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The Ratkovich Company in the News RESTORATIVE POWERS Wayne Ratkovich Renews L.A.’s Architectural Legacy Angeles – October 1988 By Tom Huth If someone put Wayne Ratkovich in charge of deciding what Los Angeles should look like, the corner minimall would be in deep trouble. Picture, instead, the villageopolis: a collection of engaging urban hamlets built around fond relics from the city’s past, and so designed that Angelenos could actually walk to the store, or the gym or to work. Ratkovich is the big-league developer who dares to think small. In his mid-Wilshire office atop the Pellissier Building—that exuberant shrine to Décomania—he shows his firm’s drawings for the back half of the block, where once a high rise had been planned. “Village retail,” he calls it, “a modest development, 83,500 square feet, about one-tenth of what is allowed—small-scale, one-and two-story, accessible, humane, pleasurable . . . an almost hidden kind of enclave.” It will be an arrangement of smart, neo-Melrosian shops around a courtyard. A few blocks away stands the gutted sandstone hulk of Chapman Park Market (1929), the nation’s first drive-in market, which he’s restoring along the same intimate lines. As he strolls through the grand entrance, Ratkovich envisions specialty food shops, a newsstand, a shoeshine parlor—a sense of arrival.” The market’s rounded Spanish arches, soaring windows and wrought-iron chandeliers give the feeling of a monastery. The central courtyard will function as an urban piazza. A bistro will go here, some shops over there. “Our antidote to minimalls,” he explains. “We want to prepare the environment for very imaginative entrepreneurial retailers to come in and do their thing. We cannot concoct another Farmers Market— these things do not happen overnight. But we’re trying to set the table so that that kind of magic will occur.” Even in Long Beach, where he’s helping to develop a megaplan for 13½ acres in the heart of downtown, Ratkovich insists on village-think. With the aid of an environmental psychologist and local historians, he’s come up with a scheme of courtyards, promenades, parks and plazas, harking back to medieval Europe. He puts it simply: “We’re in the business of producing environments that make people happy.” Ratkovich as straightforward as his development philosophy. He was born to Yugoslav immigrants and grew up a son of eastern San Gabriel Valley in the 40s and 50s. Articulate, enthusiastic, precise, at age 47 he’s gone eyeglassed and bald from a lifetime of hard thinking. Commanding of voice, Ratkovich acts like a man whose greatest successes still await him. We have here an odd bird—a developer with an actively involved social conscience. Blame it on the age which he grew up. Ratkovich went high school under Eisenhower, studied political science at UCLA during the Kennedy reign and graduated in the flip-flop year of 1964. “I was leaving the campus,” he recalls, “as Mario Savio was standing on trash cans making speeches. I was there but not quite there. I wanted work that had some social good to it, but I’d been poor all my life, so at the same time I wanted to be rich.” We still have the belief” he says of the Ratkovich Company, “that you can do well and do good—that profit should be a consequence of your good work rather than the primary motivation in life.” He is one of the few developers who endorse Southern California’s slow-growth movement, because he realizes that in an era of watchfulness the builders who continue to thrive will be those who best serve the community. Plainly speaking, here is how he reads the times: “The part of Los Angeles that I see doesn’t look very good. Urban beauty is not a standard to which we have attached great value. If you live in Bel-Air and work in Santa Monica, life looks pretty good to you—L.A. looks wonderful. Or if you stay in your backyard, it looks pretty good. But if you drive the streets of what Reyner Banham called the flatlands of Los Angeles, it ain’t pretty. “I definitely think that the growth issue is really not growth, it’s quality of life. It’s people who are sick and tired of overblown shopping centers, office buildings that don’t belong in residential neighborhoods, traffic, congestion of all types, sewage in the bay, brown air, wonderful little buildings that get junked up with all sorts of signs and graffiti.” This man loves cities. Especially L.A. His habit of rescuing and rejuvenating historic buildings (the Oviatt and Fine Arts downtown, the Pellissier and its dreamy old Wiltern Theatre) addresses what Ratkovich sees as one of L.A.’s basic contradictions. “This is a city that people have come to in recent times from other places, to a large degree. And when you come to a city and drop anchor, one, you want to be proud of your city, and, two, you like to have it remain stable. Yet this is a city in change all the time.” That’s a definition of Los Angeles, and perhaps why its citizens appreciate those rare triumphs of preservation. “We love the cheerleading we get,” he doesn’t mind admitting. “People actually say ‘thank you’ for bringing back the Wiltern or the Chapman Market. And nobody thanks a real-estate developer.” If only L.A.’s building codes and permit processes were as agreeable. Instead, he regrets, they’re “a nightmare” for preservationists, and “it’s getting worse by the day. Everything down there is geared to building new." It took a year to get a permit for the Chapman Market project: “We’re rapidly losing interest in doing this in the city of Los Angeles. As a practical matter, we can’t afford it.’’ Since L.A. will continue to grow despite all efforts at restraint, Ratkovich realizes “the real challenge that we have here is the automobile“—not only how to handle more traffic but what to do with our cars when we’re not using them. “In many ways I’d love to be a developer in New York City,” he says, “because you don’t ever have to build any parking, right? They have a different idea. They share their cars, and they never store them. They’re called taxicabs. But we don’t use taxicabs. We have our own personal cars, and we store them everyplace we go. He believes a key to the solution is mixed-use developments that let people live nearer their work and play. This is the sort of thoughtful growth Ratkovich sees the public beginning to demand. His hunch is that meaningful change comes, not by governmental decree or corporate inspiration, but from the ground up. And that’s why, when his company takes on a project, one of its first missions is to ask the neighbors-to-be what they would like to see built. Ratkovich points to Melrose Avenue as a perfect example of how L.A. can maintain its vitality, and even intimacy, in the face of continued excess. Melrose is ‘‘one of our proudest features, and it appeared in less than a decade,” he observes—without the help of government or land barons. “It was not a redevelopment area, and there was no developer even associated with it. But like a fire storm, it went right down the avenue. It’s all bottom up, and that’s what will change the face of Los Angeles—if we put a real value, a virtue, on beauty and well-planned spaces. Then it will change.” ‹‹ back |