Studio City : Revitalization: Santa Ana is hoping that a planned artists colony in a depressed area downtown will spur commercial growth.

For now, the buildings that line 2nd Street sit mostly vacant, their pillars and grillwork testament to a grander epoch in downtown’s history.

But the elaborate architecture of the Santora Building, the Grand Central Building and the Old City Hall, among others, may soon teem with new life: a fledgling Artists Village with galleries, Bohemian-style cafes and studios where artists would work and live.

To city officials, who have climbed on board the project, the village promises revitalization of a depressed stretch that will spur commercial growth and feed off the influx of potential consumers the new federal courthouse is expected to bring to the area.

To county artists who have long nurtured the vision, the village will bring them out of isolation, sparking new collaborations. And Santa Ana--gritty, diverse and rich in history--provides a perfect laboratory for the new colony, they say.

“When the unexpected rub together, then you get new things. You get sparks. Ideas are born. People start cooperating,” said Don Cribb, president of the Santa Ana Council of Arts & Culture and the visionary behind the artists community. “I hope it draws disparity together. To me it’s a crucible.”

Unresolved issues remain: While Santa Ana city officials are taking steps to ensure the plan moves forward, they concede that the financing remains up in the air for certain projects key to its success. And some Latino artists who only recently heard about the plans for an artists community question why their opinions have not yet been sought.

But the overall response from many touched by the project is a buzz of excitement--an incredulous belief that a creative heart for Orange County’s emerging artists is now seriously in the making and may get underway by early next year.

“This is happening in Santa Ana! It’s not happening in Irvine. It’s not happening in Newport Beach,” said Randy Au, a ceramic artist who heads the Santa Ana Studio Artists Assn., launched four years ago as the vehicle to make the live-work concept a reality in the city.

“Instead of going next door to borrow a cup of sugar, you’re going to go over to borrow a tube of cadmium paint. Hopefully, people who paint will collaborate with people in theater or in music.”

The project should succeed, Au said, because almost everything an artist could want is already nearby: a library, City Hall, restaurants and stores lining bustling 4th Street, coin-operated laundries, and even a multicultural bookstore.

Slapped against the window of Au’s current studio near the train station in an industrial stretch of Santa Ana is a poster teasing the times to come and comparing Santa Ana to New York’s art scene.

“SoHo? So What,” it reads in playful letters designed by Santa Ana advertising consultant Joe Duffy to look raw and home-grown. “We have grungy work space in drafty old buildings right here in Santa Ana. What we don’t have are bone-chilling winters. Or a butt-numbing 2,400-mile drive to get here. Need more reasons to move in?”

Members of a planning committee, including Cribb, Au, architect Ernie Vasquez and city staff and council members, have traveled to Portland, Los Angeles and San Diego to check out other artist colonies. A market study commissioned by the city and completed in February stamped the project “viable.”

The village “anchor”--the Orange County Center for Contemporary Arts--is fixing up its new home at Sycamore and 2nd streets recently purchased with financial help from the city. The building is undergoing extensive renovations that should be completed for an opening by next January, said Mike McGee, president of the OCCCA board and the art gallery director at Cal State Fullerton.

Cal State Fullerton is submitting a proposal to convert one building in the area into studio and living space for graduate art students and is considering a satellite gallery there and offering extended education courses, McGee said.

And the city is in the process of buying the old Handlebar Saloon, another historic building along the 2nd Street Walkway, blocked to traffic for more than a decade, for an as-yet-undecided use.

City officials hope that once the anchor tenants get up and running, the project will snowball.

“If we make these key investments, we should be able to step back and enjoy the fruits of our labor,” said Cynthia Nelson, executive director of Santa Ana’s Community Development Agency. “We’re prepared to make commitments that will be the catalyst to get the project off the ground.”

But Nelson said it was unclear how the Cal State Fullerton project would be funded. “We need to step back and figure out what we can afford to do first,” she said. “We have no money. They have no money.

“We can do things that don’t cost money,” she added, such as modify zoning in the area to make it specific for live-work space, which the city expects to do by July.

The persistent force and vision behind the project is Cribb.

When Cribb moved back to Santa Ana from Los Angeles after a long break, he said he felt restless, energized by the spontaneous Los Angeles art scene. He started searching for Santa Ana’s culture and, much to his surprise, found that there was plenty.

At least four theater and dance troupes make the city their home, and Cribb’s Santa Ana Council of Arts & Culture, founded in 1988, represents two dozen artistic organizations. The idea for a center with studios where artists could afford to live and work came from local artists, and Cribb became their voice, promoting the cause to city officials until they were sold on it.

“Laguna Beach has all but given up the opportunity to be a creative center. Land is too valuable. There is no spirit of creativity,” he said.

“Santa Ana doesn’t identify itself with one small slice-of-life experience. It has everything. You have all kinds of people from different ethnic backgrounds, rich and poor, from different educational levels. Orange County is giving birth to its first true city.”

A live-work space with affordable rent has been a dream for artist Jeffrey Frisch, who now lives in a cramped one-bedroom Irvine condominium filled with his multimedia sculptures, pieced together with the discarded objects of urban life. Frisch ponders the Santa Ana village and the years he has waited for it.

“I spent so many years a while back as an artist isolated. Here there’s a whole sense of a community developing,” said Frisch, director of the Orange County Center for Contemporary Arts and one of the village’s biggest fans and promoters. “My only frustration is that it’s not happening faster. It’s the kid in me coming out. I want it now.”

Roy Jimenez, executive producer of the recently formed Tropical Music Channel, is also eager to be part of the new colony.

On the second floor of the Santora Building, a splendor of baroque architecture with iron grillwork and curved glass, Jimenez paces the grandiose lobby explaining his vision.

He is still negotiating with city officials about where he will place his offices. But he plans to participate in the village by bringing to it a piece of the information superhighway: a high-definition television broadcast channel featuring the music of more than 40 Caribbean island nations, and another for Christian music.

“Fiber-optics--what a new medium for expression,” said Jimenez, who sports wild black curls and a pair of sneakers he painted in green, yellow and red. “We are not going to leave the artists village area!”

Jimenez, who learned of the artists village after he decided to move downtown, wants to augment it with even bigger plans of his own. On the wall of one office he has occupied since November is a drawing of a four-story Inter-American Cultural Center, complete with two- and three-story reliefs of Aztec, Inca and Mayan figures that would be commissioned to local artists.

The project is not without skeptics, however.

Some of the county’s Latino artists are angry that they have largely been left out of the planning stages. The market study commissioned by the city polled two focus groups of artists, and Rosa M. Huerta-Williamson, chairwoman of OCCCA’s exhibitions committee, says none were Latino.

“How can we ever get a true picture of the community’s needs if the community isn’t included? Santa Ana is 65% Mexican. How could there not be one damn Mexican that was included in that?” she said. “I think the artists village will be a good thing for the county if they include Mexicans, because the Mexican people need a cultural center.”

Organizers say that in the future they want to have an open door to anyone who wants to get involved in the colony.

“The purpose of this whole project is to bring the whole community together, not to be divisive,” Frisch said. “I wouldn’t put a nickel’s worth of energy into it if I thought it was going in that direction.”

Sergio O’Cadiz, an Orange artist who designs murals, facades and reliefs to accompany architectural projects, said he learned of the village only recently and was disappointed that more Latino artists weren’t initially included. Still, he is eager to contribute.

“I hope this is a good possibility,” he said. “We are a community of creative people who don’t have a place to get together.”