4th & B
Civic Core // Iconic downtown music venue might be “Turning Japanese” with planned hotel/office redevelopment
A long-time music venue in downtown, just blocks from the Civic Center and frequented by such bands and musicians as Crosby, Stills & Nash, Little River Band, Duran Duran and B.B. King \[1], is now planned for redevelopment by Japanese conglomerate Iida Group Holdings. Iida, itself a holding company for various raw material, home-building, and property development companies, bills itself as “the number one single-family home builder in Japan” \[2] - but this project will be anything but. An application submitted to the city \[3] calls for a 32 story high-rise with 2 levels of underground parking, a lobby and public park on the ground floor, a restaurant, 5 levels of offices, patio space and hotel amenities, and 23 levels of hotel with a combined 301 rooms. The site also has great transit accessibility, located just a block from Civic Center Trolley station on the Orange and UC San Diego Blue Line Trolley. Bus route 901, which provides a direct link to Petco Park, 12th & Imperial, and the South Bay, begins its run right in front - and the project is only a short walk from the Santa Fe Depot, providing Green Line, Rapid, COASTER, and Amtrak service. Overall, this seems like a textbook example of a good abandoned site project, and demolition of the old venue has already wrapped up.
The current site at 4th & B, temporarily home to an ACE parking lot