Developer Planning SaMo/Brentwood Gateway Marketplace

Prolific property owner Philip Orosco is furtively quietly putting his stamp all over Santa Monica. His company, Pacshore Partners, owns five acres of land under the media park at Olympic and Centinela and he has "big plans" for them, though he doesn't elaborate on them to the Santa Monica Daily Press. We know more about his work on the Telephone Building at Seventh and Arizona, which began life in 1937 as the headquarters for a phone company and it once housed Verizon switchboard operations; Orosco paid $20 million for the six-story building and, with help from local architecture firm Rios Clementi Hale, is turning it into a modern office building, with restaurants on the bottom and a roofdeck on top. But perhaps most intriguingly, he says his company is about to buy a handsome building on Wilshire and Berkeley (pictured above), which they'll convert to "a gateway marketplace from Brentwood to Santa Monica." Orosco is also figuring out what to do with a Jack in the Box he owns on Wilshire, as well as helping the city figure out how to update the faded civic center.

· Developer Has Big Plans for Old Buildings [SMDP]