new hotel-conference center

View from the ground. View from above. Yours truly went past the worksite of the UCLA Grand Hotel early Friday afternoon and as the photos above indicate, he found no one there and nothing happening. That was a surprise since – as blog readers will know – we recently had the grand groundbreaking for the Grand Hotel.  On the other hand, across the street at the engineering building construction site, work was clearly in progress for another building, as the photo below shows. Engineering: Click on the photo for a better view of the workers. Enlarged view of the previous…

The photo above – taken at today’s Anderson Forecast – is yet another reminder that UCLA is often host to conferences involving large numbers of people at various venues around campus. This event took place in the Executive Dining Room at Anderson.  The Executive Dining Room is actually three rooms with movable partitions.  It might also be noted that the parking to be provided within the new $150+ million Grand Hotel/conference center now under  construction could not have accommodated all of the people who came to the Forecast event. A picture is worth 1,000 words but apparently not 150 million…

Official Program Shovel Ready Chancellor Block EVC Waugh Donors Shovel Photo Op Audio recording of event link below (about 14 minutes): {Note: Archive.org where audio is posted is currently down for maintenance – as of morning of 9-11-13.  Check back later if you don’t find the audio.  It is also directly accessible athttp://archive.org/details/UclaHotel-conferenceCenterGroundbreaking9-10-2013 when the archive.org website is functioning.} Update: Given the delay today in the archive.org service, below is an alternative source for the audio: Concluding Thoughts: All’s Well That Ends Well: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YFUJ8aBkpc?feature=player_detailpage]

From time to time, we report on the “progress” of the UCLA Grand Hotel.  Sometimes, it’s helpful to illustrate just how grand it will be.  According to the official website for the Grand Hotel, it will have 250 rooms and 25,000 square feet of conference space.  So how big is that?  We have in past postings compared it with hotels in the local area.  It’s big!  Below is another comparison.  A developer in Santa Monica is proposing a hotel with 136 rooms at 5th and Colorado.  The proposal is drawing opposition which you can read about at http://www.smmirror.com/articles/News/Santa-Monica-Churches-Speak-Out-Against-Proposed-Hotel-At-5thColorado/38323.  But here…

Apparently, there can be big secrets in groundbreaking as the headline above indicates.  And the big secret of the Sept. 10 groundbreaking for the UCLA Grand Hotel is that you have to break ground before the groundbreaking.  So although not much seemed to happen on the site of the Grand Hotel at the Ackerman bus turnaround and parking structure #6 after it was blocked off last July 8, now work actually seems to be occurring.  I wouldn’t say that I saw feverish activity when I passed by yesterday, but there was work being done. A view of the Great Wall…

I took my weekly perambulation to the “work” site of the Grand Hotel on campus this past Wednesday morning, about 9:30 am.  As noted in prior posts, although the area was fenced off July 8, the “groundbreaking” is not scheduled until Sept. 10.  So not much seems to be happening other than some digging up of landscaping. Anyway, I did see a few construction vehicles on the site. (If you click on the two bottom photos and look closely, you might be able to make a couple of the vehicles out.) The only person I saw in the site wasn’t…