Demolition is underway on the former City Place Shopping Center in Downtown Long Beach. It will soon be replaced by an eight-story building that includes nearly 300 apartment units and more than 19,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space.
This week, crews began tearing down the indoor shopping complex along Long Beach Boulevard between Fourth and Fifth streets.
The building contained the since-closed Fresh & Easy grocery store, along with Jewelry Girl and Fashion Island.
In its place, development company JPI plans to build 272 rental apartments, including 16 affordable units, on the 68,733 square-foot parcel. It will be called Jefferson Long Beach.
This is part of a larger plan to build a total of three eight-story buildings with a combined 900 apartment units and 38,405 square feet of commercial space in the area.
The overall project is called Mosaic. It includes the parcels between Fourth Street and Sixth Street along the west side of Long Beach Boulevard. The trio of companies behind it — Turnbridge Equities, the Waterford Property Company and Monument Square Investment Group — laid out construction plans for the new development at a January 2023 Planning Commission meeting.
JPI will build the first of the three apartment buildings, with the other two to be constructed in the future.
Demolition has not yet begun on the building that borders East Sixth Street and Long Beach Boulevard, which contained the former Walmart that closed in 2016.
That parcel of land will eventually be split between the two additional eight-story buildings, with one as a strictly residential building and the other with mixed residential and commercial space.
“We knew the opportunity to reinvent a neighborhood was clear and the time was now,” Michael Gazzano, managing director of investments for Turnbridge Equities, said at the January 2023 meeting.
Jefferson Long Beach will contain 19,782 square feet of commercial space along with three levels of parking with 373 vehicle parking spaces and 58 bicycle parking spaces, according to the commission-approved plan. Those residential garages will be on the first three levels, with apartments on levels three through eight.
Three city-owned parking garages will remain in place west of the new developments.
A courtyard, along with a pool and spa area, will sit on level four. The eighth floor will have a rooftop deck.
A new pedestrian walkway will also be constructed to connect Fifth Street and Sixth Street west of Long Beach Boulevard and join it with the existing Promenade south of Fourth Street.
A single-story pavilion with 2,405 square feet of retail space will be constructed along East Fifth Street, in front of the former entrance to Walmart.
The City Place development was constructed in the early 2000s and replaced the Long Beach Plaza Mall, a two-level indoor shopping mall that was built in 1982.
Walmart and Fresh & Easy were the “anchor tenants,” according to a city staff report, but the mall “struggled to compete with the regionally-adjacent Lakewood Center and Los Cerritos Center malls.”