Most Santa Monicans likely can’t identify the large crumbling building that has sat empty on the corner of Main Street and Pico Boulevard for over a decade. To others, the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium is a historic icon worth preserving at any cost. Yet as our City Council once again debates what to do with the long-mothballed building, it’s important to acknowledge something: in a city with many deep and pressing needs, some costs are simply too high to bear.
Preserving the Civic Auditorium in its current form would require a public subsidy that short changes our community’s basic needs around public safety and economic development. Reimagining the site, on the other hand, could solve many of our city’s immediate financial problems while setting us on a stronger economic footing for decades to come. It would also go a long way to right the most egregious wrong perpetuated by the city in its 150-year history. Let me explain…
Although it’s been well catalogued, many are still surprised to learn that a thriving African American neighborhood by the sea was forcibly seized in the early 1950s by the city, which burned down the buildings and used the land to build a Civic Center. The Belmar neighborhood, as it was known, was central to Black life in Santa Monica for nearly half a century, home to many residents as well as boarding and bathhouses for Black tourists and travelers who sought to visit the beach but were denied access to whites-only facilities—and a jazz club our city council hated so much it passed a special zoning ordinance to shut it down.
After seizing the land on which the neighborhood stood and displacing its residents, the city commissioned a Civic Auditorium in its stead, which went on to enjoy an incredibly successful run, playing host to the Oscars and a lineup of concerts in the 60s and 70s that defined the era. In recent decades, however, the Civic has been a money loser and an eyesore. In fact, the first time the city acknowledged the building was an albatross and recommended it be redeveloped was 39 years ago, in 1986—the year I was born.
After operating the Civic for years at an annual deficit of as much as $2 million, the city was forced to shutter the building in 2013—and it has sat hulking and empty ever since. Due to its age, its unsuitability as a modern venue, and the seismic damage it has sustained, multiple attempts to revive the Civic with private partners in the intervening years have all failed.
Now a new consortium has put forward yet another proposal to “Save the Civic.” While the land it sits on is likely worth close to a hundred million dollars, the many issues with the current building virtually ensure that any effort to revive it would require the city to hand over the entirety of that public wealth to a private consortium—led by the virulently anti-union Live Nation—for the grand total of $1 a year.
And that’s the best-case scenario. The more likely outcome is that the cost estimates of restoring, retrofitting, and maintaining the building ultimately outweigh the projected revenues, the project stalls out like each of the others before it, and the building sits empty for another decade.
Alternatively, if we chose to delist the building and sell or long-term lease the land, the public would be enriched. The city could stabilize its budget and restore vital city services that benefit the entire community, from investing in public safety to paying back our housing trust fund, restoring library hours, and maintaining our financial commitments to our public schools. We could even endow a permanent Reparations Fund, which would support in perpetuity our efforts to repair past harms perpetrated by the city and uplift historically marginalized groups in whatever manner they best see fit.
What’s more, we could sell or lease the land to an entity seeking to build a modern Civic—including a hotel and the kind of world-class conference center and performance venue our city desperately needs, bringing with it fresh revenues in the form of Transient Occupancy Taxes and second-order economic benefits from business travel and tourism for decades to come.
A small but vocal contingent will read this and surely be aghast at any proposal that doesn’t preserve the Civic in its current form. But it’s worth asking, whose future are we serving when we contemplate such a large giveaway of public resources to save a building to which no one under 50 has the faintest attachment? And how can city leaders in good conscience countenance giving away for free the asset best poised to dig our city out of its current financial hole?
The history of this contested site began long before 1958. Claims otherwise are a form of selective memory calculated to minimize the past harms perpetrated there—and preclude a future vision that better meets our city’s current needs. The answer, for the good of our city, is obvious. The question is whether we’re clear-eyed enough to see it.
Councilmember Jesse Zwick
