Rotating lounge for hotel would be a treat

By: JANET HARDY DAWKINS - Commentary: | Tuesday, January 22, 2008 8:43 PM PST ∞

Oceanside's most beautiful downtown asset is our ocean side view. The environmental impact of the proposed Malkin hotel on our downtown ocean view will be to obliterate it.

These two, eight-story boxes will completely block the view of the ocean from outside, and give few views inside. The view from the ground-floor restaurant will be traffic on Pacific; the ballroom has no windows; the public and hotel guests will be allowed only up to the third floor public area; and there will be no views from the brown-shingled roof. This design squanders its ocean-side location and should be changed.

We are giving up our own piece of prime, oceanfront property and investing $27 million. We deserve a hotel with rooftop dining and dancing and skyline views of the ocean all the way to Catalina. Let's build a hotel in our city's signature, modern-mission style, with a rotating restaurant and ballroom that will be an extraordinary cultural and historical landmark, like the round, skyline ballroom on Catalina Island.

There are rotating restaurants and lounges around the world. In fact, the one rotating lounge left in Los Angeles is a Westin property, the BonaVista lounge on the top of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel. This rooftop lounge rotates one revolution per hour, and is inexpensively propelled by only four, 10-horsepower motors. Westin is a large corporation and has built such notable hotels as Atlantis in the Bahamas and Bacara in Santa Barbara. This corporation could better serve our citizens with coastal views.

London's Kensington Roof Gardens, 100 feet above the London streets, built in 1936 and still open to the public, offers dining amid its 1 1/2-acre lush garden, replete with exotic flowers and plants, ponds and winding paths. This rooftop wonderland has three areas: the Moorish Spanish Gardens with arches, fountains, flamingos and dozens of 40-feet-tall, majestic palm trees; the Tudor area with climbing ivy, roses and hanging wisteria; and, the English Garden area, with meandering streams with fish and ducks, shaded by oak, walnut and pear trees.

Imagine yourself dining and dancing on our Oceanside tropical rooftop terrace, surrounded by torch-lit waterfalls and swaying palms, in a Coconut Grove-style, glass-domed, rotating ballroom, gazing at the stars. We are only limited by our imagination.

-- Janet Hardy Dawkins lives in Oceanside.