The vacant Herald Examiner building near Los Angeles’ Arts District is finally poised for reinvention.
New York developer Georgetown Co. and partner the Hearst Corporation have tapped a Cushman & Wakefield team to market the building’s repositioned retail space, which has lain vacant since the newspaper shuttered in 1989, The Real Deal has learned.
A Cushman team lead by Matt Fainchtein and Carter Magnin is pitching the ornate ground floor-space in the Mission Revival style building to prospective tenants, primarily restaurant concepts, this week at the International Council of Shopping Center’ annual Las Vegas convention. The nearly 20,000-square-foot retail space will likely be split into a handful of smaller spaces, they said.
“The soft goods and clothing retailers are still in their infancy in the Arts District but with restaurants and entertainment, we feel that the consumer is there and the buzz is there,” Magnin told The Real Deal. “There’s a lot of disposable income. You have young people making $100,000 in income and they don’t have mortgages or two kids at home – that’s money to go out and eat and drink.”
Rendering of the creative office conversion
Upstairs, JLL’s Carl Muhlstein is courting tenants for 100,000 square feet of creative office space across five floors, TRD previously reported. Fainchtein said he expects that major tech tenants, including the likes of Facebook and Yahoo, will be intrigued by the unusual architecture of the space. While major tech tenants have typically gravitated towards the Playa Vistas of the region as opposed to Downtown, that trend may soon reverse, he said.
“The Googles of the world, the Facebooks and the Yahoos have toured the market,” he said. “None of them have quite landed but everyone is hearing all the buzz and they want to be educated.”
The building dates back to 1913 when William Randolph Heart commissioned the building for his sixth newspaper. Harry Houdini did a suspended straitjacket escape from the building in 1923. More recently, the building has been used as a filming location for films such as “Zoolander” and “The Usual Suspects.”
Architecture firm Gensler is spearheading the conversion.
Fainchtein and Carter Magnin declined to comment on asking rents for the space but noted that retail space along the Broadway corridor has recently range in price from $48 a square foot to upwards of $100, depending on the space.