Renovations at the Candy Factory : Tussle Over Loft Ordinance Fails to Sour Artists

Enter through a heavy fire door to a dusty, zigzagging corridor that leads to narrow stairs. Three flights up, past the cavernous opening for a freight elevator, the gray corridors open to an artists’ paradise.

This is the Candy Factory, a partly renovated warehouse in the no man’s land south of Market Street in downtown San Diego.

From the corner of 8th Avenue and K Street, it looks like just another industrial building. But inside there are clerestory windows, roof gardens, arched ceilings 18 feet high, polished maple floors, a theater and airy studio space for a small community of artists--16 young painters, designers, photographers, architects and dancers.

Just one month ago, the San Diego City Council approved an ordinance to encourage the creation of artists’ living and working space in old industrial buildings like this one.

Under the new regulations, city building codes are to be relaxed to allow for lofts for artists. Efforts such as this, the council said, should help revitalize downtown San Diego and help create a lively, 24-hour city--perhaps a local equivalent to New York’s bohemian SoHo district.

But the building that was the impetus for the new loft ordinance still has illegal lofts.

In September, citing major safety violations, the city fire marshal evicted the Candy Factory’s artists and closed the building. It is still closed.

If the building is ever to reopen as legal “live/work” space, its artistic tenants may have to make major structural changes, including ripping down the wide mezzanines they have constructed without permits to serve as bedrooms.

For the Candy Factory’s tenants, the irony is sharp: To comply with the city’s new loft ordinance that their quarters inspired, they may have to tear down their lofts.

The paradox is not lost on Linville Martin, a 41-year-old lawyer and “artists’ groupie” who is one of the building’s owners.

“It destroys the whole concept of the space. If you have a work/live space and tear out the live space, what do you have?” Martin asked bitterly as he took visitors on a tour of the building recently.

On Tuesday the City Council is scheduled to consider a city manager’s report on the Candy Factory. The report suggests two possible courses of action: require the mezzanines to be torn down to comply with earthquake safety codes. The alternative, according to the report, is to adopt an amendment to the building code that would give preferred status to loft conversion buildings, drafting more generous rules that could allow recently added mezzanines to stay.

City Manager Ray Blair recommended Thursday that the council ask the city attorney to draft such an amendment by April 9. As Blair’s memorandum described it, the amendment would allow a loft building to add mezzanines as long as its owner gives the city an engineering report showing that the building is no more susceptible to earthquake damage than before it was remodelled.

The proposed amendment was a compromise hammered out in a meeting between Martin, lawyer Stacey Sullivan (who is a co-owner of the building), Blair, Deputy City Manager Coleman Conrad and Building Inspection Director Gordon Murdoch.

Whether council members will like the idea of an amendment is not clear. But, when the loft ordinance was approved last month, council members ordered the city staff to reach a compromise with the Candy Factory that would make the lofts legal again.

If Blair’s recommendation is adopted, the worst of the Candy Factory’s problems could be over, Martin said Thursday. And after months of it being closed, maybe owners of San Diego’s largest loft building could start planning to reopen the place.

“I’m not sure,” Martin said, talking cheerfully about the Candy Factory’s prospects for the first time in weeks. “But it sounds awfully good.”

Until the compromise, two camps--poles apart--have debated the Candy Factory’s fate. On one side was Martin, his partners and his artist-tenants; on the other was the city staff, especially the city’s apparently immutable building inspection department.

Building inspection’s position was enunciated just one week earlier by R.L. Christopherson, the city’s principal structural engineer. If the artists were to be allowed to return, the Candy Factory’s owners must tear down their sleeping platforms, add fire exits and submit all structural changes for a detailed engineering check, Christopherson had said then.

“They have already made the addition of 1,200 square feet of mezzanine floors without a permit,” Christopherson had said, referring to the high carpeted sleeping platforms built inside five studios. “The building code says when you make an addition to a building, that addition has to comply with the code.”

The Showley Candy Factory, built in 1924, is an unreinforced masonry building. And as Christopherson saw it, the added platforms are essentially new floors supported by the older building, “which has no resistance to earthquake forces.”

Although the loft ordinance will permit some relaxation of building codes on a case-by-case basis, it “will not authorize disregarding structural requirements. It will never make sense to add floors to a building,” Christopherson had said then.

For the Candy Factory’s owners and tenants, such edicts from Christopherson and other top city staffers meant prohibitively expensive remodeling. Also, Martin argued, many of them made no sense.

Martin bought the 30,000-square-foot building in 1982 for $860,000 with lawyer John McQuaide as a general partner and Sullivan as a limited partner. They had hoped to secure an additional $600,000 in city-issued bonds to transform the old factory into a coffee house, art gallery and theater, Martin said, but they could not raise the money for that plan.

After two years of no income from the building, the partners decided to do something with it to meet their $8,000-a-month mortgage payments. They decided to convert it to lofts and begin renting space.

A year ago, Martin and a friend with construction skills set to work. They sanded floors, installed bathrooms and kitchens, and built the wide mezzanines to expand the studios and give them bedrooms.

The construction was hard but exciting work, Martin said. “It was like building a house inside four walls . . . people would come, make a chalk line and say, ‘This is my space’ “--and then build dividing walls around their space.

Local artists learned of the project by word of mouth, joined the work crews and moved in. By May, all three floors were leased.

At no point did Martin or his colleagues seek a city permit for their work.

“We didn’t take out a permit because they wouldn’t have given us one. We were not zoned for that purpose,” Martin said. There was no loft ordinance then, so there was no point in seeking a permit “because it wasn’t legal to do what we were going to do,” he said.

(A city planner said, however, that Martin could have applied for and received residential permits for the work. “If he had wanted to meet the requirements, he could have,” the planner said.)

Martin said he figured they might get caught eventually, but expected that the city would just look at their work and let it stay.

On Sept. 26, they got caught.

Firemen from a nearby station noticed lights at night in the “vacant” factory. They demanded permission to inspect it, found major fire safety violations, and closed the building, evicting all 16 tenants.

A few on the lower two floors--a fabric designer and members of a theater troupe--have been allowed to return as long as they do not stay overnight. The rest--those whose studios underwent major improvements--are still barred from the building.

Since then, Martin and his tenants have been battling the city for the right to return to their lofts.

Some city officials say they have been sympathetic, although, until Thursday, Martin would have been hard-pressed to agree.

The building still lacks sufficient exits, including the required two exits from the second and third floor, said Chief William Tomes, an assistant fire marshal.

“But they have devised a plan to meet exiting requirements and to install a sprinkler system,” Tomes said, adding that the San Diego Fire Department is working with the tenants to try to bring their lofts into line with city building and safety codes.

“We don’t like this sort of thing,” Tomes said of the evictions. “We’re not out to be a Gestapo agent.”

Fire Capt. Dan Vejtasa, who regularly inspects historic buildings like the Candy Factory for compliance with safety regulations, added, “I don’t want to be an obstacle for them to occupy the building. I want to get this thing safe and open . . . I’m very sympathetic to the development of downtown, to the idea of making it a showcase.”

Vejtasa said he knew of three other warehouse buildings whose owners had delayed converting to artists’ lofts until they saw how the Candy Factory would fare.

Now, with the hope of compromise, “we can get this (warehouse movement) going, get this enthusiasm going,” Vejtasa said.

Until Thursday’s meeting, Martin and his tenants had never been able to satisfy the building department. Martin, in fact, has regarded city inspectors as “vindictive” in enforcing the codes. “Their attitude is: You don’t flaunt what you’ve done and expect to get away with it,” Martin said.

But late last week, as the Candy Factory’s future looked more hopeful, Martin’s bitterness had been replaced by ebullience.

“I was real happy at the end” of the meeting with Blair, Martin said. “As best I can tell, they adopted a standard that we had submitted. . . . And finally there’s some indication that the bureaucracy understands there’s a tremendous support for this kind of development.”

Blair’s proposed amendment to the building codes should allow the Candy Factory to reopen without ripping out the loft bedrooms. It should let their imaginative loft building survive.

To be sure, in order to reopen, Martin and his partners had to spend up to $30,000 on a sprinkler system and find more money for a structural analysis of the building. But late last week Martin vowed to find a way to do it.

He said he would start making the required changes “as soon as I possibly can--as soon as I can find a lender!” And if all goes well, Martin said, he hopes that the Candy Factory’s artists can legally return to their lofts in about two months.