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TrizecHahn’s Hollywood & Highland on track

By Debra Hazel

The focus is on entertainment at TrizecHahn’s Hollywood & Highland.

HOLLYWOOD — Many projects billed as urban entertainment centers are clearly urban shopping centers with a few leisure elements attached.

At Hollywood & Highland, however, a mixed-use complex here in the heart of Hollywood, TrizecHahn has definitely put entertainment first.

“We’ve had to become far more than a real estate developer. This is an entertainment business, and will be reflected in the components, in our relationships and the economics of the center,” which include entertainment venues as well as traditional shopping center tenants, said Lee Wagman, president of TrizecHahn Development Corp., San Diego.

The $550 million retail/entertainment project is being built at the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, around the landmark Mann’s (formerly Grauman’s) Chinese Theater, and atop a new Metro Rail station. The 640,000-square-foot complex has been designed by Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn and Altoon & Porter, both based in Los Angeles.

The centerpiece of Hollywood & Highland will be the 3,300-seat Premier Theater, the new home for the Academy Awards. Designed by the New York City-based Rockwell Group, the 180,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art theater will have a complex live-broadcast system.

The move brings the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences ceremony back to Hollywood: The first Oscars were given at the Roosevelt Hotel, two blocks from Hollywood & Highland, in 1928. But for decades the awards have alternately been held at the Shrine Auditorium and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, both in Los Angeles.

Hollywood & Highland’s next major component will be a 30,000-square-foot ballroom that will be home to the Academy’s Governors Ball, held immediately after the Oscar ceremonies. The ballroom, too, will be wired for broadcast capabilities. The historic Mann’s theater, still a major site for film premieres, comprises the project’s third major element. Its owners, Paramount and Time Warner, are spending $10 million to expand the theater by six screens, which will physically connect to Hollywood & Highland.

An existing Holiday Inn hotel is being redesigned by Wimberly Allison Tong & Goo of Newport Beach, Calif., into the 22-story Renaissance Hotel (a joint venture between TrizecHahn and Marriott Corp.).

With all of the entertainment elements, the 230,000-square-foot shopping center could easily have been an afterthought. Instead, TrizecHahn’s plan is to provide the type of unique fashion tenants found in New York’s Soho as well as a smattering of typical mall tenants. Some 100,000 square feet of nightclubs and movie theaters will be surrounded by dramatic pedestrian-only streetscapes, walkways and terraces. The center was 55% leased 18 months prior to opening, Wagman said.

“The reason this project worked was that political leadership was convinced there was a great public gain in reestablishing Hollywood. The place had deteriorated over the years, but there is a tremendous amount of entertainment industry in a two-mile radius, so there was also a major investment from the private sector,” Wagman said. Some $90 million in public bond financing is also involved.

Ground was broken in October 1998, with the opening set for fall 2001. The hotel will open shortly afterward, and the first Oscar ceremony will be held in the Premier Theater in spring 2002.