Advancing a Legacy of Opportunity at Lulu’s Place

Just north of Los Angeles International Airport, steel frames and rising structures signal what will soon become one of the region’s most significant new community assets: Lulu’s Place. Built on 34 acres, the academic, athletic and wellness campus is designed to serve more than 10,000 students each year through free or low-cost programs, creating new access points for learning and recreation in some of the city’s most under-resourced neighborhoods. 

The vision for the campus is rooted in the life and values of Carol “Lulu” Kimmelman. A former South Los Angeles teacher and member of the 1983 USC championship tennis team, she died in 2017 after battling ovarian cancer. Her husband, Doug Kimmelman, and their four children sought a way to honor her commitment to creating opportunities for children who often go overlooked.

A few hundred feet from where the Welcome Center is being built, DPR’s team built an onsite prefabricated steel panel yard, a factory-style setup that turns design decisions into install-ready product. Crews build each panel from a detailed ticket, assembling the frame, installing the blocking and checking all dimensions so openings and edges match the layout.

“Prefabrication is time-consuming at the beginning. It takes planning, but once you get it going, it’s a beautiful thing,” said General Foreman Carlos Rubi. “We even designed a custom blocking piece that slides in and cuts about 70% of the labor on thousands of locations.”

That panel yard works because the project is structured for self-perform and real time decisions.

“We have a really strong team; we’re self-performing a lot of the trades. Basically, every trade we self-perform in Southern California, we have on this project,” said Project Executive Jon Holzer. “We all cohabitate in this trailer right behind us. Something comes up, communication is easy. Everybody’s together here. It gives us a lot of schedule certainty and budget control.” 

Holzer said virtual design and construction (VDC) helps the team prevent clashes before steel and walls go up, coordinating miles of underground utilities, along with the foundations for lighting and fencing across the courts and site.

That same focus on schedule certainty shows up in the logistics behind the scenes: OES Equipment served as a trusted partner for access equipment, PPE, consumables and the construction supplies required to keep installation work progressing without interruptions.

The structural systems reflect choices made with the owner. The TGR Learning Lab is conventional steel with a sloped steel auditorium. The Welcome Center shifted from a two-story steel concept to a one-story structural frame to meet budget and schedule requirements, which opened the door to DPR’s self-perform panelization approach.

 “You don’t see a lot of cold formed structural frame projects in Type I construction,” said Senior Superintendent Jon Fraker. “When the Welcome Center became a single-story, it made sense to move to a different system and bring in our self-perform team for the cold formed metal framing system.”

Co‑location, SPW and the panel yard give the team immediate feedback and control, while VDC modeling aligns utilities, lighting and fencing with building work. The result is predictable progress: panels set in sequence, steel where it’s needed and site utilities complete ahead of athletic courts.

The campus will include the TGR Learning Lab, as well as 24 tennis courts, a Welcome Center, soccer fields, a multipurpose field, parks and gathering spaces. Those elements came directly from five years of listening sessions with families, teachers and local organizations who helped identify what the surrounding neighborhoods needed most.

“These things take a long time, but they're worth doing,” said Karina Hamilton, Lulu’s Place board member. “We wanted this campus to reflect the spirit of Carol Kimmelman from the beginning. She was deeply committed to uplifting the community and to helping kids thrive.”

Access was a central consideration. Hamilton said that in a one-mile radius of the site, there are roughly 2,000 students, and within a five-mile radius, around 25,000. The proximity was a deciding factor when selecting the current location, as students can reach the campus by walking or biking. That simple fact, the difference between attending a program or staying home, adds weight to the project’s placement north of LAX on land that sat empty for years.

“All kids are deserving of top-quality facilities,” said Hamilton. “We felt like we could create something really special here.”

Holzer believes that clarity of purpose influenced the team’s approach to the work.

“It’s really a project of a lifetime,” Holzer said. “You rarely get to give back like this to the community.”

The impact of the project is clear from the moment new workers step onto the site.

“They get excited right away when they understand what this is all about,” Fraker said. 

Months into construction, Fraker moves between the TGR Learning Lab, Welcome Center and athletic facilities, tracking progress and lining up next steps with the crews.

“It’s one of the most exciting things about this project for me, to do something that gives back to the community,” he said.

The work now continues building by building and field by field, moving the campus toward the day it can open to the communities it was designed to serve. The project is expected to be completed in 2027.