The historic, 14-story Ocean Center Building in Downtown Long Beach is up for sale.
The prominent building at Ocean Boulevard and Pine Avenue (110 W. Ocean Blvd.) recently opened as a luxury apartment building. Its first tenants arrived less than two years ago, after a $50 million renovation converted the interior from offices to rental units with 10,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space.
Pacific6 Enterprises, an investment company led by longtime Long Beach businessman John Molina, bought the nearly century-old building in April 2018 for $18 million and began the multi-million dollar renovation shortly after the purchase.
Molina said it “wasn’t a tough decision” to put the building up for sale. “We accomplished what we wanted to do with renovating the building,” he said, adding that when Pacific6 bought the property, it was “vacant [and] kind of falling into disrepair.”
The five-year restoration of the 197-foot-tall building resulted in 80 luxury apartments ranging in size from a 520-square-foot studio to a two-story penthouse spanning 2,158 square feet.
Molina said 60% of the units are currently occupied.
Avison Young, the Canada-based real estate company handling the sale, described it as a “rare opportunity to acquire a 14-story, architecturally iconic coastal asset.”
Amenities for the building include three community rooftop terraces, a private fitness center, bike storage and one parking spot for each unit.
The cheapest available studio unit is $2,525 per month. The most lavish unit available, a one-story penthouse, can be rented for $5,995 a month. When the building opened in October 2023, the lowest monthly rents started at $3,150.
Despite the facelift, Pacific6 kept the existing doors and hallways along with the building’s iconic marble entryway, terrazzo floors, ornate elevators and staircases with wrought iron railings.
“It’s an important part of Long Beach history,” Molina said. “I think nowadays people are a little bit too fast to pull the trigger on older buildings, and Long Beach has such a rich heritage.”
Originally constructed in 1929, the building first hosted accountants, tax attorneys, bankers and real estate salesmen, according to the building’s website. It was designed by the same Los Angeles architects who designed Grauman’s Chinese Theater and the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood.
City staff worked there briefly in 1933, while City Hall was under repair following a 6.4 earthquake that March.
Ocean Center was also once part of the long-gone Pike Amusement Zone and its “Walk of a Thousand Lights.”
During that time, thousands of visitors “passed through the arches on the 14-story building’s south side and headed west into the land of thrill rides, penny arcades, hot dogs and tattoo parlors,” according to the building’s website.
Ocean Center is a short walk from another Pacific6-owned building, the Fairmont Breakers hotel, which opened last December after hundreds of millions of dollars in renovations.
Pacific6 initially decided to buy Ocean Center because they were starting renovations on the Breakers around the same time, according to Molina.
The group wanted to redo both buildings while maintaining their character.
“When construction projects are done by people from the city, they tend to reflect the city’s character more, and there’s more commitment because we live here,” he said.
John Molina’s company previously owned the Long Beach Post and Long Beach Business Journal. The two publications were reorganized under an independent nonprofit in 2023.