The Prestige Acropolis

Mustang after Mustang rolled down the Avenue of the Stars and up the gently curving driveway, past a sparkling fountain, to halt beneath the porte-cochere. On hand to help the guests alight were doormen rigged out in Beefeater suits. Inside, phalanxes of blonde, straight-haired teenagers, wearing tight pants and no shoes, padded noiselessly through the vast, thickly carpeted lobby. Standing by the automatic elevators were delicately feminine Japanese starters in long kimonos and obi sashes.

"Coming to a hotel," says Architect

Minoru Yamasaki (TIME cover, Jan. 18, 1963), "should be an event, a fun thing." His new $32 million, 800-room Century Plaza Hotel, which opened last week in Los Angeles, is all of that and more. To begin with, there is the hotel's distinctive shape. To eliminate endless vistas down straight corridors, Yamasaki designed the hotel as a curved slab, 400 ft. long. In most new hotels, ballrooms, restaurants and shops are housed aboveground in a massive and ungainly block; Yamasaki placed them beneath notice, underground, along with a 1,000-car garage, so that the gracefully balconied slab rises cleanly from the ground.

Buried Ballroom. The hotel has no fewer than 32 shops and seven restaurants and bars, including the dimly lit Hong Kong Bar, with its bead-curtained alcoves, and the Spanish-style Granada Grill, with arched doorways and central fountain. In front, guests can wander onto an outdoor "cafe plaza," one floor below lobby level; in back, they can sip tall drinks beneath mustard-colored umbrellas in a Japanese-style formal garden crisscrossed with bridges, or take a dip in the swimming pool.

Guests' rooms all have color TV, room-wide balconies that are 6 ft. deep, built-in bars with ice machines, and electric blankets; they cost $16 to $21 a day for single occupancy, while penthouse suites run up to $150. To capitalize on its superior location--much closer to the airport than its downtown competitors--Century Plaza offers extensive meeting-room facilities. For corporate guests, the hotel has nine board rooms, each with an adjoining private dining room on the mezzanine floor; for conventioneers, there is the immense, 24,000-sq.-ft. Los Angeles Ballroom buried two floors under ground but directly accessible to motorists via ramps.

Hedged & Soaring. The new hotel is the latest and liveliest addition to Century City, Alcoa's huge, 180-acre project on the edge of Beverly Hills and 14 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. The land--which, as 20th Century-Fox's back lot, used to bristle with cowboys and Indians, and before that was Tom Mix's ranch--cost $43 million. So far, Alcoa has spent an additional $160 million for the hotel, two 13-story office buildings, a big shopping center, and a pair of I. M. Pei-designed apartment towers, billed as "Your prestige address in America's modern Acropolis."

"I would like to do for Los Angeles," said Fox Head Spyros Skouras, who instigated the project, "what the Rockefellers did for New York." Land values within Century City have already soared from $5 to $30 per square foot, and the center may well become a gigantic urban magnet, drawing together in its shadow a host of commercial and cultural activities. The main obstacle is not lack of clients--its two office buildings are now 90% rented, and a third is on the drawing boards--but the lack of immediately available adjacent land to grow on. At the moment, Century City is hedged in by two prosperous country clubs and the Beverly Hills High School.

At least for now, Century City will have to soar up within its present boundaries. Alcoa, which considers it "the choicest piece of real estate in the U.S.," intends to make the sky the limit. Less than half finished, Century City has plans for $300 million more of apartments, office buildings, row houses and a cultural center across from the new hotel. By 1973, according to the plan, the present working population of 4,500 is expected to grow to 20,000, its number of residents from 350 to 12,000.

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