Plan for Office Park Unveiled in Altadena

A developer who has proposed building a “technological park” on the western edge of this unincorporated community says the project should serve as a magnet for retailers, eventually satisfying a longstanding desire by residents for a supermarket.

The Cantwell-Anderson Development Co. has proposed putting up 300,000 square feet of new office space in the 80-acre West Altadena Redevelopment Area. Tim Cantwell, president of the firm, unveiled the $60-million plan at a Town Council meeting last week.

The plan had already been presented to the Los Angeles County Redevelopment Commission and was approved by the Altadena project area committee, a group of residents, organizations and merchants that has been designated by the commission to oversee the redevelopment area.

The proposed new offices, designed for engineers and technological consultants doing business with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, would be in small buildings behind existing stores along Lincoln Avenue, between Crosby Street and Figueroa Drive, Cantwell said.

Cantwell-Anderson project manager Peter Postlmayr said there are as many as 54 homes on the site. “We’d try and go out and buy them at fair market value,” he said.

Residents had long expected a supermarket and other retail stores to be built on that strip, but that proposal has languished for four years.

Supermarket operators rejected opening a branch on the site because it was in a depressed area and too far from principal traffic thoroughfares, Cantwell said.

Cantwell, the developer of the controversial La Vina housing development north of the site, proposes building the offices first, then putting a supermarket at the corner of Woodbury Road and Lincoln Avenue.

The entire project could be in place in five years, Postlmayr said.

“The offices would increase traffic, get street improvements in place, change the tenor and feel of the area to bring about the conditions that might make a shopping center possible,” Cantwell said.

Town Council members said they wanted more details. “There’s no question that particular area needs economic revitalization,” said council chairman Robert Powe. “But people in the area have gotten cynical. Redevelopment plans have just meant a lot of grandiose promises there.”

Council member Duane Merrill added, “I hope the plan will be as good for the community as Cantwell says it is.”

Community correspondent Loretta Schertz Keller contributed to this story.