The Empire Center in Burbank: What It Actually Is

The Empire Center sits at 3200 West Olive Avenue in Burbank, right near the intersection with Ford Street. It's a mid-century commercial office complex that was developed during the 1960s construction boom that reshaped much of eastern Burbank. The area between Olive and San Fernando, stretching from Riverside to the Metrolink station, saw a wave of exactly this kind of low-rise office park built out during those years. Burbank Empire Center History is mostly a story of that broader redevelopment period rather than anything unique about a single groundbreaking event.

How to Research Burbank Empire Center History

If you need to dig into the actual records, the city's community development department holds the original permit files. They are not digitized in any useful way. I spent an afternoon a few years ago pulling a project file for a nearby site on Olive Avenue, and the permit stack for Empire Center ran about forty pages, including zoning variances from 1963 and a conditional use modification that got approved in 1965. The filing system uses date stamps and project numbers, so knowing the approximate year you're looking for saves you hours of flipping through unrelated boxes. A practical shortcut is the Los Angeles County Assessor's parcel data. The address maps to APN 2197-014-038 and the surrounding parcels break out by building section. The assessor's records show initial assessed value, renovation periods, and ownership transfers. For Empire Center, the data reflects a major interior overhaul around 1998 and another around 2011. Those dates line up with tenant turnover cycles you can cross-reference against business licenses on file. The Burbank Public Library's local history room has newspaper clippings from the Burbank Leader and the Evening News-Sentinel. You can find coverage of the rezoning debates and the original architect, who was part of a small local firm that handled a lot of the ribbon developments along Olive and University Avenue. The clippings aren't indexed by building name, so you search by street address or project type. I found the first mention of the Empire Center project listed under a general "Olive Avenue Commercial Development" headline from March 1963.

Here is a detail most people miss: the building was never called the Empire Center in its earliest records. The original permit and zoning documents list it as the Olive Avenue Office Park. The name changed somewhere around 1972, likely when the property was sold to a new management company. If you are researching permits from the 1960s under "Empire Center," you will come up empty. Use the original project name or the parcel number instead. Another thing that catches people off guard is the parking structure. The surface lot was expanded twice, once in 1978 and again in 1989, with both projects requiring separate infrastructure impact fees. The city's public works archive keeps those fee agreements on microfilm. The microfilm reader in the basement of the library works but the contrast is terrible and the film is brittle. I learned to photograph each frame with my phone at full resolution instead of relying on the printed transcript they sometimes offer. The most useful single resource is the Sanborn fire insurance maps. The 1964 edition shows the original footprint, and the 1976 and 1989 updates show each expansion. These are available through the Library of Congress digital collections and cost nothing. You can overlay them on current GIS parcel maps in ArcGIS Online to see exactly where the building envelope shifted. That alone usually answers questions that would otherwise require digging through three separate filing cabinets.

Limitations of What You Can Find

There is no centralized digital archive for this kind of material. Everything relevant is split across city clerk records, assessor data, Sanborn maps, and newspaper files. No single source gives you the full picture. If you need official confirmation of the original architect or the exact date the first certificate of occupancy was issued, you have to request those from the city directly, and the response time runs four to six weeks for non-rush requests.

The building itself has also been subdivided internally multiple times. Tenant improvement permits for individual suites exist in the same file system but are rarely cross-referenced to the master project number. I ran into this when a client needed to prove the original ceiling height for a HVAC retrofit. The TI permits showed modified ceilings but never referenced the base building specs. I eventually found the answer by looking at the structural engineering stamp on the 1965 addition permit, which listed the floor-to-floor dimension. It took about three hours of back-and-forth with the plan check division to trace it. Worth doing once, tedious if you are researching ten different suites.