IE's economic engines | guasti winery district

A new village
DEVELOPER PLANS REBIRTH OF HISTORIC PROPERTY

ONTARIO
By ANDREA BENNETT, PHOTOS BY WILLIAM VASTA

WHILE shiny new projects are rising up from mere dirt in other areas of the city, an investment in a century-old winery village is in the works to create a unique destination.

Plans to redevelop the historic Guasti District were being sketched out many years before San Diego-based developer OliverMcMillan purchased the land for $35 million in 2006. Ontario redevelopment director Jim Strodtbeck said the former owners, the Pauley family, sought assistance in 2000 to preserve and restore the area.

“Guasti, from the city’s standpoint, has a uniqueness that sets us apart from other communities,” Strodtbeck said.

“The vision (for it) is a compact, walkable, hospitality focused project with specialty retail and businesses that don’t exist other places in the Inland Empire.” John Loomis of Thirtieth Street Architects Inc. in Newport Beach said in 1984 he began studying the history of the old wine-producing community and how the 52 acres south of Interstate 10 might be reused.

“Grapes were brought to the warehouses by steam train, unloaded, fermented and turned into wine products,” Loomis said of the historic area. “About 250 to 300 people lived and worked in the town, with a school, church, cottages and neighborhood market.”

Loomis said laborers were paid in
credit to purchase things from the market, which stocked Italian items that were hard to find elsewhere, so it frequently drew shoppers from Los Angeles.

Fifteen historic structures will remain and be part of the new Guasti, including the mansion, two giant warehouses made of field stones gathered at the site, the foreman’s house and the cooper’s house.

“This is a place where you don’t have to create architectural character, you just have to capture what’s there,” Loomis said.

But it’s a delicate balance and a challenge. The old buildings have to be seismically retrofitted and updated to comply with accessibility laws, and new structures that are built must be compatible and sensitive to the historic ones, says Loomis, who adds that other places where the old has been successfully recreated include Quincy Market in Boston and Harbor Place in Baltimore.

“It’s going to be a very unique niche,” Loomis said. “It’s authentic. Not to take anything away from Victoria Gardens, but this is a real historic place being reused and not a place being created.”

The tricky business of redeveloping the old villa into a
luxury hospitality, retail and entertainment haven is no small task for OliverMcMillan’s team of architects and engineers.

Dan Nishikawa, development director for the project, has been busy negotiating with and signing future tenants, though he would not disclose any names yet. A boutique hotel that will operate out of the mansion has been signed, and the details for three other big leases are being worked out.

“One is a luxury theater, another is a high-end bowling concept, and the third is a Quincy Market-type public market,” Nishikawa said.

Construction is set to begin next year, and openings are expected to start in 2010.

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In addition to a new hotel, Citizen’s Business Bank Arena and the planned Guasti project, an elegant green-glass covered tower has risen next to the San Bernardino Freeway just east of Archibald Avenue.

The first installment of the Ontario Airport Towers project, the six-story 150,000-square-foot office building and an adjoining single-story 10,000-square-foot retail building, is now complete.

Turner Avenue, which runs alongside the buildings, connects directly to the Centrelake Plaza business center farther to the east.

Peter Vanderburg, principal of development and construction at PGP Partners, said this first of six phases in the Ontario Airport Towers project wrapped up in July; the next is slated to start mid-2009.