Apparel Manufacturer to Break Ground at GM Site

Mayor Richard Riordan will break ground this morning at the former General Motors Plant in Panorama City for a company that manufactures Walt Disney and Warner Bros. apparel.

The groundbreaking ceremony for Jerry Leigh--which is currently located in East Los Angeles--will be held at 10:30 a.m. at 7860 Nelson Road. Developers Robert D. Voit and Daniel F. Selleck are scheduled to attend.

By mid-2000, Jerry Leigh will move its headquarters to the new 190,000-square-foot Panorama City plant. Over the next year, the company plans to transfer 300 people from its East L.A. facility and hire up to 150 new employees, according to a statement from the mayor’s office.

The company considered moving to Nevada or the South but ultimately decided to stay in Los Angeles, said company President Andrew Leigh.

“The truth is, we are a longtime California manufacturing company,” Leigh said Wednesday. “This is closer to the studios, and we do a tremendous amount of licensing work with the studios so we wanted to stay closer.”

The addition of Jerry Leigh to “The Plant”--as the redevelopment project at the site of the former Van Nuys General Motors plant is known--completes the first phase of the industrial side of the project.

This first phase comprises 600,000 square feet. A second 200,000-square-foot phase of the industrial project remains to be built.

A 35-acre retail center, which includes Babies R Us, Home Depot, Ross Dress for Less and Officemax, as well as a 16-screen Mann Theatre that opened in January, has been completed and is currently 99% occupied, said Dan Margolis, a spokesman for Riordan.

Margolis said Jerry Leigh’s links to Disney in nearby Burbank are an example of the garment industry beginning to “leverage its ties to the entertainment industry.”

For nearly half a century, the GM factory anchored manufacturing industries in the Valley. Before it closed in 1992, it was among the Valley’s largest employers. When it closed, more than 2,600 people lost their jobs.

The rebirth of the General Motors manufacturing site as a shopping and industrial center is in part the result of a government-backed redevelopment effort. Riordan and former City Councilman Richard Alarcon, now a state senator, succeeded in netting $4 million in federal subsidies for the retail renaissance.

That was supplemented by about $75 million in private investment. Riordan has touted the project as a model of private-public partnership in development.