Arts District, Los Angeles

Arts District
Neighborhood of Los Angeles
The Arts District
Arts District Location within Downtown Los Angeles
Coordinates:
Country	United States
State	California
County	County of Los Angeles
City	Los Angeles
Government
• City Council	José Huizar
• U.S. House	Xavier Becerra
Area code(s)	213

The Arts District lies on the eastern edge of Downtown Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, east of Little Tokyo and west of the Los Angeles River. The area of formerly abandoned industrial buildings has become a popular with young professionals in creative industries, including the TV and film industry. The city community planning boundaries are Alameda Street on the west, First Street on the north, the Los Angeles River to the east, and Violet Street on the south.

Early history

Vignes Street winds through the northeastern edge of the Arts District, parallel to and a couple of blocks west of the broad cement trench that memorializes the L.A. River. It is named for Jean-Louis Vignes, an aging adventurer and vintner who arrived in Los Angeles in 1831 by way of the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) and Bordeaux. He planted grapes on 104 acres moistened by the seasonal river, ocean mists and sparse rains. The hardy Cabernet and Sauvignon Blanc vines imported from the south of France thrived there and by 1849 El Aliso, as the Vignes vineyard was called, was the largest producer of wine in California The grapes are gone, but the San Antonio Winery just north of the community is a reminder of the area’s past.

By the late 19th century, oranges and grapefruit had replaced grapes as the principal agricultural products of the area and the property west of the riverbank was thick with citrus groves. The groves provided a location for filmmaker DW Griffith who filmed parts of Hollywood’s first feature film (In Old California) there in 1909. A single grapefruit tree remains, towering over the Japanese American Plaza off San Pedro Street and Azusa.

Somewhere near Third Street and Alameda, the area’s first commercial arts enterprise opened as a print shop that employed artists from around the region who vied to create the most intriguing labels for the boxes of citrus fruit shipped across the country.

The growing Santa Fe Freight Depot and warehouses created to serve the citrus industry’s shipping needs determined the area’s economic character for most of the next century and is responsible for the architectural flavor of the Arts District structures that have survived earthquakes, flood and fire. The single room hotels for rail workers to the northwest and the growth of Little Tokyo to the west and Chinatown to the north created a mix that was working class, cosmopolitan and a bit exotic in a manner similar to other West Coast urban centers.

By World War II, the citrus groves had been replaced by factories and the rail freight business was giving way to the trucking industry. The area had taken on an industrial character that was growing seedy around the edges. Over the next twenty years, many of the independent small manufacturers had either been absorbed by larger competitors, grown too big for their quarters – or simply failed—and an increasing number of vacant warehouse and former factory spaces contributed to a dingy, decaying urban environment typical of many aging big American cities of the era.

Art scene

In the mid-'70s, a handful of artists, including Dan Citron, Marc Kreisel, Maura Sheehan, Peter Zecher, Jon Peterson, Joel Bass, Stephen Seemayer, Sydney Wittenberg, Colleen Sterritt, Woods Davy, and others saw opportunity in the empty buildings and began colonizing the area, converting former industrial and commercial spaces into working studios, sometimes renting space for as little as a three cents a square foot and carving out living quarters. In 1981, the City of Los Angeles passed its "Artist in Residence" or "AIR" ordinance, which allowed residential use of formerly industrial and commercially zoned buildings; artists had long used such spaces as living quarters illegally, and the AIR law sought to bring this practice into legality and regulation.

Art galleries, cafes and performance venues opened as the live/work population grew. LA Artcore, founded in 1976 by Lydia Takeshita with the purpose of exhibiting local artists, exists today in locations at the Brewery Art Colony and in Little Tokyo. Al’s Bar, owned and operated by artist Marc Kreisel, on Hewitt just off Traction, in particular, served up punk rock from the late-70s through the beginning of the new century, introducing generations of Angelenos to dozens of emerging groups. The popular sound band "Party Boys" played the bars and art events.The Atomic Cafe on 1st Street at Alameda was an artists and musicians haunt in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), created exhibitions at its gallery space, first located on Broadway St in the late 70's, and later moving to Industrial Street in the 1980s. Several commercial art galleries, including Oranges and Sardines, Kirk DeGoyer Gallery, the Downtown Gallery, Vanguard Gallery, Exile, and Galleria by the Water opened in the late seventies, only to close in the early eighties. Cirrus Editions, the first gallery to open downtown, remains open.

During the '80s, Bedlam, created by artist Jim Fittipaldi, on 6th Street (and later, briefly, in the former premises of Al’s bar) was a salon with drawing workshops, art installations, theater, live music and a speakeasy. Dangerous Curve, on a dangerous curve of 4th Place between Mateo and Molino, put on exhibitions of artists whose work was often difficult to categorize. The Spanish Kitchen, a warehouse space on Third near Traction, was home to series of happenings, events, raves, installations and blowout parties. It now houses the 3rd Steakhouse and Lounge, an eatery that hosts community events and exhibitions of works by local artists. Cocola (later known as the 410 Boyd St. Bar and Grill), the legendary artists’ bar just west of the Arts District, lives on as Escondite.

In 1994, the nonprofit group Downtown Arts Development Association (DADA) was formed as a spinoff of LARABA by several artist members of the LARABA board of directors in order to provide a platform for the burgeoning downtown art scene; DADA hosted exhibits of more than 400 downtown artists in 1994–1998. After 1994, the heart of the Arts District was Bloom’s General Store, presided over by Joel Bloom, a veteran of Chicago’s Second City, who became an advocate for the community and who is remembered as The Arts District’s once and only unofficial mayor. Bloom died in 2007, but his memory is honored with a plaque from the city declaring the triangle around Third, Traction and Rose to be Joel Bloom Square. Cornerstone Theater, an enterprise that brings community theater to locations all around the country, still resides on Traction Avenue. Around the corner, on Hewitt at 4th Pl., the non-profit ArtShare offers lessons in art, dance, theater and music to urban youth and features a small theater often used by Padua Playwrights. Padua stages plays around the city, often in non-traditional environments, and hosts play-writing workshops.

Current status

The city community planning boundaries today are Alameda Street on the west, First Street on the north, the Los Angeles River to the east, and Violet Street on the south. Challenges facing the Arts District today include the loss of affordable live/work lofts, loss of artists, and loss of historically significant buildings. Community leaders are struggling to create balance amidst the economic issues brought about by gentrification and the need to preserve the character of the Arts District as a creative community that has made contributions to the cultural and economic well-being of Los Angeles for decades. In 2014, the average annual income for neighborhood residents was $120,000. While the initial decades saw the conversion to residential and commercial uses of low-slung warehouses and industrial spaces, downtown zoning laws could be rewritten to permit the heights of buildings to double, allowing up to 1,500 new residential units to be built in 8-story, one hundred feet (30 m) edifices.

The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), resides in the 110-year-old, quarter-mile-long (0.40 km) former Santa Fe Freight Depot that has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Across the street is a 438-unit apartment complex, "One Santa Fe," that opened in 2014 and was designed by Michael Maltzan Architecture (MMA).

The century-old Coca-Cola manufacturing plant at 4th and Merrick streets, just around the corner from the enormous Santa Fe railroad dock that houses SCI-Arc, is the latest in adaptive reuse into creative spaces. The three-story brick-clad building was described as the "headquarters for the company's Pacific Coast business and for its export trade in the Hawaiian Islands and Old Mexico" when it was built in 1915. The complex has been renamed Fourth & Traction after Traction Avenue.

The Arts District remains the home of artists, arts enterprises and many employed in L.A.s film and television industry. The Arts District has as many as 800 filming days a year. Filming activity has created challenges, as location productions make donations to community non-profits which are used to support local arts activities; a practice that has done much to preserve the peace between residents and production companies.

The artists George Herms, Paul McCarthy and Shepard Fairey, writer filmmaker Frank Miller, singer Meshell Ndegeocello, actors Forrest Whittaker Tim Robbins, and Jenna Fischer are among the many whose talents were nurtured here early in their careers. McCarthy opened a gallery (The Box) in the community. Early in the new century the internationally acclaimed Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein took up residence in the Arts District. When he was asked why he chose to live and work here he said, “because this is the image capital of the world.”

External links

• Media related to at Wikimedia Commons