Craig Galati Interview, October 24, 2016: transcript

i AN INTERVIEW WITH CRAIG GALATI An Oral History Conducted by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White The Building Las Vegas Oral History Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ii ©The Building Las Vegas Oral History Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2016 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Editor: Stefani Evans and Israel B. Salinas Transcribers: Kristin Hicks, Frances Smith Interviewers: Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White Project Manager: Stefani Evans iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of the UNLV University Libraries. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank the university for the support given that allowed an idea and the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader’s understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University Nevada, Las Vegas iv v TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Craig Galati October 24, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White Preface……………………………………………………………………………………vi Early years in Ohio; moving to Las Vegas; first teenage jobs; studying architecture at University of Idaho; marriage and returning to Las Vegas………….......……….……..1–7 JMA; partnership with Ray Lucchessi; Las Vegas Springs Preserve; Silent Heroes of the Cold War project; Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Vegas……..……………….…….8–17 Projects for the homeless; Las Vegas homelessness; Las Vegas-Clark County Library District projects; Garside Pool; Las Vegas Community Centers……...……………...18–31 vi Preface “I always thought I'd be more urban. I would live in a downtown city. I wouldn't have a car. I would walk around. I would work on these big skyscrapers.” At one point in his life, architect Craig Galati dreamt of designing large buildings in some of the nation’s biggest cities. Instead, he was drawn back to his childhood home of Las Vegas, where he created projects meant to preserve the city’s integrity, such as the Grant Sawyer State Office Building and the first building at the College of Southern Nevada Charleston Campus. He speaks to his work in preservation at the Las Vegas Springs vii Preserve and in welcoming visitors to Mount Charleston with his Spring Mountains Visitor Gateway design. In this interview, Galati talks about his parents’ decision to move from Ohio to Nevada and what it was like growing up in Las Vegas. He recalls his first teenage jobs in the Las Vegas of his youth and his studies in architecture at the University of Idaho. He recounts the dilemma of struggling to find architecture work he enjoyed and how that vision drew him back to Vegas. He describes various projects in his portfolio from his early years to the present. He speaks highly of his partnership with Ray Lucchesi and the basis for their vision: “We wanted to be a place that everybody liked to work for. Buildings were just tools to do something grander. They weren't an object. We had a philosophy that was not object based, it was people based.” 1 S: Good afternoon. This is Stefani Evans and Claytee White [on October 24, 2016]. We are here with Craig Galati. Mr. Galati, would you please spell your first and last name? My name is Craig, C-R-A I-G. Galati, G-A-L-A-T-I. S: Thank you. Why don't we begin by you telling us a little bit about your early life? Where you were born. What that was like. I was born in Cleveland, Ohio. I don't have a lot of recollection of that. My parents moved here in 1968. S: How old were you? I was eight. I have a lot of recollection about moving here because I went to three elementary schools in third grade. I went to one in Ohio and I went to two different ones here. That is embedded in my memory and at the same time I got glasses and that was a really traumatic time of my life, meeting all these new friends and having glasses for the first time. I eventually settled into that and it all worked out. When we first moved here, we lived right behind Red Rock Theater on a street called Westleigh [Avenue]. I believe that house is still there. Then we moved and my parents bought a house on Torrey Pines [Drive], near Washington [Avenue]. It was the edge of the earth. There was nothing in front of our house except for desert as far as you could see. There were no homes. I remember they built Sproul homes off of Rainbow [Boulevard] but that was a little bit a way from us. It was just straight out to the desert for a long time. S: Do you know who built that area? It was Ernie Becker. I joke around with him about that. I met him much, much later and I met his son Barry. My dad was in construction and the reason he moved here was he 2 wanted to get out of Ohio because of the weather. I had two brothers so there were three of us and we all had really bad allergies back there to ragweed. We were always having the croup. My parents decided to move to Las Vegas. My dad picked Las Vegas because there was plenty of construction work at the time. He was a sheet metal contractor; he was a tin bender. My mom was a home maker at that time. She was taking care of the three kids so she didn't work until a little later in her life. It was a big difference to move here but I still remember falling in love with the desert. My brothers and I would play in the desert all the time. We used to hike as far as we could go before we had to turn around to get home by the time the street lights came on. We spent a lot of time in the desert riding bikes, building forts, doing all those things that kids do. It was a great place to grow up. Funny story, and I only heard this story much later, when my parents moved out here my father's mom and his sisters and brothers couldn't believe they were taking kids to the city of sin. My aunt wrote a letter to the Vatican and the Vatican wrote a letter back to my parents trying to convince them not to move to the city of sin. I come from a very strong Catholic background on both sides. My dad is Italian. My mom's family is Polish, very strong Catholics. S: They don't still have that letter do they? My parents have both since passed away so if we do still have the letter it is in this box of stuff I have. I don't know if I have ever actually seen the letter but I have heard about the letter. That is one of those myths that may get busted someday but it is the family lore. My parents actually didn't want to move to Las Vegas. They wanted to move to Phoenix, but my dad could not find a job in Phoenix so they ended up in Las Vegas. They wanted 3 the West, but Phoenix is really where they wanted to go. They were really happy here. They had a good life in Las Vegas and Las Vegas was a good spot for them. C: Did you work as a young boy, teenager? Yes, I did. I worked at a bunch of different jobs. I remember before I was 16 I wanted to have a job and I worked at Nifty's Drive-In on Charleston [Boulevard]. S: Tell us about Nifty's. I got fired after two days because they found out that I was not old enough. I used to ride my bike there and I told everybody that I drove. My parents didn't have a lot of money so if I wanted anything I had to work. I had a paper route before then. I made onion rings at Nifty's for two days before I got fired. Then I went over 3 to the Batter Beater, which was a restaurant in the Arville [Street] and Charleston area. I worked there for a couple of days as a dishwasher and they finally fired me too because I wasn't old enough. I had to wait until I was old enough and then I was a box boy at Vegas Village [Shopping Center]. I was at the one at Oakey [Boulevard] and Decatur [Boulevard]. I did work at the one at Owens [Avenue] and Las Vegas Boulevard too. There was a big union strike at that time, the cashiers and the stock boys, it must have been 1976 or 1977 and Vegas Village was the only non-union grocery store. They went on strike for some reason. Vegas Village was the only one that was open and everybody was coming to Vegas Village to get their groceries. We were so busy that we had to work extra shifts. I would work a shift up there and a shift down here. He was great. It was a lot of money for me at that time. S: Did Vegas Village sell Christmas trees in a Christmas tree lot out front? I am sure they did. They had a department store and a grocery store in there. It was like Wonder World [locally owned discount store] on one side but Smith's [supermarket] on the other side. I worked there for a couple of years and then I got hired to work for Pepsi. I used to drive around from store to store and face the shelves. The guys that drove the trucks would just go and dump the stuff in the back. We would go there and move it and put it in the spot in the grocery store where it was supposed to go and then we would take out the product and put it on the shelves and face it up so it looked good. I used to have a route there and I would work there after school when I was in high school. I did that for a couple of years as well. S: Were you interested in architecture at all at that time? 4 I was very interested in architecture but I was more interested in graphic design. My dad knew an architect in town, Robert Fielden. Bob use to live just up the street from us. I used to mow his lawn when I was a kid and take care of his house because my dad was friends with him. I don't know how my dad knew him other than that he was from the neighborhood. Back in those days neighborhoods were tight, everybody knew everybody, everybody watched the kids, and everybody sat on their porches and front yards. People didn't have a lot of money but they had a lot of friends. It was a nice time to grow up. My dad went to talk to Bob Fielden. I was thinking about Arizona State [University] as a school and I also applied to [University of California] Berkeley. I didn't get into Berkeley. Bob Fielden said, "You should go to the University of Idaho." I'm saying, "Idaho? I don't even know where Idaho is." My dad says, "If Bob Fielden says you should go there, you should go there." Bob knew the dean up there, Paul Blanton. Bob called the dean and somehow I got accepted there and my dad said you are going there because I can afford that and I can't afford Arizona State. It was kind of good because I went far away. I kind of wanted to go far away but I couldn't afford to go too far. But culturally and climatically I went very far away. It was like a whole different world. I have two boys and I just took them on all these tours to see all these schools. We didn't do that, right? I saw that school when we got there. We drove and I remember my car broke down on the way up. There were all these trials and tribulations getting there. As I am getting up there the signs were becoming like foreign languages to me. Coeur d’ Alene, what is that? There are a lot of Native American names up there. It is far north, probably about 100 miles from Canada. It is in Moscow, Idaho. I 5 remember going there and it turned out to be really good. I got my degree there and then I got married. S: What is your degree in? Architecture. I have a Bachelors in Architecture, which was a five-year degree, back in those days. C: Tell me what the culture was like on campus for people studying to be an architect. Idaho was a land grant college and it had a lot of farmers. The biggest majors were agriculture and agricultural mechanization, which is the business side of agriculture. Most of my friends were in those majors and they planned on going back home and running the family farm. There were a few engineering majors and there were architecture majors. My class was pretty small, maybe 50-60 kids ended up graduating in architecture. People were mainly from the Northwest. We didn't have people from other parts of the country, mainly the Northwest, and mainly the little towns in Idaho and maybe a few from Washington [state]. We also had a whole group of people from the Middle East. Apparently the dean of the college had been a dean in Saudi Arabia. We had a lot of foreign students, which was really nice until we had the [Iranian] hostage crisis in the late '70s. This group of students, a whole class a year ahead of me, were on a field trip to Vancouver and they [the U.S. Government] closed the border and wouldn't let them back in. So a bunch of my friends and acquaintances and people in my class, they all transferred to the University of British Columbia. You remember when we had the hostage crisis. I think it was President Carter, he closed the borders. You couldn't go in or out of the U.S., especially if you were 6 from the Middle East. There were a lot of protests on my campus. I remember that because we had quite a bit of a contingent of kids from Saudi Arabia. That dwindled my class down a little bit. Kids are kids. We worked hard and we all drank a lot. We experimented with everything. It was the '70s. C: How did you get back here? I met a girl up there my junior year and she was an engineering student from Spokane, Washington. We ended up getting married. We graduated one weekend and got married the next. In 1983. We did not want to come to Las Vegas. I did not want to come back. I wanted to go to a big city. I applied for jobs in Seattle, Portland. My wife received a job offer with Texas Instruments in Fort Worth [in Texas]. I went down to Dallas and looked at that and I couldn't get a job there. I couldn't get a job anywhere. It was 1983. Times were tough. It was really tough up in the Northwest because they had the spotted-owl crisis and Boeing was just laying off everybody up there so the economy was tight. I did have a few friends who did get work in Seattle eventually and still work there. My wife really didn't like her job offer in Dallas/Fort Worth. I said, "Well, there are always jobs in Las Vegas." So we moved down here and moved in with my parents for a few months until we found jobs. She got hired on at Holmes and Narver [Incorporated] out at the test site as an electrical engineer and then right after that I got hired by Holmes and Narver as well as an architectural engineer. I used to work out at the test site when I first started and I hated it. S: What did you do out there? I designed the utilitarian buildings for the government on the test site. My grandiose plans of designing skyscrapers were not coming into fruition. I always thought I'd be 7 more urban. I would live in a downtown city. I wouldn't have a car. I would walk around. I would work on these big skyscrapers. This wasn't my vision. I eventually got hired on by a firm here in town. S: What firm was that? It was called Dobrusky Kittrell Garlock, which is now called KGA [Architecture]. I worked there for a year. I worked for Ed Kittrell and George Garlock. Tom Dobrusky eventually retired. I then got hired at JMA [Architecture Studios] and I worked at JMA for four years. I loved it and I really did some great projects there. I got to work with some really talented people there. S: Did you work with Bob Fielden there? I did. Bob hired me but he left about two years after I started, so I ended up working for Tom Schoeman, which was great. He taught me so much. He taught me the value of marketing. I was doing nothing but design and I was a pretty good designer, but JMA got slow and I started looking around. My buddy over there got laid off and my buddy over here got laid off and I started thinking to myself if I brought some work in I bet you I wouldn't get laid off. I went into Tom and said, "I know a lot of people here. I grew up here. My dad has lots of connections." He said, "Give it a go and see what you can do." I started learning about marketing and what it meant to get work. We use to do these government forms to try and get work. The very first one I did we won. We won a job out at the test site. It was a lab project and a badging building. It was very interesting and I got to work on that. C: What is a badging building? 8 When you go to the test site you have to check in. It is a government facility and you get a temporary badge. Badges have radiation detectors on them out there. I can say all this stuff because I never got a clearance so I don't know the super-secret stuff. I started getting pretty well known in the community and able to bring in work and I was on a lot of committees. I became the president of AIA [American Institute of Architects] back then. I was on an AIA committee and I met Ray Lucchesi and Ray and I hit it off and he was just starting this firm with his father. They had maybe been around for a year and Ray said, "You know, I really need somebody to come over and do design and marketing. If you come over and it all works out you can be a partner." I decided to leave JMA and I left these glamour jobs that I got to work on like the [Las Vegas] convention center and Citibank. I got to do some great things at JMA. I left there and came here and Ray had just won the [Southern Nevada] Veterans [Memorial] Cemetery in Boulder City. That was my first project here. I got to design the Veterans Cemetery. The buildings there were so tiny. It was a 1400 square foot administration building and then we laid out all the sites and the roads. It was a good job for me, but it was so tiny and I remember Ray kept saying, "I don't know why you left JMA for this." I saw the future and Ray and I negotiated for a year before I came over. I wanted to make sure if I was going to make a move to someplace that I knew where we were going and I wanted to know that we were compatible. I wanted to make sure I would be at home and I wanted to make sure we had the same vision. We did. We were partners all the way until 2011. S: Can you describe that vision? 9 We wanted to be a place that everybody liked to work for. We all work hard. Our profession works really hard. We wanted to be the kind of guys that appreciated that and we also didn't want people working on the weekends and not working too much at night. We said that we had to figure out a business model where we can charge more so that people have to work less. If we are able to give people less billable work they can spent their time getting better at their craft and profession, which allows us to charge more. We kept planning it back and forth through all those years until it started working. It was a different philosophy from all the other firms. All the other firms at that time was about leverage your employees to work their butts off so they can make a lot of profit for the owners. We never had that philosophy. We shared alike. If the company did well, everybody did well. We built this really cool firm that way. Even back in the '90s we cared about, we now call it sustainability, but back then we just called it good design. We always cared about solar, and wind, and how organizations and people connected to buildings and how buildings were supportive of cultures. Buildings were just tools to do something grander. They weren't an object. We had a philosophy that was not object based, it was people based. That really took off for us and allowed us to win some really nice jobs at a time when we were so young in our business. I was 29 years old when we designed the Grant Sawyer State [Office] Building. I was 28 when we did the master plan for the West Charleston community college [College of Southern Nevada – Charleston Campus] and we designed the first building there. S: What was the first building there? I think it is called building C now. You have the dental building in front, it is the one directly behind it. It was the very first building there. It has classrooms. It could have 10 changed a lot since then but at the time it was the only building. It had a little library in it, classrooms, lecture rooms, nursing program and science labs, all in the same building. It was a great project for us. We won the corporate offices for the Boyd Group [Boyd Gaming Corporation] which is over on Industrial [Road] behind the Stardust [Hotel & Casino] that has since gone down too. Then we ended up doing a whole bunch of work at Women's Hospital, which is gone as well now. We had a great little practice and we weren't doing glamour architecture. We were doing what we call responsible architecture. What we cared about was creating these bonds and connections between people that came to buildings. We also cared a lot about being responsible to the environment and having the building's system designed to be in the desert. We joked around about being of the place. That built our reputation for a long time. We got great work because of that. The big one was when we won the [Las Vegas] Springs Preserve. We won the Springs Preserve because it was such a strong connection between place and what they were trying to do. I remember when we won that. The client said, "We want to do this thing called LEED." We are thinking what the heck is that? We had never heard of it before. But we care about the desert, we care about the place, we care about energy, we care about all the things that LEED cares about so let’s start looking into that stuff. We had a couple of guys that learned it and taught the rest of us. As it turned out it really wasn't that foreign, it was just that you were able to track your progress of doing the right thing. Back in the day I remember when green design was just called good design, now it is green design. I don't exactly know what that means. We won the Springs Preserve master plan and then we won the parking and reservoirs and then the main entry to it and 11 then we won the Desert Living Center and all the gardens. We then were asked to be the master coordinator, even though we didn't design the Origen building or the gift shop. We were asked to coordinate that work to make sure it fit into the strategy and that we were able to get a LEED Platinum rating on the whole campus, which we did. In fact, our Desert Living Center brought all of the projects over, with the points. That took about ten years. We are very proud of that. We still have pictures of it up. C: What about the museum? We did not do the museum. That came in after the Springs Preserve project was done. Then the governor funded the museum there to get them out of Lorenzi Park. We went after it but we didn't win. I don't remember who designed it. I think it might be Paul Steelman's firm [Steelman Partners]. S: Is that the one that you consider the crown in your portfolio? I think it was the crown at the time. We just finished the Visitor's Center up at Mount Charleston. It is called Spring Mountain Visitor's Gateway. That, in my opinion, took all our learning from the Springs Preserve and put it into an even better execution. It is probably going to get more visitation and do more for people than the Springs Preserve ever could do. S: What lessons did you take from Springs Preserve to that one? We learned a lot. Springs Preserve was the notion of building set in landscape, not building on landscape. We also learned at the Springs Preserve, especially the Desert Living Center, it was about being of the desert, not just in the desert. That is what we talked about and we learned that and interpretative planning and educational planning within buildings. We took all that to the Spring Mountains project. The Spring Mountains 12 project, the entire site became a tour. The entire site became an educational opportunity while we did a restorative landscape, while we did a small visitors center and an educational building and we worked with the Paiute tribes out there because Mount Charleston is so special to them. Our site is right across from the slot canyon that the Paiute emerged from the Earth, so it is their mother. We worked closely with them to make sure the work was done right. S: Did they play a part in the Springs Preserve? No, they did not. Not to my knowledge. We had a working group of all seven tribes of the Paiute nation. S: For Spring Mountains? Yes, for Spring Mountains. I don't believe we had anything like that at the Springs Preserve. C: Is there anyone you met that you think should be interviewed from those seven tribes. Yes, I think there were a bunch of them. Richard Arnold, he was very active. They taught us a lot. I remember when we told them that we were going to do a real sustainable project and they would look at us and say, "What are you talking about?" It was like a foreign word. To them it just was. My ex-partner Ray ran that project and I remember coming back from a meeting and he said, "There are certain stories they can tell us and there are certain stories they can't or won't tell us, and there are certain stories that can be only sung in their native tongue. We can't learn those, but we want to make sure those stories, somehow get captured." So anytime we would design something that working group would approve it and make sure that we weren't trite, we were real with it. We did 13 a seven stones plaza for them out there where it brings all seven tribes together as one. They approved that. They were instrumental. In this working group we worked with a gentleman from Portland State University named Jeremy Spoon, who is an anthropologist specialist in Paiutes and he helped coordinate that. There were some rough times anytime you try to engage all these cultures, and we were probably on a different time frame than they were. But the Forest Service was wonderful to work with. On that site we also ended up doing the memorial for the Silent Heroes of the Cold War [National Memorial], so that is on the site up there as well. You should go up there. It is maybe a 30-minute drive, it is not very far. S: Is it at Kyle Canyon? The lower side, before you get to the hotel. Right when you get to the roundabout the entrance is off of the roundabout. We are really proud of that work and we are doing other things now that we are proud of too, but that is built and done. S: When did it open? 2015. It is a great project. S: How long did that take you? We had a five-year contract. It took all five years from conception through construction. We may have had a little lag in the middle somewhere with funding. I think we had a six- or eight-month stoppage, but it went good. S: Who brought in the tribes and the tribal leaders? Was that the Forest Service? I think it was a combination of things. The Forest Service had been studying this property for a long time. They did so many different studies. They had landscape studies, they had species studies, and they had flora and fauna studies. I think along the way they had some 14 connection to the Paiutes. I don't know who initiated it. I know when we brought it all together we brought in all these different consultants and it was suggested that we bring in Jeremy because he could help us connect the Paiutes to the whole story. We had interpretive planners, we had landscape architects, and we had a huge team on that project. We worked with the Biomimicry Guild. We worked with Regenesis, who helped us think about the genesis of place, and we also had a strong connection to another group, I think it is called Biohabitats, with water reuse strategies and nature systems. We had worked with them on the Springs Preserve as well. We actually had the same interpretative planner that we had out at Springs Preserve and we had the same exhibit fabricator. We did all the exhibits and built the exhibits under our contract. S: Who was the exhibit fabricator? It was called Pacific Studio. And the interpretative planner and interpretative exhibitor was AldrichPears Associates out of Vancouver. Pacific Studio is from Seattle. They are one of the best in the business. C: Your work is so different from everyone else's. We decided somewhere in the late '90s we set forth this mission to be this kind of company and we decided that we were not going to work for developers because we didn't feel like we wanted to be just a line item on their pro forma because we could never bring the real value that we have to a developer client. If everyone jumped out, we would have certainly worked with them but it wasn't our best fit. We found our best niche in the public sector. The clients that we wanted and the clients that we worked with seemed to care more. We also started doing a lot of religious work, mainly for the 15 Catholic Diocese [The Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Vegas], but it fits our mode in terms of having higher meaning. S: Tell us about that work. We had never done a Catholic facility before. I had been trying because I had always wanted to do a church. I got this phone call from the structural engineer and he said, "Come with me and we are going to go down and look at the old Vegas Village where Catholic Charities is. They are having some problems and they want to see if we can renovate it." This is 1996. S: Is this your Vegas Village that you had worked on? Yes. This structural engineer, Ron Bennett, and I went down there and we went and toured the facility. We went on the second floor where they had all these guys sleeping up in the rafters. They had these rafters and they were maybe this far above my head and that is where they hung all their clothes. You could look up and see sky through the roof. Ron Bennett said, "We are going to have a conversation but we are going to have a conversation outside. We are not staying in here." We went outside. We said, "One, your diaphragm is ruined on the roof, so it is not stable if we had any seismic or any wind, and two, the bottom cords of your trusses, which are supposed to be in tension, you are pulling them down with all this stuff you are hanging on them. You are going to pull this roof down." They said, "What should we do?" I said, "I don't think this building is worth saving, but what you ought to do is to hire us to do a master plan. Let's get in and find out what you really need on this site, what you need to do a good job serving the population." I had been very active in the homeless community already. In 1987 or 1988 I was on Mayor Lurie's task force for homelessness and when I was the president of AIA in 1989 I 16 put together a program called Search for Shelter, which we ran and combined it with UNLV's School of Architecture. We brought in UNLV Architecture students and we paired them with an architect from AIA and we had them design a homeless shelter on a site at Owens and Main [Street]. I was really active in this and trying to figure it out. I had started my own non-profit with a guy named Brady Exber, which owned the Las Vegas Club, who was the son of Mel Exber. [Colloquy not transcribed.] It was Brady and Karl Rowe, an independent consultant, and Pam and Jim Hammer who were developers, and then Brady and myself. We ended up getting Sherman Frederick, who was high up in the RJ. We had this group and we were going to build housing for the homeless without taking any government money. We were going to do it on the private side and after two and a half years we figured out it couldn't be done. There are just not enough people who would give money or there weren't enough people that cared about homeless people to give money. I knew all these people which is why I think I got called for the Catholic Charities. We did a master plan for Catholic Charities and then helped them get that thing built over three to five years. We got a piece here and a piece there and eventually they got a big Don Reynolds grant and finished the project. In the meantime they were going to do business with a group called Help U.S.A. They are from New York and they build housing for veterans and transitional housing. I got connected to them and I ended up becoming the president of Help Las Vegas, which is not the same as Help Southern Nevada. It was a big problem for us branding wise. We did 250 units when I was president. We did the 140 units at Catholic Charities site. C: When you say units, what do you mean? Housing units. 17 C: A house? No, single room occupancy, small apartments.