First Assistant Chief Jim McDonnell stands in his empty office at Parker Center, headquarters for the Los Angeles Police Department, after workers began moving his office to the new LAPD headquarters. (Hans Gutknecht)
When the Los Angeles police move out of their downtown headquarters, the challenges are different from when you move out of an old house or office building.
For one thing, you probably don't worry that you'll lose homicide evidence and case records, allowing murderers to go free.
That's one practical concern for the L.A. Police Department, which is in the middle of switching its operations hub from 54-year-old Parker Center to a modern police administration building a couple of downtown blocks to the west.
On a recent morning, Lt. Gregg Strenk stood next to his well-worn desk in the Robbery-Homicide Division and gestured toward one of the wooden wall cabinets that hold the detectives' live-case files.
Strenk said he's anxious about what could happen in the short time a moving company will have possession of that cabinet and its irreplaceable contents.
"(The day it's moved), I'm going to be here," Strenk said. "I may not be carrying it or pushing it, but I'll be watching it."
Strenk likened himself to a family wondering how to get its heirloom china from one house to another in one piece.
"Do you let the movers take it, or do you handle it yourself?" he said.
The old Parker Center - named in 1966 after Chief William H. Parker - has been the LAPD's base since 1955 and is familiar to viewers of countless police dramas real and fictional. In need of seismic retrofitting, the building is expected to eventually be demolished.
The new $437 million headquarters - as yet unnamed - is beautifully landscaped and comes complete with Wi-Fi.
The LAPD, anticipating an Oct. 24 grand opening for the new building at 100 Spring St., has been packing up the old cop shop at 100 North Los Angeles St., a process that began in July and will continue into next year.
Some departments won't move for a while, among them Robbery-Homicide, which isn't going anywhere until December. Detectives keep working out of their musty old room, their attitudes still hardboiled but maybe a bit wistful now.
From top to bottom of the 10-story current headquarters, department veterans express mixed emotions about leaving behind their dumpy (but homey) digs for a dazzling (but unfamiliar) workplace with space for about 2,300 employees.
"The new building is so much bigger, nicer and cleaner," said Sgt. Kelly Arnett of the Public Information Office.
"(But) we're going to miss the cockroaches," said Officer April Harding of the Media Relations Section. And, they said, no longer will there be the scent of unburned confiscated marijuana that sometimes wafts up from the downstairs evidence room after a productive weekend for the narcotics squad.
First Assistant Chief Jim McDonnell noted that a lot of L.A. history revolved around Parker Center.
"The famous and the infamous," McDonnell said.
One imagines what a veteran detective might find when he pulls open a neglected drawer and empties its contents into one of the bright-orange moving crates. So far, no reports that any gumshoe has pulled a paper bag out of the back of a drawer and exclaimed, "Here's that Black Dahlia evidence we could never find!"
The real back-of-the-drawer finds are more like what you find when you pack up for a move.
"The number of paper clips is unbelievable," Arnett said.
McDonnell, a 28-year veteran of the force, said the experience of moving is bittersweet.
"We've looked forward to the day when we'd be moving out of Parker Center and into the new building," McDonnell said. "It wasn't until we started moving and we saw how empty it is, that we saw how many memories are leaving that building."
