<Begin Segment 33>

MN: Now I want to get into your Bunker Hill days.

YK: Okay.

MN: When did you join the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency?

YK: Well, it was 1962. I left the Eisner office, and one of the main associates that really helped me at Eisner's office had gone and went to work for the Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles and he kept trying to entice me there. And I said, no, I had planned to work for a private architect, larger architectural firm that did large scale urban planning. This one firm was doing the whole campus of USC and was doing the Irvine Ranch complex, and so I wanted to work for them. But he kept raising the ante, so I said, "Oh, wow, you're going to make me a full city planner and also give me such a high salary?" So I said, "Well, I'll come for a year and a half or two years." He said, "Yeah, 'cause we have a chance on Bunker Hill here, we had 134 acres of land that was being cleared of all buildings, and it was thirty-four city blocks. He says, "We can remake downtown L.A." So it was a real challenge, so I went to work there.

But at that time, redevelopment was, there was no experience in California. And so we hired I.M. Pei, who was an architect in New York, and he had done redevelopment in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, where they did some major -- [coughs] excuse me -- major redevelopment projects. And so we hired him because of experience, and he brought in Barton Ashman who did all their traffic and parking studies. And so we worked with them for about a year and a half, but then the money ran out, and they were spending too much time on specific design of buildings. We said, "Hey, we just need the concept, especially the top of the hill, we're just trying to get started on the west side where the land is level there. And so don't spend so much time." Then they wanted to do a whole big model of the area and we said, "No, no, we don't need it." But he did it anyway. So they left, and then (others) said, well, some of his concepts were too unrealistic. He had apartment buildings that were thirteen stories high and a thousand feet long. We said, "That will never fly in Los Angeles." So we started amending his plan and also, so it was just Art Schatz and me primarily. And we had some engineers helping us. We liked the street system, so we adopted that, but then we started changing. And also, we were changing the whole plan again. But there was a demand for actual development at that time, so we took his plan for a forty story office building, which became the Union Bank building at Figueroa and Fifth, and so we had a forty story office building and we're having an apartment complex of fourteen hundred units. And (others) said, "We've got to proceed with that." How do we do that? "Create design parameters and proceed with this." 'Cause now we were in the big time. All of a sudden, from little one and two story complexes in the various small cities, we were talking about a forty-story office building and fourteen hundred units of high rise apartments. And I kind of felt (overwhelmed). I told Art, "How can we do this?" Here we were doing, planning for little cities, and all of a sudden here we're in the big leagues of land development. And he says, "Oh, no, we can do it." He says, "We're well trained, and who else can do it but us, and we're the only ones here. We have to do it." And I said, "Well, that's true." Either we do it or it doesn't get done, then we have to bring in somebody else, but there were very few trained in redevelopment at that time. So I thought, "Well, okay, we're going to go ahead." And so I had to change my attitude that we're gonna do it.

So we proceeded with the negotiations with the forty-story office building, and then the apartment complexes, we actually took a tour of the various developers, there were five of them. So we went to five cities: New York, St. Louis, Chicago, Washington, D.C., to see their apartment complexes. And Art was sick at that time, so I went with two board members, our executive director and real estate. So we saw the various complexes and the administrator, Art and I liked the design of this one that was done in Chicago. He said, "That fits right in," but the Chicago complex was more of a middle income. And so it didn't look as flashy as the other highrises, expensive apartments that we saw in other cities, so the two board members said, "No, no, we're gonna go with the one that showed us the classy apartment across from Manhattan." And Low Kitchen was a big developer at that time, he said, "We got a big name, we're gonna really do well." But as it turned out, when they finally were going to do it, then they said, "Well, wait a minute." They learned the market isn't for apartments, this would be, there are no apartments downtown. This would be a groundbreaking thing. So they then started scaling way back and they changed the whole design. Art and I said, "We got 'em," but the board members said, "No, no, give 'em a chance, they'll come up with something good." So in the end, instead of the forty and fifty story office towers that they proposed to build, they built (far less). First they wanted to build one building first, and that was thirty stories, and it was kind a stumpy thirty stories, and then two eighteen-story buildings. So we were very disappointed in that, but that's what we ended up with. And for years people would kind of criticize it, "How come you don't have some lower buildings, too?" And it was in the original design, but then after it all got cut out. And so we just had to grit our teeth and know that, hey, we were overruled. But it got built.

And at that time, too, we had a central plant facility that was providing superheated chilled waters (for) the (two building) complexes, plus we were redesigning the whole west half (street system) of the project in accordance with the new plan. So we were entering all these agreements to these things. In the meantime, this differed from the original (official) redevelopment plan that was adopted in 1959. And so we had to go through a whole amendment process. The city at that time was trying to cut density in half throughout downtown, and so we had a major battle with them. And in the meantime, these other developments are starting. [Laughs] And they aren't under a legal redevelopment plan. So we really sweated it out, but it did work out.

And at that time, too, the chairman of the board of the Redevelopment Agency resigned after seventeen years or so. And so Mayor Yorty appointed this woman whose husband was a politician in Sacramento, and she was going to run it from the kitchen, you know. And she got in trouble with the executive director and Art Schatz, and so finally they in frustration resigned. So all of a sudden I was the only planner. And there was an architect, engineer under me, and they said, "Gee, how can we do it? We have a new chairman," and she brought in a new executive director who didn't know much. But I said, "Well, we've got to keep going." They only lasted about a year and a half, and they finally brought in somebody from San Francisco who was, I think, a federal person and a real tough guy, and he came in, he fired all the top staff and replaced them with people he knew at the various cities that had successful redevelopment projects. So above me was a director of planning head guy, and liked to really show who's in charge and he had this loud voice. So I had to quietly approach him and tell him, "Look, I don't mind you acting that way with other guys, but please, don't do it with me." So we got along. (He tended) to the redevelopment expanding all over the city, so I was still in charge of Bunker Hill. And I had the support of the new administrator, and I always had the support of the legal department, that's always important, and the real estate. So we built a lot of big buildings.

<End Segment 33> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.