Town Embraces Outdoor Art to Soften Its Industrial Image : Sculptures: Claremont artist’s “Undone Abstraction” sits in Santa Fe Springs park.

A year ago, Santa Fe Springs had more hazardous waste sites than public artworks. There wasn’t 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.

Last Tuesday, city officials dedicated “Undone Abstraction” by Claremont artist James Mitchell in a half-acre park on Pioneer Boulevard near Alburtis Avenue. The six-foot high, steel-slab sculpture painted red and black 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, 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 and its restored Victorian gardens.

Within the past year, the city has also opened to the public the Clarke estate, a long-forgotten 8,000-square-foot, pre-1920 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.

But as the crude reserves dwindled, the nine-square-mile city, incorporated in 1957, has found itself with plenty of Los Angeles county 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 generated $60 million of development annually for the past five years.

Although there was no artist behind it, the landscape of heavy industry owns a beauty of its own, said Hammon. 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.”

Hammon said the city’s landscaped median strips and railway overpasses have long been a source of local pride. But Powell, the city manager, decided those enhancements weren’t 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 artworks since 1975. The rate now is about six a year.

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

The Los Angeles 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 spokeswoman 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 modern California art for his home and office.

He 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.

The developer, who said he long wanted to be an artist, contributed about $10,000 more to the artwork’s creation than the $14,000 required by the city.