Fleeing Rising Rents : Lofty Ideals Keep Artists on the Move

Atwater Village is not exactly a bohemian neighborhood. Certainly Laurence Dreiband didn’t think so when he leased an old movie theater on the main drag and converted it to a studio three years ago. He expected to work on his galactic-theme paintings in isolation from the city’s artistic circles.

This appeared to be a logical deduction. Atwater is a sleepy section of Los Angeles just south of the Glendale border, where an old-fashioned striped pole revolves outside the barbershop and the locals stop by the Dutch bakery for coffee and Eikelblaadjes as they have for decades. The side streets are lined with modest bungalows, miniature lawns in front, clotheslines and bird baths in the back.

Then painter John Millei phoned to say he had walked down the alley and noticed Dreiband’s name on the back door. “I didn’t know you were here, too,” Millei said. Soon after, Dreiband spotted conceptualist Tim Ebner and painter Judie Bamber in a restaurant up the street. “I didn’t know you were here, too ,” Dreiband said.

‘Village of the Damned’

At least a dozen artists of local repute have moved into the area, braving their friends’ jokes about “Atwater: Village of the Damned” and jibes about the need for “No Parking” signs on their lawns.

That a fledgling art colony of sorts could surface in Atwater, of all places, is an indication of an occupational hazard. Sometimes it seems as though the artist’s endless quest is not so much for universal truth as it is for cheap space and light.

These days, the search is taking full-time artists to some decidedly unhip locations. Atwater is just one. In the last three or four years, warehouses have been converted into studios in Glendale, Vernon and East Los Angeles. Sculptures take form on the decks of Highland Park and in the industrial district of Elysian Valley near the Los Angeles River and Dodger Stadium. Other artists have traveled even further, to Sepulveda and Tujunga in the San Fernando Valley.

Displaced by Yuppies

Once such commodities were found in Venice, but rents skyrocketed when the yuppies moved in. Redevelopment uprooted a cluster of Pasadena artists. Then in the 1970s artists flocked downtown, but over the last five years prices for the old brick lofts have risen from a level that painters and sculptors can afford to the sphere of fashion designers and architects.

The latest round of migrations has some artists worrying that they are too far from Westside art dealers and collectors and too dispersed from each other. But their main fear is the same one they always have had: They scrutinize the streets of their new communities for signs of nascent trendiness, signaling another rise in costs, another exodus.

“It’s an age-old problem,” said Adolfo V. Nodal, general manager of the city’s Cultural Affairs Department. “The arts community moves into an area that’s kind of downtrodden. They fix it. They’ve got a lot of energy and activity. And then they get priced out.”

The lack of affordable housing and studio space, Nodal said, was one of two issues raised at every one of about 25 meetings held throughout the city to discuss how to spend the new Los Angeles endowment for the arts, which is expected to generate millions of dollars each year. The other was health insurance.

Los Angeles has had an artists-in-residence ordinance since 1981 allowing development of live-in studios under a building code less stringent than that for apartments. But because those are technically commercial spaces, there is no rent-control provision. And anyone who spends $20.16 for an art retailer’s license can qualify as a tenant.

Consequently building owners can find high-income residents to pay $1,000 a month or more for spaces that commanded $75 or so 10 years ago.

“They aren’t putting real artists in their buildings,” said Joy Silverman, executive director of downtown’s Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. “They’re commercial photographers who have Porsches and Jaguars.” More than one downtown warehouse resident, she said with disdain, “is just a lawyer who lives in a loft.”

City records show 105 artists-in-residence buildings, mostly downtown, with five to 10 lofts in each. Owners and managers of several of them estimated that about half their tenants work in the fine arts.

In recent years, the Community Redevelopment Agency has spent $100,000 on a mixed-use project that includes four lofts and $1.2 million on a subsidized 45-unit building where prospective residents must prove to the developers that they are seriously committed to the fine arts.

The agency would also like to see studios in vacant upper floors along Broadway and Spring Street. But there is just no more money for artists’ projects in the foreseeable future, “nothing in the hopper,” said Bill Jones, the agency’s director of rehabilitation.

“It’s a shame,” said Lee Ramer, arts deputy to Councilman Joel Wachs. “It’s almost like we’re letting our artists down.”

Michael John Pittas, a former National Endowment for the Arts official living in Los Angeles, agrees. Letting artists scatter about the city inhibits their art, he believes.

“I think there is a certain synergy, a certain chemistry, that comes about by virtue of the presence of many art forms in a concentrated area,” said Pittas, who also served as New York City’s director of comprehensive planning. “That’s how some of the most productive and creative work goes on.”

The artists have more prosaic concerns.

“Especially when you’re just starting out, art dealers don’t know you, they’re forming a judgment,” said painter Linda Burnham. “When they hear you’re out in Glendale or somewhere, they wonder what they’re going to get out of it if they go all the way out there to take a look. It’s away from the rounds.”

She was so horrified when she realized that her converted warehouse is in the 818 area code that she made special arrangements for a 213 telephone.

Although city arts officials want to interrupt the cycle that keeps artists moving on, they are not sure how to do it. Their counterparts elsewhere are similarly stymied.

In Chicago, for instance, space costs about six times as much in River North, northwest of the Loop, as it did before artists colonized the neighborhood about 10 years ago, said Nick Rebkin, deputy commissioner of the city’s cultural affairs department. Galleries are now concentrated there, but studios have been replaced by expensive boutiques.

The next stops were Bucktown, an industrial area to the north, and Pilsen, a traditionally Slovak section on the Near South Side that also has a large Latino population. “Bucktown began to be trendy about three years ago and Pilsen is starting to get a little trendy now,” Rebkin said.

In New York, prospective residents in the SoHo and NoHo warehouse districts theoretically must prove to a six-member peer panel that they are actively pursuing careers in the fine arts. The city has certified 6,000 artists. But somehow at least 2,000 non-artists got in.

Jim Kelly, director of real estate services for New York City’s Cultural Affairs Department, attributes the rise in prices there to such illegal--and mostly affluent--residents. Even if the city does eventually find and evict non-artists, SoHo’s prices “have gone up beyond the point where artists can afford to go there,” Kelly said.

So artists are leaving Manhattan for Long Island City, Brooklyn, the Bronx and New Jersey. If gentrification follows, they are likely to have to leave again.

“From the city’s point of view, arts activity leads to the enhancement of the community and it’s not a bad thing to have that happening all over,” Kelly said.

Some critics also say artists do not deserve to be favored over other low-income people.

Jon Peterson, a painter who owns three downtown Los Angeles loft buildings, puts it this way: “Most of the artists I know have college degrees and can support themselves if they want to, but they choose to be artists. They have the ability to earn money. I think there are probably people who are a lot more needy, as a group.”

It was illegal to live in downtown’s warehouses when Peterson arrived in 1976. Only a few dozen struggling artists were there, literally camping out inside cavernous brick shells. Like the others, Peterson improved his space himself. He paid a monthly fee of three cents per square foot for his 2,500-square-foot space.

Authorized, renovated lofts now fetch as much as 60 and 70 cents per square foot. The main reason that owners and managers give for such steep increases is the high bills they have been forced to pay to shore up the turn-of-the-century brick buildings against earthquakes. Others needed to repair damage from the 1987 Whittier earthquake.

Still others are turning away from the loft business altogether, further restricting artists’ options. After Sue Iwasaki pondered the cost of replacing walls that fell during the quake, “it was demolition time,” she said. Her four-story building is now a pile of bricks and lumber, destined to become a parking lot near the corner of 2nd and Los Angeles streets. Eight of the 10 departing tenants had to leave the downtown area.

Likewise, Maggie Salenger, who manages five artists’ buildings downtown, is planning to lease for industrial use a 100,000-square-foot building she recently bought. “We can get 55 and 60 cents for ground floor space,” she said. “We’d get only 5 cents more for artists’ space and spend hundreds of thousands for improvements.”

Some artists, determined to tough it out downtown, have taken roommates. But they worry about the future. “I am sharing and it’s a lot,” said Peter Zecher, who lives on Traction Street. “Can I afford it after three years or two years? I don’t know.”

Alexis Moore, who creates multimedia installations, and painter Peter Wirth were Zecher’s neighbors until January. When the rent for their 3,200-square-foot loft went from $900 to more than $1,500, they bailed out. They live now in a 1,000-square-foot house in Highland Park. “My work is getting smaller,” Moore said.

In Atwater, Judie Bamber paints in the 300-square-foot garage of the house she has shared with Tim Ebner since October.

Under incandescent lights and long fluorescent strips, she hangs her finished canvases: minutely detailed depictions of such objects as a marble on a field of brown (called “If You Don’t Know, I’m Not Going to Tell You”) or a cervical cap against a green backdrop (titled “Closeness Is Easier When You’re Far Away”).

When the two moved in together--Ebner from Hollywood and Bamber from Silver Lake--the downtown area was briefly considered and quickly rejected. For the cost of a loft, they could find a place in Atwater that would provide the ultimate protection: they decided not to rent, but to buy.

Crime Rate Lower

Bypassing downtown has its advantages, they said. The crime rate, for one, seems much lower.

And Atwater has its own quirky charms: the footbridge over the Los Angeles River, the row of riverside drain caps painted to resemble cats’ faces and with a mouse at the end, the block of houses with Egyptian-style windows and medieval-castle turrets.

Many of the neighbors are only dimly aware of the arts activity in their midst.

“I haven’t heard any complaints,” said Ed Waite, a 34-year resident who heads the Atwater Village Homeowners Assn. Indeed, some of the merchants are ecstatic.

“Something would happen to change this area, anyway,” said Leona Gardner of Arabesque Photography. “But artists do a little to shade the direction of change. When they move in, they fix a place up. We’ll like the design quality, the type of places they frequent.”

It is getting harder already for newcomers to gain a foothold. Atwater is being discovered. The area is a hot topic at openings and exhibitions. A sign that hangs near the local driving school announces: “Studios. High-ceiling work space for lease.”

“This is how downtown started,” Ebner said, “with a couple of dozen people.”

Eight months ago, a chic Italian restaurant opened, complete with designer pizzas and ponytailed waiters. A few months earlier, the massive brick Sonntag’s Plumbing building had come on the market. “A lot of artists looked at that building,” said Linda Burnham, who sent friends over to check it out. “But the price was just too high.”

A graphic design firm moved in instead.