Oil giant Phillips 66, operator of a massive oil refinery near the Port of Los Angeles, has unveiled plans to replace its belching smokestacks and hulking steel tanks with stores, restaurants and soccer fields.
Phillips 66 announced last year that it would close the century-old refinery and remove it to make way for a new development intended to provide services and recreation for people who live nearby, along with warehouses to serve the port.
The refinery in L.A.’s Wilmington neighborhood received its last shipment of crude oil in September and should have it all processed by mid-October, Phillips 66 said.
The oil company last year engaged real estate companies Catellus Development Corp. and Deca Cos. to evaluate potential future uses for the site and the developers have rolled out their plans after hundreds of meetings with local residents to see what they wanted in their neighborhood.
It turned out that one thing neighbors would actually miss about the refinery is Smilin’ Jack, a 3-million-gallon oval storage tank that has been transformed into “the world’s largest jack-o’-lantern” at Halloween since 1952, said Al Ortiz, spokesman for Phillips 66. It takes more than 100 gallons of paint to make Jack the perfect shade of orange and provide his distinctive facial features.
Smilin’ Jack is making another great-pumpkin appearance this year and may show up again before demolition of the refinery is complete, Ortiz said.
When redevelopment of the 440-acre site is done, one of the two playgrounds there will include a pumpkin-shaped play structure for kids in a nod to Smilin’ Jack, planners said.
The new complex will be called Five Points Union, a reference to the complex five-point intersection of West Anaheim and North Gaffey streets at the northwest corner of the refinery.
The public focus of the plan is a town center featuring more than 400,000 square feet of shops, restaurants, cafes and other community spaces. These areas will be surrounded by outdoor gathering spaces, two playgrounds and new walking paths.
As large as the public-serving component of Five Points Union would be, it would fill only a small portion of the former refinery site.
The bulk of the space would be filled by eight warehouse buildings, ranging in size from 250,000 square feet to 1 million square feet, significantly larger than other warehouses found around the port, said Heather Crossner, who is overseeing the project for developer Catellus-Deca.
“We’re proposing them as warehouses to support goods movement through the region,” she said, but they’ll be zoned for other industrial uses.
The warehouses will be built in phases to meet market demand, which could take more than two decades, Crossner said. The town center retail portion will be part of the initial development and expand as smaller stores and restaurants fill in spaces around anchor tenants such as supermarkets.
In public meetings, “we heard over and over that this is a food desert,” she said, “so we’ve included grocery stores.”
The other oft-stated wish from residents was for a popular warehouse club store.
“The community is very excited about a Costco,” Crossner said. Unfortunately, “we do not have any deal with Costco done, but I think everyone would love to see that.”
Within the 10 acres north of Anaheim Street, adjacent to Ken Malloy park, the project would introduce new sports and recreation facilities, including two soccer fields and a 60,000-square-foot indoor sports building.
The project also would redesign the frontage along Anaheim and Gaffey streets to make walking along them more appealing. The Anaheim Street sidewalk would be reconstructed and set back from the street, with new canopy trees planted on either side to shade pedestrians. Gaffey Street would get a new sidewalk and landscaping.
The redevelopment of the refinery is “extraordinarily important for our local community,” said City Councilman Tim McOsker, whose district includes Wilmington. “It’s a challenge and an opportunity to turn it into something good.”
One important element of the redevelopment plan, McOsker said, is the removal of liquid butane tanks just south of the refinery on Gaffey Street.
The tanks hold a combined 25 million gallons of butane, which many consider dangerous, he said.
The tanks were constructed in the 1970s to safety standards at the time, but standards “have dramatically changed in the 50 years since,” he said. “No 25-million-gallon butane tank would ever be allowed adjacent to a residential neighborhood in the United States today.”
The refinery’s massive fuel storage tanks, distillation towers and sprawling pipeline have also been a long-standing source of community concern. In recent years, complaints of acrid odors, fiery accidents, soot and harmful emissions gained new resonance as public officials became more sensitive to accusations of environmental damage.
“Phillips 66 in L.A. is an old refinery. It’s had a lot of problems with flaring and fires in recent years and high levels of pollution,” Julia May, senior scientist for Communities for a Better Environment, told The Times last year. “It may have just been out-competed by the rest of the refineries.”
The proposed redevelopment of the site would require city approval and successful remediation of underground pollution overseen by the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board.
“Phillips 66 is committed to addressing environmental impacts from historic operations,” the company said in a statement.
“They are the experts and they’re the ones who are going to be informing how the cleanup takes place,” Crossner said. “The project will follow their directive entirely.”
Catellus and Deca have taken on industrial land makeovers in the past.
Catellus redeveloped the 200-acre former Pacific Refinery Co. near San Francisco into a residential subdivision called Victoria by the Bay in 2003, a process that involved the removal of contaminants.
Deca has transformed outdated sites to accommodate new technologies. Its 800 Cesar Chavez project on San Francisco’s waterfront converted an aging warehouse into a large electric-vehicle charging and maintenance facility. It opened in 2018.
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