From the “Baywatch” headquarters at Will Rogers State Beach to the long defunct gas station at Topanga Canyon and Pacific Coast Highway, several public and private construction projects are underway.
By Hans Laetz / Special to The Malibu Times
The familiar cityscape at Malibu’s eastern gateway, unchanged for decades, is morphing as four big construction projects are either underway or about to start, officials say.
Perhaps most significantly, bulldozers are pulling out almost all the fixtures along Will Rogers State Beach, which stretches for more than a mile along Pacific Coast Highway near Temescal Canyon Boulevard in Pacific Palisades.
The lifeguard headquarters, used as a backdrop for “Baywatch” and other TV shows, has already been gutted. It will be expanded and rebuilt in a California mission revival style, said Dusty Crane, chief of community and marketing services for the Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors.
North of the lifeguard headquarters, the snack bar and several bathroom structures have been pulled out and will be replaced with mission-style buildings. The $11.6 million overhaul at one of the state’s busiest strands is funded by vote-approved state parks bonds.
“Those bathrooms had not been remodeled since the World War II era,” Crane said. “The change has been a long time in coming.”
The landscaping at the park entrance, at the PCH-Temescal Canyon intersection, will be also updated.
“I don’t think the Coastal Commission is going to let us plant any more palm trees, but we’re going to keep the ones that we’ve got,” Crane said.
The entrance gates to the beach will be relocated in an effort to reduce frequent backups onto the highway on busy summer days, she said. The project will be topped off with new parking lots and landscaping, and should be finished in 12 months.
Just north of Will Rogers, construction is about two-thirds complete on a new surfside facility for the private Bel-Air Bay Club. That club, one of the very few with its own stretch of private sand and a liquor license (Alphonzo Bell, the builder of the club who came from a strict Presbyterian background, forbid alcohol at the club for several years since its inception in 1928) was scraped down to the sand last fall after extensive negotiations with the state Coastal Commission.
As part of the project, the club is realigning its driveway on Pacific Coast Highway to improve intersection safety. The club has also granted the City of Los Angeles a valuable sliver of land next to the highway to extend the oceanfront bike path around the club.
The bike path starts at Marina del Rey and dead-ends at the beach club, where a landslide covered highway shoulders 40 years ago. Bicyclists consider this “pinch point” one of the most dangerous on the highway between Santa Monica and Malibu.
Club manager Bill Howard said the $12.5 million project would become a landmark along the beach.
“It will have a nice, airy Spanish atmosphere, like the upper clubhouse [across PCH],” he said.
Further up Pacific Coast Highway, at Coastline Drive, the county has secured state bond money to rebuild facilities at the small beach that stretches toward Malibu from Gladstone’s Restaurant. A new view deck and buttressed parking lot will be built on the site of the old Jetty restaurant that burned down in 1981.
This $1.6 million project is funded by county parks bond money, and will include new bathrooms that are handicap-accessible. It will be finished this month as well.
Finally, the abandoned and forlorn-looking Thrifty Gas Station at the corner of Pacific Coast Highway and Topanga Canyon Boulevard is being readied for reopening. Viewed by some as an eyesore at the entrance to Malibu, the gas pumps have stood abandoned since the business closed after an adjacent hillside gave way in a 1994 landslide.
Since then, the hill has been buttressed with concrete and steel by Caltrans.
A spokesman for Thrifty Oil in Santa Fe Springs said the corner is leased by the company to multinational oil company BP, and is being remodeled by the company. But a BP regional spokeswoman in Orange County said BP, doing business as Arco, is only looking at leasing the remodeled station once it is rebuilt.
Crews were busy rebuilding the station last week.