The big announcement last week that the Los Angeles Times will move out of its Art Deco downtown office and into a new locaiton in El Segundo was missing one thing: an address.
Now, that has been confirmed. The company will move to 2300 Imperial Highway in El Segundo, the Times reported.
Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, who is in the process of buying the newspaper, owns the unassuming seven-story office building. It is one of at least five the biomedical billionaire owns in the city.
Soon-Shiong said the building is being renovated to accommodate a newsroom on multiple floors, a cafeteria, retail shop, museum, studios, and event spaces. He added that there was room on the 4.5-acre property to raise another building as well.
Soon-Shiong’s Culver City-based Live Oak Properties bought the 157,000-square-foot building last February for $52 million. It was built in 1964 and underwent a major renovation in 2000.
The mission, he added was “to create the most modern newsroom,” and said the Times “[needs] to build a campus that is there for the next 100 years, not to lease a building.”
While the building is being outfitted, Times employees will work in a 120,000-square-foot building nearby, the paper reported.
The Times has been at the Downtown building that bears its name since 1935, near many of the government institutions it regularly covers. Vancouver-based Onni Group purchased the building two years ago and wanted $1 million in monthly rent from the Times, Soon-Shiong claims. [LAT] — Dennis Lynch