It looks more and more like the end for Parker Center, the city’s former police headquarters, which has stood as a monument to the department’s missteps and its forward-thinking history.
The Los Angeles City Council voted 10-0 Tuesday to deny a city landmark application for the eight-story building, at 150 N. Los Angeles St., that was home base for the LAPD from 1954 until 2009, setting the city up to more seriously consider a proposal by the Bureau of Engineering to demolish and replace the facility.
Preservationists who sought to keep at least part of the building, said it offers a complex and uncomfortable history lesson, due to its role in the department’s mistreatment of African American and Latino residents, as well as some of the gains in efficiency in policing work that occurred while the building was in use.
Parker Center is also designed by noted architect Welton Becket, who is responsible for the look of the Music Center and the Capitol Records building.
• RELATED STORY: LA City Council committee opposes historic designation for Parker Center
City engineers say the building does not meet L.A.’s seismic standards, and much of it was deemed unsafe to use in 2010. The department moved to a new building at 100 W. First St. in 2009.
During a committee meeting last week, Councilman Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who is African American, pointed to former Chief William H. Parker as a negative figure for Harris-Dawson’s South Los Angeles constituents, and declared the idea of preserving a building named after him an “abomination.”
Still, opposition to preserving the building is coming most strongly not from critics of the police department or Parker — a controversial figure in the police force’s record on race relations — but from members of the Little Tokyo community who have come out in force to oppose the landmark designation.
For many Japanese-American denizens of the Little Tokyo area, the block where Parker Center now stands was once a “vibrant” area where their grandparents and relatives sought to rebuild their community, after returning from internment camps during World War II. But about a decade later, disruption occurred once again when the city used eminent domain to buy up businesses and properties in the neighborhood to build the police headquarters in the 1950s.
“It is very much an affront to have the building remain as a historical landmark, when it was kind of another blow to the face of the community when it was built,” said Jonathan Tanaka, who’s grandfather ran a “photo mart” in Little Tokyo.
• RELATED STORY: ‘Star Trek’ actor George Takei shows solidarity with Muslim community at LA City Hall
The landmark application unearthed a dormant distaste for the Parker Center building from some of the Little Tokyo community’s deepest rooted organizations.
“It was pent up inside of us,” said Chris Komai, board chair of the Little Tokyo Community Council, which was why “you saw a lot of venting at the hearing last week,” during a planning committee meeting that proved a turning point for the application.
Komai and others in Little Tokyo have looked to the unused Parker Center site as an opportunity to recreate the old “community center” that once existed there. He pointed to an in-the-works Civic Center Master Plan that might accomplish that.
With the City Council expected to consider the demolition proposal next, the Los Angeles Conservancy’s advocacy director, Adrian Scott Fine, said the group is still “optimistic” about their campaign to preserve Parker Center.
“We understand how the community in Little Tokyo feels — we’re empathetic,” he said, but the preservation of Parker Center is “a citywide issue, this is an issue of taxpayer dollars, and preserving all of the layers and telling the full story of Parker Center.”
In preservation circles, there is a feeling that “if you don’t have the place, it’s hard to tell the story,” Fine said. “There’s no other place in Los Angeles that tells a story like Parker Center.”
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
