HUNTINGTON BEACH : Panel Gets $75,000 for Art Center

In the funky mix of architecture in this 81-year-old city’s downtown, the old Southern California Edison Co. building on Main Street is somewhat of a landmark.

In sharp contrast with the quaint bungalows and old-time storefronts, the SCE building at 538 Main St. is austerely modern. And now that structure is becoming even more distinctive. City government, which purchased the building in 1988, is converting it into a municipal Art Center.

The FHP Health Care company Monday night gave the City Council $75,000 toward the $900,000 estimated cost of renovating the SCE building. A major fund drive is under way to raise the rest of the renovation money. Plans are moving smoothly, city officials say, toward a spring, 1991, opening.

“A lot of people in this community are starving for art,” said Mayor Thomas J. Mays, during a City Council study session last week at the SCE building. Noting that many schools have eliminated art classes because of budget cuts, Mays said the Art Center will benefit students throughout the city.

Mays said the Art Center also will be a magnet for bringing people to the city’s redeveloped downtown. Massive reconstruction is already under way elsewhere along Main Street, and Mays said the “new, village concept” of the redeveloped downtown will make it a restful, pleasant place to shop and sightsee. The Art Center will enhance that aura, he said.

The Art Center and an adjoining new fountain and outdoor seating area, to be called Celebration Plaza, are the northern focal points of redevelopment on Main Street. Five blocks to the south, the city is planning to rebuild its most famous landmark, the pier, at Main and Pacific Coast Highway. Plans also call for a plaza at the shore end of the pier, with a modernistic surfing museum.

But the cultural hub of the redeveloped downtown will be the Art Center and the Main Street branch of the library, just across from the old SCE building.

Although it is Orange County’s third largest city, Huntington Beach has had no center for its fine arts. The city voted in July, 1988, to buy, for $758,000, the SCE building.

Naida Osline, director of the new Art Center, told the City Council last week that when the 11,000-square-foot building opens next year, it will have a range of innovative features.

“We won’t have a permanent display of art here, and we don’t want a permanent display,” she said. “Every eight weeks there will be something new. In addition to paintings, we’ll have contemporary art--videos, performing arts. . . . We intend to have exhibits that show that art is about ideas.”

Janice Atzen, regional public relations manager for FHP, explained that the company has “long been interested in the arts and has a long history of supporting them. This donation is the largest art gift ever from our regional office. At one time, we were thinking of having our own art gallery in our Huntington Beach senior center, but when we learned about the city starting up the gallery, we decided to be in concert with that direction.”

Architectural drawings call for three exhibition galleries, a classroom studies area and a multipurpose room.

Although it is vacant now, the building is occasionally used for gatherings and receptions. Councilman Don MacAllister told the city’s Allied Arts Board and the board of the fund-raising Huntington Beach Art Center Foundation that he hopes the boards will open the building to even more events before 1991.

“The more it’s used now, the more the public will know about it,” MacAllister said.