Monument Status Urged for Bakery Site : * Landmarks: Preservationists see the vacant Van de Kamp’s building as a ‘sitting duck’ for demolition.

The now-empty Van de Kamp’s Holland Dutch Bakery, with its unusual Dutch Renaissance facade, has been nominated as a city monument by members of the Los Angeles Conservancy, who fear the building is slated for demolition.

The bakery, which once employed about 500 people, was closed in October, 1990, after Van de Kamp’s filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy court protection.

Conservancy members are concerned that the owner, VDK Square Ltd., plans to tear down the 62-year-old building to make way for development.

“It’s obvious that something is going to happen to that property,” said conservancy volunteer John Miller, who prepared the application asking Los Angeles’ Cultural Heritage Commission to designate the bakery as a historic-cultural monument. “It’s a sitting duck.”

Such designation cannot prevent demolition. But if a building is declared a monument, the city can delay the work for up to a year while requiring the developer to complete an environmental review.

Miller said the bakery should be preserved because it is a remnant of what was once an important local business and is also a rare example of a Los Angeles industrial building with style.

The plant, at the corner of San Fernando Road and Fletcher Drive in Glassell Park, was built in 1930 to serve as the general headquarters and primary bakery site for Van de Kamp’s Holland Dutch Bakers, which had a chain of 100 shops in Southern California, Miller said.

The front of the three-story, blocklong facility is a white stucco and brick facade reminiscent of a row of 16th-Century Dutch townhouses. The facade has three Flemish gables with crow step “chimneys,” and the main entrance has beveled-glass doors with large pictures of windmills along a country road.

The work of architect J. Edwin Hopkins--who designed bakery plants around the world--the facade complemented Van de Kamp’s Dutch advertising theme, which extends to the packaging of its products, the windmill designs of its retail stores and the blue-and-white Dutch girl uniforms of its staff, the monument application says.

“This was the jewel in the crown,” Miller said of the building.

When the bakery shut down in 1990, Van de Kamp’s officials said they hoped to soon resume operations there. But company officials could not find financing to modernize the aging equipment, and, two months later, they filed for Chapter 7 liquidation, said David Poitras, a lawyer who represented the company during the proceedings.

Jim Galbraith, a limited partner in the group that now owns the property, said earlier this week that the owners have no firm plans for the location. He agreed that the building has a “wonderful facade” and said he hoped that “any developer would take advantage of it.”

But Galbraith acknowledged that the entire building could be demolished to make way for a new project.

Meanwhile, the Cultural Heritage Commission agreed Wednesday to consider the nomination. It will hold a public hearing within the next three months.