<Begin Segment 37>

MN: Now you were with CRA for thirty-one years, and you were offered promotion several times during that time. Why did you keep turning them down?

YK: Well, I knew that if I (did), see, I wanted to be a technician, a super planner, actually work on the projects. If you move up in the administration, you're just supervising other people, you get projects all over the city and so forth. Bunker Hill was what I wanted, and this was where the real action was. This was where the big buildings were. I didn't want to work out in Watts or San Pedro or where have you, or supervise people working on it. I said, I just want Bunker Hill. And so I kept turning (them) down. I did have one (bright) guy who was, who had moved up, he was (once) below me, he moved up, and he couldn't understand why. And I told him (why), and he coined the phrase that I was the "Reluctant Samurai." And I said, "Well, that's true. I'm there to fight battles, but I'm reluctant to administrate, anyway." [Laughs]

MN: Now, Art Schatz, who brought you in initially, he didn't last as long as you at the CRA. Did you ever think about quitting and going somewhere else?

YK: Oh, no. I was (committed). Bunker Hill was my project. I was never going to leave it. So people said, years later, "Yeah, you'll never leave." I said, "Yeah, but when I do, better watch out, the ship is sinking." And, yeah, we went through various, I went through ten administrators, and it was really starting to deteriorate there. So I decided, well, I can take my retirement.

MN: Well, you know, after you retired, the downtown news publication ran a nine-week series and heralded you as the "Father of Bunker Hill."

YK: Well, yeah, it was in about '97, '98, it was going to be the city's or Bunker Hill's, oh, it was the agency's fiftieth anniversary, being in existence for fifty years. And so I said, "Well, I'll do research on Bunker Hill," and I made ten large boards showing pictures and text about the whole history of Bunker Hill from early times to the present. They showed that to the downtown news and they said, okay, they're going to publicize it for the whole nine weeks and then they put me on the front page of their newspaper and called me the Father of Bunker Hill.

MN: How did that feel?

YK: Well, feels pretty good. That was my fifteen minutes of fame that everybody's supposed to get in their lifetime. So that was definitely my highlight, that I was recognized for what I did on Bunker Hill for so many years. It was the major project of the region.

MN: Now what are some of the projects on Bunker Hill that you're most proud of?

YK: Most proud of? Oh, I don't know. I think the Wells Fargo Center was one of the better ones, because Rob Maguire was one of the (best developers), he was really forward-looking. He wanted and emphasized design and quality and artwork, and he agreed with all the things we wanted, the pedestrian connections related to other buildings. So that became the one project where they really incorporated a lot of things that we wanted. Most people want to do their own thing, they don't want to do what the Redevelopment Agency wants them to do. So that was one. But the biggest project turned out to be the, what we call Rusty, because of those parcels, R-S-T-U and Y-1. And we decided to sell all five parcels as one, so they could be designed as one project. And we had, gee, about eight proposals from around the country, major developers, and Rob Maguire. He had built only the first tower of Wells Fargo, and he still didn't quite have the financing for the second one. But he put together a team of world renowned architects, including those at UCLA. And he was, we were telling him, "Hey, you better get some money behind you." So he was trying to work out a deal to have an insurance company to come in with him. But in the end, he thought he could overwhelm us with the design, and he had our administrator, Ed Helfeld at that time. They had his support. So they thought they could do it. But with the board members, and including myself and some others on the staff said, "Hey, we're talking about a whole, five city blocks of parcels, and he hasn't finished his half of that parcel." It was a big parcel, but he hasn't finished the second tower yet. It's gonna take him a while to do these, whereas Cadillac Fairview was the big developer from Canada who was doing big projects in the United States, too. And they said, "Oh, yeah, we can come in with fifty million in cash tomorrow. And so the board members voted to go that way. So Ed Helfeld felt very disappointed (...) UCLA and the whole design community really were down on us for not selecting all the great designers.

But anyway, and then their project. Well, it was pretty complicated. It was done, designed by Arthur Erickson, who was from Vancouver, Canada, and he had a pretty wide reputation for doing a lot of big projects. So he came up with an elaborate design of three main office towers, thirty or forty stories high, and he had to unite (them) -- 'cause we had a big, Olive Street. He spanned over it, created a big fountain area and a performance plaza, and he had a hotel and office buildings, and so it looked like, wow, can't miss. But his was very complicated, and the office market had been very strong up to then. But by the time they got it all designed and built, then the market had changed, so they lost money on the first tower, and then they were reluctant to proceed with the second tower. We said, "Hey, we gave you these five parcels, we've got to go ahead. So they went ahead with the second tower, but that had this big space over the street, and so the city gave 'em all kinds of troubles at the time. By the time he got his office building up, the market turned again and they lost again, so they finally left. So that was (sad). So that's why there's a third tower never built. Some of the other portions were built, but (they) brought in a developer from Chicago who was mainly money-oriented, and built a cheap hotel and then they built a cheap residential tower. So it didn't go so well. That was supposed to be the crowning glory at the top.

But in addition to Bunker Hill, I was working on the (...) Central Business (District) Redevelopment Project. (...) I was working on the main downtown area. And the biggest project we got there was the, it was called Library Tower 'cause it related to the library, and it was (seventy)-two stories, so it was the tallest building west of the Mississippi. I had a lot to do with that because we had, the lawyers and I, we had to come up with different machinations of transferring density and so forth and tying it to the library. 'Cause money then went to completely expand the library. So that's the biggest one I worked on, and then the (Gas Company) Tower's fifty stories high, and then there was Sanwa Bank Building, it was about forty-five stories, and there are various other major highrises. Everybody wanted to build. As it turned out later, they overbuilt, and so there hasn't been a new highrise office building in downtown. They keep talking about it, but it hasn't been built yet, 'cause we overbuilt. [Laughs] We were too successful.

MN: Now, when you were going through all this, I don't imagine that a lot of people dealt with Japanese Americans. You were probably one of the few urban planners at that time. Did you encounter any problems because you were Japanese American?

YK: No, not really, because I had the full support of the administrator, and our legal counsel was very powerful in the very beginning. So he ran a lot of the strings and I always stayed on the good side. Got to stay on the good side of the lawyers. And so there were always some people I talked with, and they thought -- especially there was one guy I worked with on the Portman Hotel, he was in Atlanta. So he had to deal with the details of the plans and so forth. He says, "Oh, I'm surprised you speak good English." [Laughs] I says, "Hey, I'm American, too, and I was trained here in the USA." Just by the name, people think I came from Japan. And I'd have some young women, people, too, said, "Yeah, but you're so young and have so much responsibility." But I was over forty years old by then. So even though I wasn't high on the personnel list in the agency, I had a lot of power and influence on a lot of major development that happened. So in the end, we had more, bigger buildings in downtown than we did on Bunker Hill, but between the two, Bunker Hill, we had fourteen million square feet of development, and most of the buildings were thirty and forty stories high and worth about five billion dollars. That's not counting the downtown ones which were in addition to that. So we kind of overbuilt, but everybody wanted to build, so we said, "Okay, let's make a deal." [Laughs]

MN: Now, anything else about Bunker Hill you want to talk about?

YK: No, I think that pretty much covers it.

<End Segment 37> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.