After being in escrow for nearly five years, Triple Five Group, owner of the famed Mall of America in Minnesota, has ditched its plan to buy one of the largest undeveloped commercial parcels in Los Angeles, walking away from a 47-acre site on Canoga Avenue in Warner Center, according to real estate data firm CoStar Group.
The Warner Center parcel has been under contract since 2018 when Triple Five Group said it was planning to purchase it for $150 million from the site’s owner, Raytheon Technologies. Since then, Raytheon Technologies has been involved in a multi-year environmental cleanup of the former industrial site’s soil and groundwater.
While a large amount of contaminated soil has been removed as part of a cleanup effort, the huge empty parcel is still not safe for redevelopment, according to officials at the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board who oversee the remediation efforts.
Ailene Voisin, a spokesperson for the water board, wrote in an email on Tuesday, Aug. 15, that although soil remediation activities at the property have been completed, “additional mitigation work must be done prior to the implementation of any redevelopment activities.”
The former Rocketdyne facility at 6633 Canoga Avenue was once home to two small nuclear reactors located in a Rocketdyne building at the corner of Owensmouth Avenue and Vanowen Street, which was part of a program that developed nuclear power systems for NASA.
The Rocketdyne F-1 rocket engine was developed in that building, and was used in the Saturn V rocket in the 1960s, the famed launch vehicle of the Apollo program that took astronauts to the Moon. Rocketdyne’s operations left contamination in soil and groundwater. All work at the former manufacturing site stopped in 2014 and its buildings were demolished in 2016.
Last year, officials at the water board told the Daily News about its discovery of a plume of contaminated groundwater that had spread nearly half a mile north and east of…
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