Good intentions wrapped in a big bland box

The northwest corner of Glendale Boulevard and Park Avenue across from Echo Park Lake consists primarily of some empty lots and a few old apartments and homes. It's here where an affiliate of Angelus Temple, which sits diagonally across the busy intersection, wants to build an approximately 90-unit affordable senior housing project. Sounds like a good idea but it would mean constructing a massive, three-story-high, block-long building and demolishing or relocating some of the smaller, old Spanish and Craftsman-style buildings on the church-owned property.

Architects for the Foursquare Foundation modified their preliminary plans after a few residents saw the above rendering a few weeks ago. I don't have a copy of the new rendering presented at a meeting last night but it showed that the building had been pushed further back from the street and, through some cosmetic changes and landscaping, made to look as if was composed of smaller, separate buildings. It didn't work. Even foundation officials described the building, which would rise as high as the Angelus Temple dome, as "monolithic."

What's the next step? More meetings, of course. The foundation is opposed to breaking up the project into smaller buildings, which would mean fewer units. Some residents and neighborhood preservationists, you can include me in that camp, are pushing for something that doesn't resemble the Silver Lake Holiday Inn Express or a mini Orsini at Echo Park Lake.