For the record, San Diego’s Old Police Headquarters is located at 801 W. Harbor Drive Downtown, just adjacent to Seaport Village. You wouldn’t know that from having seen the address in print; most everything simply puts it south of Harbor Drive between Kettner Boulevard and Pacific Highway. Neither will you easily find a number on the façade itself. Nobody’s exactly been pining for mail there since 1987, the year it closed. Neglect and the elements have wrought a big, ugly orphan, a series of broken windows and a boatload of faded memories pocking its dirty magenta skin.
Sometime in the middle of the summer, the facility is slated for more than a couple coats of paint. San Diego port commissioners are currently meeting with a Carlsbad development firm over exactly what form the project should take “” but a little over two years and $40 million from now, they say, Downtown will have a public market and at least two restaurants over the venue’s 100,000 square feet. And at least one commissioner from the San Diego Unified Port District is unfazed by the potential for skyrocketing rents in the improvements’ wake.
For now, the Port’s discussions with developer Terramar Retail Centers are in closed session. “We’re negotiating key points of a lease right now,” said Terramar spokesman Bruce Walton, “and it’s counterproductive to negotiate those things in a public forum. At some point, the document will have to be approved by the [Port] board in public session. We look forward to that day.”
Meanwhile, Walton said, his firm intends to keep most of the Spanish Colonial Revival exterior intact except for new entrances and exits as required under municipal codes.
The building was opened in 1939 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1998. Six years later, the Port ­settled on a $213 plan, to be completed in 2018, that includes renovation of the headquarters, incorporation of a Downtown street grid and a new pier extending into San Diego Bay. The Port subsequently determined that the headquarters project could be implemented ­relatively quickly, and in 2005, it adopted an ordinance granting Terramar an option to lease and redevelop the site. It certified a state-required Environmental Im­pact Report (EIR) a year later.
The EIR includes several findings on seismic activity in the immediate area ” and some aren’t easily dismissed. The so-called Rose Canyon Fault Zone is cited as the vicinity’s dominant source of ground movement, capable of producing a maximum earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale. The report also indicates that the area sits atop loose soil, fragile tidelands and near-surface groundwater.
Walton, however, cited Terramar’s own city-required seismic studies, claiming that “There are faults literally all over Downtown, and there’s seismic activity all over Downtown, and”¦ even though our site is mostly fill, the testing we have done tells us that there are no seismic issues of any significant consequence on our site.” Walton said the findings of the city-required studies will be made public when closed discussions end.
While surface foundations may or may not explode, rents just might. Published reports cite the average asking price for Downtown office space at the end of 2007 at $36 per square foot “” and conceivably, those could increase significantly amid the prospect of revitalized economic growth upon the project’s completion. Port commissioner Laurie Black is unmoved by the notion, citing the insidious nature of economic progress in good times and bad.
“I was at a new restaurant today,” she explained. “The place was packed, even in this economy. They were getting and are getting new business all the time. [The headquarters renovation] is one of those projects that I believe if you build it, they will come. I’m not worried. Companies expand all the time.
“This is the center between South Embarcadero and North Embarcadero,” Black added. “This fuses the two. If we’re going to spend the money to help subsidize [projects like these], we need to spend it here. If you see the view [of the headquarters] from the condos looking down, it ain’t pretty. And what does it cost the Port to maintain that area right now? It costs over $250,000 a year. We have to move forward” in an effort to pass along those costs to potential lessees.
The end of the closed sessions will yield both questions and answers about the property’s future “” as Black remarked, “You can’t always know exactly what you get into until you get into it.” Walton remained philosophical in his assessment, concluding that “You’re solving a problem aesthetically by rehabbing a building that’s been empty since 1987, and the rentals will benefit the region. We are cautiously optimistic on all sides that we’re going to get there.”