Inner-City Art Center Canvassing Downtown Area for a New Home : Education: The acclaimed school for poor children is closed after a nearby firm is found to be using toxic chemicals.

There was really no artful way to tell the little kids to pack up and get out.

So inspectors from the Los Angeles City Fire Department could only shake their heads and apologize the other day as they shut down a one-of-a-kind art center used by the city’s poorest children.

Officials were making a routine check of fire extinguishers at a converted garment district loft building that houses the 18-month-old Inner-City Arts program at 1202 E. Olympic Blvd. when they smelled a strange odor.

They followed their noses downstairs, where they discovered vats of acid and other chemicals being used at the Super Wash and Dye Co. to give new blue jeans a faded, “stone-washed” look.

The vats are next to one of the building’s fire exits, where they could splash or form toxic fumes in a fire or earthquake, officials told art center Director Bob Bates. Besides that, it is against the law for schoolchildren to congregate in a building where hazardous chemical processing occurs, they said. So Inner-City Arts would have to close.

“We’d always thought that Super Wash was just a Laundromat,” Bates said Friday as art teachers at the center hurriedly searched for a new home. “The firemen really felt bad about it. They were very sympathetic. But they said there’s a risk.”

Since opening its doors at the rambling, second-floor loft in 1989, the arts center has become a Skid Row showplace.

More than 4,300 children who live in downtown hotels and dingy MacArthur Park apartments have signed up to study painting, ceramics and music during free school-day and after-school programs taught by Bates and other artists.

The children created their own art gallery at the loft. And the huge room became the unofficial auditorium for nearby 9th Street Elementary School, a collection of prefabricated classrooms that lacks a meeting hall of its own.

The art center was launched by Beverly Hills real estate investor Irwin Jaeger, who put up $137,000 to lease the loft, refurbish it and stock it with art supplies. On Friday, he was on hand to start the search for a new location.

Jaeger said he hopes to find a 10,000-square-foot space in an area bounded by 7th and 12th streets and San Pedro Street and Central Avenue. Although four downtown-area elementary schools send pupils to the center, the new art center has to be within walking distance for children from 9th Street School.

This time, he said, school and fire officials will be asked to help check the new neighborhood in advance for chemicals or other hazards.

The jeans-dying plant was in business before the children moved in, Jaeger said. “It’s terrific that the Fire Department found out about the chemicals,” he said. “But we’ve really got a crisis on our hands.”

Ada Mermer, a retired Los Angeles school administrator who heads the nonprofit Inner-City Arts board of directors, said the center’s instructors are teaching painting and drawing at the children’s regular classrooms. But that is hardly the same as a visit to a bright, airy art studio where young imaginations can soar, she said.

The center’s young artists remained puzzled by their ouster.

“It’s very sad. We used to do a lot of good things there,” said 5th-grader Kathy Parra, 11. “We watched plays and the orchestra and did our Christmas pageant there. That’s where we had the 6th-grade graduation from DARE,” a police-run drug-resistance program.

Sixth-grader Noe Gutierrez, also 11, worried that he will never again make the tiny ceramic sculptures he has learned to create. “We ain’t going to be able to do more art,” Noe said. “It’s terrible.”