Crescent Heights Beats Appeal on Koreatown Highrise

Crescent Heights has beat back an appeal trying to block its 34-story apartment highrise atop a historic retail building in Koreatown.

The Miami-based developer was backed by the Los Angeles City Planning Commission, which denied the appeal of its approved plans to redevelop a 39,000-square-foot office building at 3100 Wilshire Boulevard, Urbanize Los Angeles reported, citing a letter from the Planning Department.

Crescent Heights to develop 34-story apartment highrise in Koreatown — render of plans for 3100 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles (Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture)

Crescent Heights can now proceed to revamp the building by topping it with a 297-unit apartment tower. A timeline for construction was not disclosed.

The developer was approved to build the project in January. A month later, Creed LA, a coalition of building trades unions, appealed the project by seeking to block an exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act.

Plans call for preserving much of the two-story structure, built in 1939 on three-quarters of an acre at Wilshire and South Westmoreland Avenue. It’s next to the historic Bullocks Wilshire, now Southwestern Law School.

Crescent Heights wants to preserve the facade and angled roof, plus nearly two thirds of its interior, while razing the back portion and an adjoining parking lot.

A rectangular glass tower, designed by Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture of Chicago, would soar 393 feet from the rear of the property with studio, one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments. It would include balconies at either end and a rooftop deck.

A parking garage of six underground levels and seven above-grade stories would serve 410 cars.

The rest of the 85-year-old building would be turned into 7,100 square feet of shops and restaurants, plus a leasing office and a lobby.

Crescent Heights wants to employ the city’s Transit Oriented Communities incentives to allow a bigger building than zoning rules allow in exchange for 33 affordable units set aside for extremely low-income households.

The World War II-era commercial building, now slated for adaptive re-use, in turn replaced a mansion built in 1908 by British native Reuben Shettler, inventor of the automotive friction clutch.

Crescent Heights, which started off developing smaller projects in Los Angeles more than 30 years ago, now has a portfolio of existing and future high-rise buildings across the region.

Crescent Heights developed the 40-story Ten Thousand apartment tower in Century City, two high-rise buildings planned next to the Hollywood Palladium, and has highrises in the works in Mid-City, Downtown L.A. and Hollywood, plus a 20-story tower in Beverly Hills, filed under the state builder’s remedy.

Founded in 1989, the developer has built more than 38,000 homes across the U.S., according to its website, based on designs that stem from the historic Boston Seaport to L.A.’s Hollywood Hills, and the Modernist architecture of Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler.

— Dana Bartholomew