A Little Slice of Oz : In an Area Marred by Gangs and Violence, the Arts Enclave of St. Elmo Village Has Been a Haven Where Kids Can Let Their Imaginations Take Wing. But Paying the Bills Has Become a Struggle.

St. Elmo Village is a kaleidoscope, Oz in Mid-City: multihued, mural cinder-block walls. Remnants recycled into sculptures scattered through the back yard. A fishpond created by children. Towering paintings haphazardly hung.

In a transitory neighborhood marred by gangs, drugs and occasional violence, the resident-artists in this one-acre enclave off La Brea Avenue and Venice Boulevard have maintained an immutable haven for a quarter century, where young people retreat from urban mayhem to explore their creative sides.

“The village gives people the feeling that they can do anything. The people here reach out and pull people in and really help them believe in themselves,” said Elisa Torres, 21, who attended painting workshops at St. Elmo since age 8 and now works as an assistant painting instructor. “This is the only place to go for some kids.”

St. Elmo’s is marked by a distinct architectural layout--10 turn-of-the-century wood-frame bungalows with a large garage and small courtyard in the back. The village is home to eight residents as well as community arts space, set amid a carpet of cacti, conifers and succulents in the predominantly black and Latino neighborhood on the 4800 block of St. Elmo Drive.

To followers and friends, the essence and spirit of St. Elmo Village is a passion to unleash people’s best through art, exemplified by its founders Rozzell and Roderick Sykes. They pushed the simple motto: “If you live in a shoe box, make it the best shoe box it can be.”

Said Diane Lazarus, a first-grade teacher at the neighboring Alta Loma School and an avid volunteer during the village’s first decade: “During some of the neighborhood’s hard times, when it was at its weakest points, the village was the one place that held strong and worked with neighbors to pull things together.”

In an ironic twist, the village has hit its weak point. The nonprofit organization is struggling to pay bills. A slow-moving major renovation project has left St. Elmo’s bungalows partially repaired and its once-muraled pathways torn up, hurting the village’s tourist and visitor possibilities. All of this as the village and its residents still cope with the Dec. 18 death of 64-year-old Rozzell Sykes.

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“It’s like an avalanche of things, and you try and do the best with what you can, even if you feel like your back is against the wall,” said Sykes’ nephew, Roderick, 48. “Right now we’re in a crisis. We need funding. If we go, the community has nothing.”

If the village does go, it would undo a history that began in the mid-1960s, when the uncle-nephew team and their families decided to spruce up the barren surroundings of the bungalows they rented. They painted anything that didn’t move or couldn’t be cleaned: walls, walkways, sidewalks, buildings. Over time other artists moved in and neighborhood youths were recruited to add their artistic touches. A few years and hundreds of paint cans later, St. Elmo Village erupted into an oasis of color and culture, spreading the love of art throughout the neighborhood by holding free workshops for anybody who was interested.

In 1971, after a yearlong battle to stop the owner from demolishing the buildings to construct an apartment complex on the property, the village was granted nonprofit status to purchase the one-acre tract. With community support, the Sykeses raised $10,000 for the down payment and paid the $60,000 mortgage from various grants and donations.

Since its birth, the village has operated with limited funding and a limited annual budget that now stands at $60,000, depending on the amount of funding received each year. It relies heavily on a pool of volunteers who have taught or assisted in various workshops, helped organize its annual arts festival and helped staff the office on occasion.

There is no full-time paid staff. Over the years, administrative duties have been handled by the Sykeses, family members and sometimes other resident-artists. Most of the responsibilities in the past 12 years have fallon on Roderick Sykes and his wife, Jacqueline Alexander-Sykes.

Sykes, a painter and sculptor, and his wife, a graphic artist, painter and photographer, do a lot of art outside the village as well. Many of their murals dot city walls and buildings--on Pico and Venice boulevards, along the Harbor Freeway, in South Los Angeles and Pasadena.

The couple and two village residents--Carlos Rittner and Michael Cortes--are working on four murals for an exhibit opening Feb. 16 at the California Afro-American Museum in Exposition Park.

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In its heyday during the mid-1970s, busloads of schoolchildren came to the village for the after-school painting and drawing workshops it established with the help of city grants. Sykes also worked with schoolchildren on numerous community mural projects that still decorate the walls of some buildings and schools in the central city. The village became a common stop-off spot for myriad tours by foreign visitors and was featured in national guidebooks.

“The village developed into more of an internationally known place and a creative spirit,” Alexander-Sykes said of the village’s growth. “No matter what the down times have been, that’s been the constant.”

The numbers of children have diminished and the stream of volunteers has dwindled to a trickle in recent years, but St. Elmo’s energy is still very much alive, residents and participants there point out. The artists of St. Elmo have had to master the art of survival in a neighborhood swirling with changes and problems.

The crack epidemic that infected much of Los Angeles in the 1980s crept onto St. Elmo Drive. Sykes, his mother, Geraldine Bruce, and his wife confronted drug dealers on the block head on.

City budget cuts, meanwhile, curtailed the number of children from other neighborhoods who were ferried to the village in school buses. In addition, several neighborhood children who used to frequent the village grew up, had children of their own and moved away. Others were sucked into the life on the streets and ended up dead or in jail.

Apartment buildings replaced houses and tenants came and went. And the community support of the 1960s and ‘70s became the apathy of the ‘90s.

“The disappointing part is you see a lot of children in the area not taking advantage of what’s happening right down the block from them,” said Cynthia Berry, a member of the village’s board of directors and head of OASIS, a Crenshaw-based senior citizen center where Sykes teaches painting.

But the children do keep coming, even if in fewer numbers. Most come from across the street or down the block, while others are brought by their parents who remember St. Elmo from when they were younger. Older children teach new arrivals about the funky-looking village, Alexander-Sykes said. A new generation of artists is also coming on the scene and injecting a different spirit and flavor to the village.

“The activity is not a lot, but it’s continuous,” Alexander-Sykes said.

“There’ve been a lot of groups that started in the late ‘60s, but just disbanded or failed in some way. I think the village has had such endurance because it’s not about the money. It’s about doing it for the love of it.”

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On a dreary, drizzly January afternoon, a collection of youngsters ranging in age from 3 to 15 gathered in the painting workshop to learn about shapes, shadows and working on a canvas.

At 9, Maria Garcia is a village regular and rather deft with a paintbrush. Her latest work: a pink cross sitting atop a royal blue hill with a rose in the middle, two hearts on either side and stars around it.

“This is the most fun thing I do because I like to draw and paint; that’s what I learned when I started coming here,” said Maria, who has been attending workshops for two years.

After painting, Maria hustled over to the Cafe de Art, a bungalow that has nothing to do with refreshments but serves as office space and as a gallery of photographs and newspaper clippings dedicated to the village. There, she joined three other girls and three teen-age boys in an improvisational acting class. The girls performed an adaptation of a poem, while the boys worked on a dramatic scene.

“Are you feeling anything inside? Anger? Pain? Sadness?” instructor Ta-Tanisha Weaver asked of 14-year-old April Day as she read over a poem about a frustrated female poet suffering writer’s block.

“Well, I guess I feel annoyed and that makes me feel kind of, I don’t know, hopeless,” April responded.

“Good,” said Weaver, an actress and resident of the village who played Pam in the 1970s series “Room 222.” “Work from that. Let that come out.”

Weaver scrapped the boys’ script and had them play their parts from instinct.

“What I do is help them with improvising because some feel uncomfortable reading scripts, they have difficulty,” Weaver said. “When we practice different scenes like being at a concert or at a bus stop, it’s interesting the direction they take it; it usually involves something violent, which clues you in on what surrounds them in their lives.”

Although in the middle of Crips turf, St. Elmo has gained a reputation among gang members in the neighborhood as being off-limits to drugs and violence or colored rags.

“Gangs have been around here since ‘jump street’ but the kids have always had ownership of this space,” Sykes explained of the village’s open-door policy.

“We have people who do all kinds of things, but when they come here we get their best. I don’t know why. I think this is a place where you’re not judged, you’re encouraged . . . so it allows them to let their guard down and show a different side of themselves.”

Sykes is part preacher, part philosopher. He describes a world of art, life and collaboration in such impassioned yet mellifluous tones it seems as if they could get people to clasp hands together and work for change.

In truth, Sykes has brought together an array of youths from differing backgrounds. He has had nightlong rap sessions with some and put paintbrushes and welding guns in the hands of all them.

Six years ago, during a student mural project, Roderick helped Rittner, then a junior at Los Angeles High School, shake his fear of paint.

“I remember when we poured the paint, I didn’t want to touch it. I didn’t want to make a mistake on the wall,” said Rittner, now 22 and a professional painter who teaches at the village and runs another arts workshop in Pico-Union. “Roderick just told me to stick my fingers in and just feel the paint. He taught me to feel much closer to the elements that I was using.”

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Rittner and Cortes, 22, an airbrush artist, are the newest village residents and considered the next generation of leaders to hopefully carry on the enclave’s philosophy.

“St. Elmo Village is going through a rebirth and gaining new energy,” Sykes said. It’s a transition from adolescence to adulthood that includes new volunteers, new spirit and a new look.

Sykes and his uncle had been talking about the renovation for years. Talks and planning with city officials started in 1992. The village secured a $270,000 loan from the Los Angeles Housing Department to pay for the project.

In 1993, the Design Professionals’ Coalition, a collection of architects, planners and engineers organized after the 1992 riots to offer volunteer planning services to nonprofit organizations, devised blueprints for the village’s face lift. The plans call for new plumbing and wiring in the aging buildings. The asphalt walkways will be redone in concrete and the garage-studio will be insulated and sectioned into separate workshop spaces.

Construction started in September, 1993, with a four-month completion time. Sykes said the village planned to repay the loan by applying for a change in housing status that would allow St. Elmo’s to charge rates comparable to the surrounding area, but until the renovation is finished the application is on hold.

Right now, three residents pay $300 a month in rent, while a fourth pays $133 because of rent control. Sykes and his wife don’t pay rent, nor do they receive a salary for their work at the village. Grants and donations pay for the artists’ workshops.

Logistic problems with the construction contract repeatedly halted the project. Seventeen months later only 80% of the work is done. And an April 1 due date for the first loan payment of $1,500 looms.

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Most of the village’s funding comes from city grants that pay for the free workshops and allow village leaders to hire aspiring artists. Private grants have helped pay for occasional office help, but the administrative burden falls on the shoulders of Sykes and his wife, who juggle earning their own livelihood as artists with running the village, writing grant proposals and dealing with the renovation.

The construction holdup is “destroying the village,” Sykes said. “We’ve had to turn away teachers who want to bring their students here for Black History Month.”

The renovation has also effectively suspended St. Elmo’s annual Festival of the Art of Creative Survival for three years. The Memorial Day weekend event, which features artwork, dance and music, gives the village its greatest exposure and profit.

“There are a lot of people who only know about the village because of the festival, so with (that) on hold for so long people may think we don’t exist anymore,” Alexander-Sykes said. “We really need to get another one going so we can get back on track.”

Otis L. Will, rehabilitation project coordinator for the city’s Housing Department, said that although there have been a few snags, the project will definitely be finished.

Once completed, St. Elmo will be fully accessible and able to accommodate more functions. Sykes is hoping to include art exhibits, summer outdoor plays, cultural events and an annual calendar as part of the revitalized St. Elmo Village. It is part of the dream he and Rozzell had talked about for St. Elmo’s maturation to adulthood.

Though Rozzell Sykes had semi-retired from village operations in recent years, he still maintained a heavy presence and his own significant following of visitors.

“It’s like now there’s a void of his half, the people he involved himself with,” his nephew said. “We’ll have to find a way to reach out to those folks so they’re a part of the ongoing process of the village.”

Revitalizing the pool of volunteers and obtaining funding to hire a full-time administrative assistant is next on the list.

“I see real hope for the future, but to do that means we’ll need more involvement from people and more support from organizations,” Rittner said. “I would like to see the village full of activities, constantly busy and full of people. It has enough energy and positivity to give to lots of people.”