Owner of Universal City Hilton Plans Second Tower

The owner of the Hilton Los Angeles/Universal City hotel was expected to file paperwork Wednesday with Los Angeles city officials to build a new tower at the complex. Hillcrest Real Estate LLC seeks to construct a 15-story, 365-room addition to the Universal City hotel, located next to Universal Studios Hollywood and City Walk, according to media reports. The existing hotel is 24 stories tall and has 495 rooms. The Los Angeles Times reported that Hillcrest wants the additional rooms to accommodate visitors to the theme park and its popular Wizarding World of Harry Potter exhibit that opened last year. NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast Corp., which owns the theme park, however, is objecting to the size of the proposed project. A contract between Hillcrest and the media company requires that NBCUniversal give its consent prior to the Los Angeles real estate developer submitting development applications, according to the Times. “Our key priority is to make sure that any development is compatible from a scale, density, traffic and other impacts standpoint,” NBCUniversal said in a statement published by the Times. “We understand the currently proposed project substantially exceeds what is allowed by current zoning.” In its own statement, Hillcrest said that it had worked “in good faith” with the media company for two and a half years to address concerns about the hotel expansion, according to the Times. “Having reached an impasse in those discussions, Hillcrest has taken the next step and filed our development application with the city,” the statement said. “We look forward to working with our neighbors at NBCUniversal to achieve consensus on our expansion plan.” The Hilton hotel opened in 1984 as the Sheraton Premiere Hotel and was rebranded as a Hilton in 1990 when the building was purchased by Hillcrest.