LOS ANGELES BUSINESS JOURNAL: REAL ESTATE SPECIAL REPORT

The Grove: Latest Example of Caruso’s Main Street Feel

By: DEBORAH BELGUM

Call it Rick Caruso’s coming of age.

The brash developer, still only 43 years old, has just taken the wraps off The Grove at Farmers Market, a $160 million, 575,000-square-foot retail project that may change - for the better - the entire Fairfax district.

It’s the heady sort of stuff one might expect from the president of the Los Angeles Police Commission (who is smack in the middle of the controversy over extending Chief Bernard Parks’ contract), though a few years ago that, too, might have appeared beyond the ken of young Caruso.

President and chief executive of Caruso Affiliated and scion of an automotive dealership and car rental empire, Caruso cut his real estate teeth more than a decade ago when he took over property that once housed the aptly named Millionaire’s Club, a rowdy nightclub on La Cienega Boulevard.

“He was insufferable at the time,” said Diana Plotkin, a nearby resident who was among the many petitioning Caruso to terminate the club’s lease. “He was young and more inexperienced and his attitude was, ‘Who are these people trying to tell me what to do?”

Harold Hahn, president of the Burton Way Homeowners Association, remembers a young businessman what sharp edges and a puffed-up ego.

“We had fights,” Hahn recalled of Caruso’s negotiations with the surrounding neighborhood associations. “When Rick said he was going to continue renting to The Millionaire’s Club, we almost keelhauled him.”

Today, those same people are in Caruso’s corner.

“I don’t have a very high opinion of most developers in this city,” said Plotkin, now president of the Beverly Wilshire Homes Association, in remembering discussions over The Grove project. “But I gave Caruso a very, very good recommendation.”

Construction of The Grove and Caruso’s choice as developer of the 13-acre Glendale Town Center were pivotal in his selection by the Business Journal as the developer having the most influence on L.A.’s changing face.