already has a “steel moment frame” as part of its structure, and certainly swayed but came out fine in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Lennie LaGuire, spokesperson for the county’s Chief Executive Office, had previously told The Times that the tower is already safe and the upgrades are “proactive.”

We want county workers safe. But this is a boondoggle. No to any more “voluntary” spending on a solid building.