Two Toms

Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov

Tom Gilmore walks fast, with a big man’s stride. “A developer is like a shark,” he says. “He has to keep moving.” Gilmore is moving west along Sixth Street at more than 4 mph. He’s heading toward lunch at one of Los Angeles’ fanciest downtown restaurants, Cicada, of which he owns a big hunk, from the central-city area of which he owns a bigger chunk. He’s wearing a well-cut dark-olive suit, which he says cost $179.95 at a Hollywood discounter. Much investor capital has passed through his hands in recent years, but he appears to have been very careful about where money goes. He’s carrying on two conversations, one with a reporter he’s just met, and the other with a homeless man he seems to know well.

For a transplanted New Yorker who first saw L.A.’s downtown 10 years ago, he’s done well. He’s the man who bought St. Vibiana’s from the cardinal who wanted to tear it down. How many people own a cathedral? Then again, how many people would want to?

“I see myself as a de facto urban planner,” Gilmore says. “You have to make a city work for you.” First to work for him is his Old Bank District — a pre-WWI block on Fourth Street between Main and Spring streets.

The de facto back lot to much urban-themed TV production, it includes some of the city’s most-filmed architectural landmarks: the San Fernando Building; the Continental Building; and the Farmer’s and Merchant’s Bank. (This last marble-veneer Palladian wonder is familiar to millions of X-Filesfans, portraying the institution where Fox Mulder and Dana Scully bank.) The 240 units in these buildings, already 90 percent rented, could create critical mass sufficient to ignite a downtown residential renaissance. Acting on this belief, Gilmore says he’s moving his own household from Hollywood’s Beechwood Canyon to a Spring Street loft.

“Ten years ago, you wouldn’t have thought it possible,” Gilmore says. L.A.’s old downtown bottomed just before the 1992 riots tore the city apart. Downtown had long centered around the homeless population: The last department stores closed, along with most theaters. The city, after pouring hundreds of millions into its Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) revival effort, washed its hands of the costly failure.

But the city did it wrong, Gilmore says. “You have to let it happen; you have to avoid the bureaucratic CRA approach,” says Gilmore. “You can’t plan everything. You have to take risks. This isn’t a perfect world and cities are based on imperfections. We’ve had no time to plan everything.”

Actually, the CRA has since helped Gilmore. It’s revised building codes to make his rehabs less costly. Gilmore’s committed beyond the Greater Skid Row area: He owns the Seventh Street former home of Clifton’s Cafeteria, and the Equitable Building in Hollywood, a classic office pile perfectly sited by the TrizecHahn development. And he owns the spectacular Palace Theater on Broadway, whose upstairs houses his lofty offices.

It’s easy to see why, theoretically, the area between Staples Center and the four-level, bounded on the east by San Pedro Street and on the west by Hill Street, ought to be facing revival: For one thing, it’s where all freeways and public transit meet. “It’s the developable center of the entire region,” says Sabrina Venskus, a major opponent of the Playa Vista Westside development. She believes the city has little business developing its distant outskirts when it’s got a virtually uninhabited center.

Gilmore disdains the Westside. Downtown, he says, “There are architectural treasures . . .” And there is an increasingly mobile, affluent population who would rather live affordably in a re-growing urban center than pay more to live across Lincoln Boulevard from the Marina, many miles from the typical workplace. But the big bet is that the newcomers will attract their own services — coffee shops, grocery stores, restaurants. And ignite the region’s largest urban, residential pedestrian environment in more than a century.

Gilmore isn’t alone in betting on downtown. National players like Avalon Bay Communities and Camden Property Trust are said to be looking. And there are Geoff Palmer’s controversial Medici complexes: new, luxury gated communities walled off from surrounding streets. “They actually face away from the city’s center,” Gilmore says. But Gilmore’s may become the first downtown-revival success story. Ira Yellin’s nearly decade-old Grand Central Square has yet to turn a profit, and its landmark theater is now vacant.

Re-populating Los Angeles’ downtown has been a project much like nuclear fusion: huge investment, but no sustained reaction. Many of the current 20,000 dwellers are poor, homeless and hopeless. Absentee landlords let their upstairs offices rot empty while collecting high rents off their storefronts. There are many vacant lots. And what does Gilmore have that the CRA and Yellin didn’t? Well, for one thing, Gilmore will listen to anyone — he even wants the homeless to become part of the productive population. And as activist Madeline Janis-Aparicio of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy puts it, “Gilmore has a vision like no one else’s.” Gilmore’s sincerity and ability is perhaps one of the few things Janis-Aparicio and the business-oriented Central City Association’s chief, Carol Schatz, agree on.