I often familiarize myself with trends in building and design by touring new projects, a goal that motivated my recent visit to the Cienega townhouse development on Pacific Coast Highway at Grand Avenue. Many Long Beach residents know this location as the former home of the Java Lanes bowling alley. I have fond memories of spending time there as an adolescent, playing arcade games and attempting to bowl. As an adult, I was saddened to see Long Beach lose one of the finest examples of Polynesian-inspired Googie (not Google) style architecture in Southern California. Designed by the architecture firm of DeRosa, Daly, & Powers, the interior treatments and sweeping cantilevered entrance of Java Lanes made it an exemplar of recreational escapism, a miniature Disney Adventureland. It was campy yet sophisticated, certainly an architectural combination not often pulled off with any measure of success.
While opposing the demolition of Java Lanes, I had become resigned to the fact that its sleek silhouette would no longer greet those escaping the infamous nearby traffic circle on Pacific Coast Highway. It is hard to compare Java Lanes and the Cienega townhouses that replaced it, because they are such different kinds of structures. It will prove more instructive to compare the Cienega townhouses to another existing residential development. Located on the 1900 block of Cherry Avenue, the Pacific Crest were completed about the same time as the Cienega (and only about a mile away from them). The two are of similar size and were developed for the same residential sales markets.
Cienega was developed by the Costa Mesa-based company Brookfield Homes, while Pacific Crest was developed by Anastasi Development, from Redondo Beach. Both developments are medium-density complexes of attached townhouses located between lower-density residential neighborhoods and commercial corridors. The attached townhouses all have their own garages, providing residents with the sense of living in a single-family home. In each development, garages are arranged around courts. This provides greater efficiency and security, and also limits the impact of the garages on the façades of the townhouses, making the developments more attractive.
However, while these two developments are similar, they are not the same: there are important differences between the environments in which these two developments are respectively located. The Cienega townhouses are surrounded by a mix of hotels, mid-rise office buildings, and high-density residential complexes. In contrast, single-family homes, self-storage facilities, and institutional buildings make up the context around the Pacific Crest townhouses. The design of the two projects reflects these divergent environments. Pacific Crest is made up of ten triplexes lining Cherry Avenue, spaced evenly continuing the rhythm of residential structures the north block. Cienega, on the other hand, relates to its context of more substantial structures, being composed of eight larger buildings consisting of ten townhouses each.
While both projects treat automobile access in a similar manner, Cienega prioritize the front door over the garage. Over half of the units are directly accessible from the street, and the remaining units open to a beautifully landscaped lane. In contrast, only a third of the Pacific Crest townhouses face the street; the remaining face drive courts behind. This forces residents to walk along driveways by garage doors to reach their front door, hardly a fitting welcome for guests.
The buildings in both of these developments cover comparable percentages of their overall properties, leaving a similar amount of open space. However, the developments differ quite dramatically in terms of what they do with that open space. Anastasi Development, the developer of Pacific Crest, had perfected the concept of developing duplexes and triplexes on typical single-family home lots in Redondo Beach, and decided to replicate this formula ten-fold in Long Beach. As a result, Pacific Crest takes the form of ten semi-autonomous buildings, with the remaining land largely unusable narrow space between the buildings. Cienega uses those spaces in between as circulation; whether they are meant for vehicles or pedestrians they are richly landscaped so they become positive, active environments for windows to open onto. It testifies to this more productive use of open space that Cienega features a rich mix of patios, stoops, porches, balconies, and decks. In contrast, most of Pacific Crest has much more limited second-floor balconies that face back into the drive court, providing little fresh air for residents.
Architecturally, the two developments could not be further apart. The Spanish Revival aesthetic of Cienega is executed with appropriate details, colors and proportions. The scale of these clustered townhouse buildings reflects the kinds of 1920s-era courtyard housing seen in the historic Rose Towers and Casa Nieto (located on Third Street). In contrast, Pacific Crest feature little more than the hodgepodge suburban style of Irvine Ranch, with little regard for scale or proportion. Shutters, keystones, bow-arches, rafter tales, corbels and fake mullions are all thrown into a blender for a stucco smoothie with variations in pastel color pallets between the ten buildings.
On paper, Cienega and Pacific Crest complexes are quite similar. In their execution, however, they differ starkly in their ability to create enduring residential communities. Pacific Crest managed to be considered a success based largely on the fact that all of its townhouses sold quickly, though this was likely due in large part to real estate market at the time. My assessment is that the success of Cienega is more enduring: it is the sort of development that will find long-term residents and have little trouble reselling units. In a perfect world, I would have kept the historic Java Lanes bowling alley and had Cienega built on the site now occupied by the Pacific Crest. At least we can learn from these two developments, similar but not the same, that good design makes all the difference in bringing quality housing to Long Beach, housing that fosters community and contributes to its local environment.
