Getty Villa Expansion OKd Despite Residents’ Protests

Despite objections from neighbors in Pacific Palisades and Malibu, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved renovation and expansion plans Wednesday for the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Roman-style hilltop villa that include a new outdoor theater.

The council action caps months of wrangling between the museum and well-organized opponents, who fear traffic nightmares on Pacific Coast Highway and additional noise in their pristine neighborhoods. The villa has been closed since July 1997, five months before the new Getty Center in Brentwood opened and became a major tourist attraction.

Under a $150-million renovation plan, the villa will reopen at the end of 2002 as a museum and study center devoted to antiquities, the only one of its kind in the nation. Getty officials also won the right to build a 450-seat outdoor classical theater and underground parking lots.

City Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski, whose district includes the Pacific Palisades villa and who has attempted to broker a deal between the museum and its angry neighbors, supported the expansion plans. She said Getty officials have been accommodating, even agreeing to a $2-million neighborhood protection plan that includes landscaping, fencing and a 24-hour, toll-free telephone number to receive calls from neighbors.

Additionally, the council approved dozens of restrictions on the project, such as a reduction in parking from the 610 spaces requested to 560, still nearly double the 291 spaces now at the villa. Parking reservations will be required. The city also limited the number of performances and seats at the theater and required that 10 performances be held during the day for schoolchildren.

Getty officials, clearly pleased by the council’s overall support, said they can live with those limitations and hope they appease the neighbors.

“From the beginning, we tried to engage the community in all of this,” said Marion True, curator of antiquities and assistant director for villa planning. “They were opposed from the start.”

Added Donald Baker, an attorney representing the Getty Trust, the cultural and philanthropic organization that funds the museum: “The community has taken the position that if we don’t take out the theater and parking [from the master plan]/ they will oppose the entire project regardless of conditions and anything else.”

Many residents do, however, support the reopening of the villa--if expansion were not part of the plan.

“Certainly, the Getty is a wonderful institution,” said Garrett Hanken, an attorney representing Pacific Palisades homeowners. “But why must it burden the neighborhood with more, more, more?”

John Murdock, a lawyer representing Pacific Coast Homeowners, an umbrella group of six large residents associations, said he believes that lawmakers were persuaded more by “the power and prestige” of the Getty Trust than by the actual blueprints.

“They’re swayed by the fact that the Getty is a $5-billion trust with influential board members,” Murdock said after the swift vote. “These guys get together in the clubhouse and City Council offices. . . . That’s City Hall.”

The homeowners’ attorneys have threatened to sue the city to stop the expansion, mainly on the grounds that a 1975 zoning decision restricted the parking to 291 spaces.

But a city zoning administrator has said the original permit allows for adjustments if there are changes in operation.

Councilman Joel Wachs, an avid museum supporter, said he believes that the residents’ concerns are misplaced.

“Ten degrees more in weather one day will bring far more cars out there to that road than the Getty ever would,” he said of the neighborhood near the beach. “We ought to be thankful we have the Getty.”

Plans call for the museum to showcase the Getty’s 35,000-piece collection of Greek, Roman and Etruscan antiquities now partly on display at the Getty Center in Brentwood. The seaside museum’s garden tea room will be expanded--with limits on alcohol sales--and a new entry pavilion will be built.

“This is an important resource to the city as a whole,” Baker said. “The community will be protected more than it ever would be.”