All Leash and No Dog
Poodle Barks at the Californian Hotel
SHOT ACROSS THE BOW: It’s nice to see City Hall finally taking off the kid gloves with the owner of the Californian Hotel, a festering, oozing pustule of a municipal black hole. Whether it’s all bluff and bluster, however, has yet to be seen.
The Californian has been the centerpiece of various development schemes for the bottom of State Street, each one more grandiose than the next. For various reasons, nothing ever manages to get built despite the fact that all the necessary permits were granted long, long ago. Instead, the city has a boarded-up four-story hotel just spitting distance from the beach as well as a collection of nearby parking lots, vacant lots, and the coitus interruptus equivalent of a construction site. In years past, city officials have said “please” and “pretty please,” hoping to expedite the creation of something other than the Dead Zone. In response, the developer (Mountain Funding) and its predecessor (Bill Levy) have hemmed, hawed, dragged their feet, and pretended not to hear. Levy, it turned out, lacked the money to finance the deal he spent decades perfecting and was forced to declare bankruptcy. Mountain Funding, the lender who foreclosed on Levy, belatedly concluded that the timeshare condo project for which Levy won approval-and for which they had loaned roughly $30 million-made no sense economically. Oops. As a result, Mountain Funding is now hoping to persuade the powers that be to allow major changes to an approved project without having to submit new plans and start from scratch. As gimmees go, they don’t come any bigger.
In this context, City Administrator Jim Armstrong has concluded he can afford to be a little more insistent with Mountain Funding. On November 17, a team of city inspectors-representing the departments of police, fire, building & safety, and planning-took a tour of the Californian, originally built back in the 1920s. Going in, the inspectors knew it wasn’t going to be pretty. Let’s face it, the Californian was kind of a scurvy place. My brother spent the night there just before it closed. While he enjoyed the cheap room rates, he wasn’t so thrilled with the fresh blood on his sheets. Once upon a time, the Californian housed the famed Lei Lani Room, a quasi-tiki bar where Johnny Cash reportedly once brought down the house way back in his speed-freak days. It was in the Lei Lani Room back in the ’70s where Bill Levy signed the first papers that got him going on what became his road to financial perdition.
