Alexander Haagen: Thrown for a Loss : A Lifelong Dream Turns Sour for the Coliseum Commission President

The romance between Alexander Haagen and the stadium he considers a municipal treasure began 55 years ago, when his father took him to the 10th Olympiad. Though the Games themselves were dramatic, what really impressed the 13-year-old was the massive arena in which they were held.

“It was a magnificent structure designed for great events,” Haagen recalls, describing the then-decade-old Memorial Coliseum. “It was more than just a stadium. It was a place where history could unfold.”

‘Walking on Clouds’

Haagen returned a few years later as an All-City running guard from Los Angeles High School, and again was awe-struck. “There I was playing football on the same field where Babe Didrikson won her medals,” he says. “The grandeur of the surroundings had me walking on clouds.”

So when the governing board of the California Museum of Science and Technology appointed Haagen, then 65, to the Coliseum Commission in 1985, it was the literal fulfillment of a dream. Haagen’s name was added to those of Whittier, Barham, Kellogg and Robinson--commission members who have founded corporations, developed suburbs and lent their names to boulevards.

As Haagen himself proudly puts it, “appointment to the Coliseum Commission makes you part of the elite group that shapes the history of Los Angeles.”

Embattled Leader

Today, that dream has crumbled, and the embattled president of the commission finds himself remembered for another reason. In the weeks since Los Angeles Raiders owner Al Davis announced he was moving his team to Irwindale, Haagen’s name has come to be associated more with the loss of the city’s only pro football franchise than with historical forces.

Even as the Irwindale move continues to work its way through the courts, the 68-year-old shopping center developer has been labeled an intransigent bully and accused of tyrannical behavior. In the California Assembly’s frantic waning hours, one legislative committee even found time to call for his resignation.

It has all left Haagen both dazed and defensive. To a man who has spent his entire life in deal-making and development--a man whom friends seem to understand only in the context of business--the uproar over the loss of a single sports team seems to genuinely perplex him.

It’s clear that he doesn’t consider himself the man who lost the Raiders, a notion he finds “really very disgusting. Los Angeles lost the Raiders because the Coliseum Commission is flat broke,” he says with finality. “We don’t have the funds to compete. You can’t keep an engine running without gas.”

To him, business is business.

To his friends and associates, there is no better definition of Alexander Haagen’s life.

Haagen, born in Denver, came to California as a young boy, the only child of a “show business” entrepreneur who eventually parlayed a financial interest in carnival arcades and vaudeville theaters into one of the first Pantages movie houses. The family lived in a frame house next to the old Charlie Chaplin studio in Hollywood. “I could stand on top of our garage and watch Chaplin make his flickers,” he recalled.

Haagen took pre-law courses at Los Angeles City College, then lived briefly in New York before returning West to work at the California Shipping Yards as a welder. After the start of World War II, he joined the merchant marine as a cook and baker, and was assigned to tankers plying the Persian Gulf. Loaded with aviation fuel picked up in Iraq and destined for supply flights “over the hump” to China, the ships sailed across the Indian Ocean, their crews alert to U-boats, but often succumbing to ennui.

Haagen recalls being on one such trip late in the war on a newly built freighter loaded with ammunition when the engine room exploded. “We sat there for hours on a listing ship loaded with ammunition for Merrill’s Marauders. One after another, the ships in the convoy sailed past us. The British told us to stay put, which was easy to do since we were dead in the water. We survived because a British destroyer arrived before the U-boats and gave us a tow to Madras,” he said.

At the end of the war, Haagen’s economic prospects also seemed dead in the water. His sole source of income at one period came from jukeboxes he had bought and placed in waterfront bars around the Port of Los Angeles. It was from this vantage point in San Pedro he began to observe the city’s southward sprawl to Palos Verdes and beyond. Hastened by the construction of freeways, the migration to the suburbs was beginning, and before long Haagen and his wife, Charlotte, were buying corner lots along arterial roads for resale to oil companies hungry for service station sites.

The experience of growing up in the Depression apparently made Haagen tireless in his pursuit of wealth, and convinced him that his two sons, Alex III and Charals, should start working early.

‘Only Way to Learn’

“I was in my second year of junior college when he came up to me and said, ‘Son, you’re wasting your time,’ ” remembers Charals Haagen, 43, who dropped out of school to become a full partner in his father’s property developments. “He said the only way to learn anything was to do something. When people remarked about my ‘advantages,’ Senior would tell them that his sons’ greatest advantage was lack of a formal education.”

Haagen offered his children a piece of the action if they could close deals, and as a consequence family talks in their Hancock Park home usually involved parking lot maintenance, common area costs, and the percentage of taxes and landscaping fees a tenant should pay.

Strong Competition

Neither son thought this unusual since many of their early negotiations, they said, were against other competitively minded business scions.

In 1964, Haagen sent Alex, then 21, to negotiate a multimillion dollar development in the San Fernando Valley with Mike Goldstein, the son of the founder of Boys Markets. During the Depression, Haagen and Joe Goldstein, Mike’s father, had competed as door-to-door fruit sellers. Haagen called his son in before the meeting and told him to hang tough against the much larger company. “We may be small now, but not for long,” Alex Haagen III, 44, remembers his father saying. “You go out there and tell Goldstein we’re going to be the biggest property developer in the Western United States.”

Today, Haagen presides over the largest retail development company in Southern California. He has developed more than 40 major shopping centers. At any given time an average of 7 million square feet of retail space is being built or leased by his Manhattan Beach company.

Yet Haagen is not one to boast. “If my company were a Roman galley, I’d just be one of the oarsmen,” he says, leaning back toward a shelf containing two books: “Architecture in the Real World” and “Visions of Paradise.”

His 60 employees say these volumes cover his only real passions--building shopping centers and planting trees. (Haagen spent $1 million planting 2,000 trees at Manhattan Beach Village, where his headquarters is located. Says Lucky Stores Inc. vice-president Jerome Fahey: “There are so many trees at Alex’s centers people often can’t tell there’s a grocery store back there.”)

Executives in the building and retail trades respect him as a shrewd, yet honest, businessman who not only can close a deal but also deliver to specification.

“Al Haagen explains his financial risks and the revenue he expects in return at the start of every negotiation,” says Dan Felix, a San Diego developer who formerly headed the La Mesa Redevelopment Agency. “You won’t find cookie-cutter architecture in the centers he builds. His developments succeed because each tries to meet the needs of a specific community.”

Obsessed With Business

Haagen’s own headquarters, built to resemble a Mexican hacienda and located, appropriately, across from a shopping mall, reflects his obsession with property development. No sports posters adorn his office. Instead autographed faces of prominent politicians, shoveling dirt at ground-breaking ceremonies, gaze down from the walls.

With the exception of two paintings by his great grandfather, Frederick Rondel, who was a founder of the Hudson River School of painting and who later instructed Winslow Homer at the Chicago Art Institute, the entire building is decorated with plot maps, watercolor renderings of previous developments and cardboard miniatures of shopping malls under construction.

Each shopping center has its own history, which Haagen gladly recounts in the loving tone parents usually reserve for their children.

“The Fountain Valley Plaza used to be an old turkey farm,” Haagen explains with a wave of his hand toward a far office wall. “This one here is the Von’s center at Sunset and Hobart,” he smiles. “It’s built on top of the old Hollywood Motel, where Mary Pickford and Doug Fairbanks used to stay.”

A stroll down an office corridor quickly becomes a tour of Southern California that rapidly departs Los Angeles for San Fernando, Gardena, Covina and beyond. A chronicle of the Alexander Haagen Company is the story of urban sprawl.

“The Chino Town Center was a bean field,” Haagen says. “The development where we are now was a tank farm where bunker fuel for steam ships was stored in huge ponds.

“I’ve seen this area grow,” he boasts. “Rancho Yorba down in Anaheim is on land I bought from Don Bernardo himself. I’ve dealt with the Sepulvedas, the Dominguez family and the Yorbas. I don’t think anyone can top that.”

Though the majority of Haagen’s revenues now come from retail centers in the suburbs, his reputation was made in the inner city. In 1981, he attracted major retailers to the Vermont-Slauson area by promising to build a “security shopping center.” At first the community objected to the wrought iron fence he erected around the mall, but complaints stopped when it became apparent the fence minimized vandalism.

Buoyed by the commercial success of the Vermont-Slauson center, Haagen shifted his focus to “Charcoal Ally,” a blighted area of Watts destroyed during the 1965 riots. Financed by government grants and industrial development bonds, he began building the Martin Luther King Center, a ten-acre, $10 million retail complex that opened in 1985.

“These two first class developments proved that redevelopment of the inner city could be profitable,” says Ted Watkins, executive director of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee. They also have brought 5,000 new jobs to Central Los Angeles and convinced stores like Broadway and the May Co. to join in the renovation of the Crenshaw Plaza in Baldwin Hills.

“This type of redevelopment can make Main Street America vital again,” says Haagen. “It’s possible to stimulate commercial activity with the right kind of development. You don’t have to buy a football team like Irwindale.”

In February 1985, Haagen arrived on the Commission determined to satisfy his “tenants”--USC and the Raiders--and the “community” of football fans. Methods that worked in commercial real estate development also should satisfy owners of professional sports teams, he felt.

Howard Edgerton, the founder and chairman emeritus of California Federal who served on the commission during its stormy negotiation with Los Angeles Lakers owner Jack Kent Cooke, understood Haagen’s logic, but knew the Coliseum’s clients would be difficult to please.

“I don’t know what we ever did to deserve people like Jack Kent Cooke, (Carroll) Rosenbloom and Al Davis?” he now muses. “They are difficult and arrogant individuals.”

Edgerton had first-hand experience, at least in the case of Cooke. “I was on the Coliseum Commission when we ‘lost’ the Lakers,” he says. “At that time USC, UCLA and the Lakers all were playing in the Sports Arena. Cooke threatened to leave unless we gave him sole control of all the basketball dates. Imagine the reaction if we had agreed. It was a no-win situation.”

From the moment he became president of the Coliseum Commission last February, a clash between Haagen and Davis seemed inevitable. Retired builder Ernie Hahn, now living in Rancho Santa Fe, remembers being surprised when he learned that Haagen had become president of the commission. “Alex is not the sort of guy to surface as chairman of a commission,” he says. “He’s a very quiet, low key fellow.”

A product of Palos Verdes and downtown Los Angeles, Haagen’s professional life had been spent among corporate executives and local politicians. He valued long-term relationships, consensus and written contracts that ensured everyone a profit.

Davis was expert at the fluid economics of professional sports. His was a world where verbal agreements were often renegotiated.

Haagen’s idea of an athlete was an Olympian like Buster Crabbe; the “Just win, Baby” philosophy of Al Davis put a premium on “rough-edged” men like Lyle Alzado.

‘Cut a Real Deal’

The battle between Haagen and Davis began in the spring of 1986 when Davis asked that a series of verbal commitments highly advantageous to the Raiders be implemented. Haagan asked Coliseum Commissioner William Robertson, the AFL-CIO executive director who negotiated the deals, to arrange a meeting with Davis, and all three finally met in October 1986. According to Robertson, Haagen said, “I’m going to show Davis how to cut a real deal. He’s not so tough.”

“I warned him that Davis didn’t bluff,” Robertson says, “but Haagen wanted a fight. He was a bull that carried around his own China shop.”

According to Richard Riordan, a Robertson ally on the commission, Haagen’s political ineptitude drove Davis out of the Coliseum. “Davis had a product in the Raiders that the public desperately wanted, but Haagen didn’t care. Instead of trying to satisfy the public, he followed his own agenda.”

“If there was a hidden agenda, it belonged to Al Davis,” Haagen responds. “I work out agreements, not jam deals down peoples’ throats, but nothing ever satisfied Davis’ master plan, whatever it was.”

Haagen insists he tried to work with Davis. When Davis demanded more parking, Haagen secured authorization to issue $75 million worth of bonds. When the Raiders later suggested eliminating the track and reconfiguring the stadium for football, he came up with a scheme, later rejected as impractical, to put temporary seats over the track.

Critics charge that compromises, made reluctantly, were usually delayed. Haagen concedes, after carefully considering his response, “there’s probably some truth” to the observation that he was unenthusiastic about modernizing the stadium.

“Not many cities have a great monumental facility like the Coliseum. The Coliseum is a magnificent facility. We can’t tear down a national monument for the sake of progress and economics,” he said.

‘Morally Proper’ Actions

“I think all our actions were ethically and morally proper,” he added. “As to the behavior of the other side, I have no comment.”

In hindsight, Haagen now concedes that he never would have joined the commission had he realized the extent of its bureaucratic and financial problems.

“When you look at the massive historical monument that is the Coliseum you envision enormous wealth,” he explains. How was I to know the commission was broke? I guess I was just naive.”

He’s also surprised by the lack of public support from politicians for whom he is a major benefactor. Indeed, Haagen is one of the largest political contributors in Los Angeles. Over the past four and a half years he has contributed more than $52,000 to assorted city council campaigns. Since 1981 one county supervisor, Deane Dana, has received $29,000 from Haagen. Mayor Tom Bradley has received $25,000. But what hurts him most was being disavowed by the staff of Gov. George Deukmejian, to whom he contributed $30,000 over the course of last year’s campaign.

And he admits that he has an ambivalence toward professional sports. During the two and a half years he has served on the commission, his colleagues can remember him attending only one Raiders game.

Haagen sees no inconsistency arising between his civic duties and the fact he feels more comfortable at a construction site than on the 50-yard line.

“I just don’t have time for recreation,” he explains.