Image-Conscious Industry Town Unveils Second Public Artwork

A year ago, this city had more hazardous waste sites than public artworks. There was not a piece of art to be seen in the industrial city--unless you appreciate the stark outlines of oil derricks and massive storage tanks.

Now there are two sculptures--and counting.

On Tuesday, city officials dedicated “Undone Abstraction” by Claremont artist James Mitchell in a half-acre triangle of city park on Pioneer Boulevard east of Alburtis Avenue. The steel-slab sculpture, six feet high on a two-foot base, is the latest product of a year-old ordinance. It requires builders to donate an amount equal to 1% of their project cost toward public art for developments of at least $1 million.

The city’s first piece of public artwork, Utah artist Dennis Smith’s sculpture of a little girl reading, was dedicated about a month ago in front of the city library in the town center.

The public art ordinance symbolizes an ambitious exercise in image-changing for this town with only 15,000 residents, but more than 3,000 businesses, including two oil refineries and a pair of hazardous waste sites.

Two years ago, the city opened Heritage Park, a $4-million project. The 6.5-acre park contains the ruins of a 19th Century estate as well as its restored Victorian gardens, which in the 1880s put Santa Fe Springs on the map, city officials say. Also restored are a carriage barn, an English-style greenhouse and a windmill irrigation system.

Within the last year, the city also has opened to the public the Clarke estate, a long-forgotten 8,000-square-foot, turn-of-the-century mansion that the city bought and restored for $3.5 million.

The mansion’s original owners departed in the 1920s about the same time as the city’s ranching image, when geologists discovered what was then the sixth-largest known reserve of oil in the world, said Margaret Hammon, the city’s cultural-resource specialist.

The oil boom turned Santa Fe Springs into a dirty, sprawling, bustling, unincorporated company town surrounded by vast open spaces, where orange groves shared fields with oil rigs. But as the crude reserves dwindled, the nine-square-mile city, incorporated in 1957, has found itself with plenty of real estate to offer.

“The welcome mat is out,” City Manager Don Powell said of the city’s well-known pro-business stance, which has attracted $60 million in developments annually for the last five years. Most of the city is zoned for heavy industry, and the city typically puts approval of industrial projects on the fast track.

Although there was no artist behind it, the landscape of heavy industry owns a beauty of its own, said Hammon, who has master’s degrees in fine arts and public administration. On Carmenita Road below Imperial Highway, there remains a refinery on the east and dozens of huge storage tanks on the west side of the street. “At night, you should drive down that street,” she said. “It’s just beautiful. It’s an interesting, glorious sight to see all those tanks lit.”

In recent years, city officials and staff decided that local residents should benefit more directly from this commercial vitality. Hammon said the city’s landscaped median strips and railway overpasses have long been a source of local pride. But City Manager Powell decided those enhancements were not enough and circulated the public art ordinance idea, which he said is modeled after similar regulations in Brea, Norwalk and Paramount.

The program in Brea, another former oil town, has resulted in the creation of 91 works of art since 1975. The rate now is about six a year.

The works in Santa Fe Springs must reflect one or more of three historical periods: Mexican/Indian, turn-of-the-century ranching or industrial modern.

Although only two pieces of art have been created so far, the Santa Fe Springs project has outproduced, by two, a similar program in Los Angeles. There, the City Council approved its own version of the ordinance in November, 1988, but a concern over possible lawsuits from developers has delayed its start, said Jane Kolb, a spokesperson for the city’s Cultural Affairs Department.

No such legal challenge was forthcoming from Jeffery Potter, the 36-year-old president of Potter Development Corp. Potter paid for the latest sculpture so he could build his just-completed, office-warehouse structure.

Potter collects contemporary California art for his home and office. “It’s like a little museum,” he said of his Los Angeles corporate headquarters. “I never have enough art.”

For a city with about 175,000 fewer pieces of artwork than the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the match was perfect.

Potter could have placed the sculpture in front of his building, but agreed to the more accessible Pioneer Boulevard site, which is flanked by businesses on one side and a neighborhood of modest, boxy houses on the other. Potter, whose brief, prepared remarks at the ceremony Tuesday were partly drowned out by a parking 18-wheeler, said he hoped the traffic from both communities would enjoy the red and black painted sculpture. The developer, who said he long wanted to be an artist himself, contributed about $10,000 more to the artwork’s creation than the $14,000 the city required.

Artist Mitchell’s work consists of two rectangular boxes balanced at about 45-degree angles and connected by a circular joint. The 33-year-old Claremont artist, who has sold sculptures across the country, said in a later interview that his work represents an exercise in volume and space rather than message, but Mitchell noted a persistent theme in the labors of city officials.

“When you think of Santa Fe Springs, it’s always oil derricks, industrial factories and railroad yards,” he said. “They are trying to improve their image. The art program is one step in that direction.”

By 11:45 a.m. Tuesday, the dignitaries had departed, but their efforts clearly had the desired effect on local resident Rod Duarte, who attended the dedication.

The retired 74-year-old has lived in Santa Fe Springs for 38 years and remembers both the open fields and the heavy industry. “I’ve been all over the world,” said the Air Force veteran, “and I wouldn’t move out of here for anything. It is the best city to live in.”