COVER STORY : Bergamot Is on the Fast Track : The former trolley station now offers galleries, a cafe and--soon--two Taper theater stages. It’s the new arts center on the Westside. But will it endure?

Speed down the Santa Monica Freeway. Exit on Cloverfield. Drive north one block to Michigan Avenue. Turn east and continue to the end of the street. Proceed through the gate of the chain-link fence and grab a parking space.

You have arrived at Bergamot Station, Southern California’s latest answer to an art scene perpetually in search of a center.

If the hub of the moment looks familiar--albeit rustic--it’s not because it resembles clusters of galleries that have blossomed and faded in Los Angeles and Santa Monica during the last three decades. The model for Bergamot Station is closer to a shopping center--one of the few places that foster a sense of community in a region shaped by automobiles.

In most past attempts to create a cohesive art environment, the galleries have been scattered along city streets or throughout neighborhoods.

Monday night “Art Walks” brought crowds to La Cienega Boulevard in the 1960s, but the galleries eventually spread into a wider area of West Hollywood, where many prestigious showcases continue to operate. The founding of the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1979 sparked new gallery action downtown, only to die in the mid-1980s--the victim of rising rents and Westside collectors’ reluctance to drive to scruffy areas. Dealer Jan Baum opened her building on La Brea Avenue in 1981, marking the arrival of another gallery row, which persists today but with fewer players. The next big move was to Santa Monica during the art market boom of the mid-1980s, but an exodus ensued in the early 1990s after the art market had crashed and the economy had soured.

Now there’s Bergamot, where you can park your car once and take your choice of 20 art galleries--about double the number that formerly gathered along Santa Monica’s Colorado Avenue--plus six architecture and design firms, a frame shop and a cafe.

And the concept seems to be working. Bergamot’s opening celebration last Sept. 17 drew a crowd estimated at 20,000, and the abandoned trolley station has become a destination for the international art crowd. Recently revealed plans for the prestigious Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles’ most prominent theater company, to establish a two-stage theater in a pair of vacant warehouses there have raised the professional profile of the project while sparking excitement about adding a first-rate performing arts component that will extend Bergamot’s audience.

“I think Bergamot is wonderful,” says Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Center Theatre Group, the Taper’s parent company. “I love the atmosphere there--the openness, the unpretentiousness, the variety of the offerings there.

“When you go through the gates and see the whole space, it’s pure California--an open space where people and art come together. Then, when you see the 26,000-square-foot warehouse space and the adjacent [8,000-square-foot] space, you say, ‘Wow, this could be a theater of some originality and consequence.’ Those warehouses say, ‘Use me, use me.’ ”

The key factor in the Taper’s planned expansion, Davidson says, is to “develop a sense of community space in Los Angeles.”

“We tend to go to one place for one thing and to another place for another thing, except in movie malls and shopping centers,” he says. “The promise of Bergamot is that not only are there art galleries, there’s the possibility of involvement with music, film and television. Santa Monica is a very arts-friendly city, which makes it extraordinarily full of potential.”

That potential is only beginning to be fulfilled, but Bergamot Station has come an astonishingly long way.

*

In the beginning, it was ridiculed as Wayne’s World. And who could blame the detractors?

The complex was little more than a glint in contemporary art dealer Wayne Blank’s eye. The 5.5-acre property he hoped to parlay into a thriving cultural center offered lots of space, ample parking and great freeway access, but it was hard-core ugly, the neighborhood was grim, and Bergamot’s industrial buildings were little more than rusted hulks or leaky lean-tos.

The city of Santa Monica had bought the former trolley car station at the intersection of 26th Street and Olympic Boulevard for Metro Rail use in 1989. (Bergamot is the name of a flower, of the mint family, that flourished in the area.) City officials approached Blank about developing the site late in 1993, when transit plans didn’t develop as expected. He had a city track record, having converted a vacant hangar at the Santa Monica Airport into artists’ studios, but who knew if the city would make a long-term commitment to an arts center or yank the property out from under tenants after they had improved it?

If the plan worked, art dealers who moved their galleries to Bergamot would gain the desperately needed benefit of low rent--75 cents a square foot, less than half the going rate at the commercial locations they had been using, mostly in Hollywood and Santa Monica--but they would face the uncertainty of month-to-month leases. Signing onto the project required a considerable leap of faith, so believers were thought to be blind optimists, if not lunatics.

But now, even Blank’s most persistent critics have to admit that he was onto something big. In a troubled economy and a conservative political climate that has devastated the arts community, Bergamot Station is a beacon of light. The collaborative venture, combining public and private resources with creative energy, has evolved as a viable alternative to more traditional arts enterprises.

Architect Frederick Fisher has converted many of the industrial buildings into functional art spaces, retaining what he calls their “down-and-dirty” look, while television writer-producer (“The Bob Newhart Show,” “Alf”) and art collector Tom Patchett has become the project’s major benefactor--pumping more than $400,000 into improvements even as he has opened his own Track 16 Gallery for contemporary art and his vast holding of American collectibles.

The Taper’s planned 350- and 99-seat theaters are expected to occupy two empty structures on a strip of private property adjacent to the city-owned land. Blank and Patchett bought part of the private property from American Appliance Co. several months ago. Escrow on the final parcel--including the two buildings to be converted to theaters and another warehouse--is scheduled to close Dec. 15. The addition of the entire strip of private property will increase Bergamot’s original 5.5 acres to more than seven acres.

Los Angeles-based artist and philanthropist Hiro Yamagata has agreed to pay about $4.4 million for a package including the theater structures and a third warehouse, which he will use for related arts activities. Yamagata plans to lease the two theater buildings to the Center Theatre Group for $1 a year. The Taper is expected to spend at least $7 million to transform its two industrial structures into theaters. Most of the money will be raised by the Entertainment Council, a group of Taper supporters who work in the entertainment industry.

“It’s going to take a lot of money, but it won’t be more than a medium-budget movie costs, and [the theaters] will potentially have much more lasting value,” says Sid Ganis, president of worldwide marketing for Columbia and TriStar studios, who heads the Entertainment Council.

Admittedly concerned about fund-raising, Davidson says that the donated buildings provide a big boost and that “the location brings potential funds that might not be accessible for the Music Center.”

The Taper will retain its primary theater at the downtown Music Center, while using the Westside venue to complement its programming and expand its audience. Tentative plans call for developing new plays that might move to the Music Center, presenting educational programs and collaborating with film and television companies.

If all goes according to plan, the theaters will bring crowds to Bergamot at night, when the galleries are generally closed. Also in the works is an upscale restaurant, to be operated by well-known restaurateur Hans Rockenwagner and owned by Patchett, providing visitors with a stylish place to dine between afternoon gallery visits and evening theater sessions.

At present, however, Bergamot is still a work in progress with fledgling bamboo hedges, minimal signage and gaping holes where big projects are planned. But that hasn’t stopped people from turning out in droves at special events there. An estimated 10,000 showed up July 14 at a reception for the L.A. International Biennial Invitational, making for shoulder-to-shoulder viewing in the galleries. A Museum of Contemporary Art fund-raiser Aug. 12 attracted 1,200 celebrants.

“Bergamot Station is a high-class CityWalk. It’s fun,” says Los Angeles City Councilman Joel Wachs, a collector of contemporary art who keeps a close watch on the art scene. “Its primary purpose is galleries for serious art-lookers, but people love to go there. The evening events are incredibly successful.”

Parties rarely lead to sales of artworks, but dealers who operate galleries on the premises say they do more business and see more of the professional art crowd than in previous locations.

“Everyone comes here--critics, collectors, curators, artists, students,” says veteran dealer Patricia Faure, who closed her West Hollywood gallery last year and chose a space at the east end of the Bergamot complex where she could add a walled patio to display sculpture. “In all the years I’ve been in business, since 1972, I’ve never seen so many serious art people from all over the world.”

As art aficionados and looky-loos have streamed into Bergamot and computer buffs have checked out its World Wide Web site, fears about losing the property have subsided. City Manager John Jalili says the month-to-month leases don’t indicate a lack of commitment to the arts. The city can’t make a long-term binding agreement to use Bergamot for an arts center, because the site was bought with Metropolitan Transit Authority funds for a light-rail storage facility, but there are no concrete plans or funds for rail service in the area, he says. And now that Bergamot is feeding rent and taxes into public coffers and drawing crowds to nearby restaurants, the city appears to have a growing interest in maintaining the arts center.

“Bergamot Station demonstrates that the art scene is here to stay in Santa Monica,” Jalili says. “It also demonstrates that the arts can significantly enhance economic development. This is an area of the city that needed to be restored. Bergamot Station is a wonderful tool for that.”

Currently gearing up for the fall gallery season--with a few galleries closed during the end of August--and looking ahead to the arrival of the Taper, Bergamot Station appears to be in the enviable position of having happy landlords, tenants and customers.

This is not normal.

So the question is: How did Blank’s folly turn into a success story?

Observers offer a litany of reasons, which boil down to four concepts:

* Timing: The local economy and gallery scene were so depressed when Blank’s project started to percolate that many dealers were looking for ways to downsize their operations. Bergamot Station offered a chance for survival along with an affordable dream of rejuvenation.

“It gave me a way to continue at a third of the cost of doing business in West Hollywood without losing anything. In fact, I’ve gained,” Faure says.

Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, puts it this way: “Bergamot Station clearly came at the right time and the right place for the needs of a program that already existed in Los Angeles. It hasn’t invented new galleries or drastically changed the way galleries operated. But it has prevented the loss of galleries that had received national and international notice and allowed them to prosper--to a degree. The loss of those galleries would have had a very severe impact on the gallery scene in Los Angeles.”

* Location: Freeway access is a giant plus and one of the top items on everyone’s list of Bergamot assets. Trying to find Bergamot, at 2525 Michigan Ave., can be frustrating because it has an inauspicious entrance at the end of a dead-end street. But once visitors figure out the approach, they see how accessible the complex is.

The art and film crowd is already familiar with the area because it is home to dozens of galleries and film studios.

Well-established galleries nearby include G. Ray Hawkins and Christopher Grimes on Colorado Avenue, Koplin on 9th Street and the Broadway Gallery Complex. Three other showcases--Acme, Dan Bernier and Marc Foxx--plus the co-op Hello Artichoke have sprouted on Nebraska Avenue, and longtime dealer Fred Hoffman plans to open a gallery on Stewart Street in October.

Among the film companies that have proliferated in the neighborhood are Cinergi, MGM, Savoy Pictures, Todd-AO Studios West and Arboretum Studios.

The 18th Street Arts Complex--including Highways, the Westside’s best-known performance art center--is a few blocks west of Bergamot. Other theatrical venues are not as close at hand, but the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble and the Zeitgeist, Wooden-O and Rose theaters operate in West Los Angeles. Santa Monica is home to the Santa Monica Playhouse, City Garage, the Powerhouse Theatre and the Upfront Comedy Theatre. And not too far away is the Westside’s flagship mid-size theater, UCLA’s erstwhile Westwood Playhouse, which is about to become the Geffen Playhouse thanks to movie and music mogul David Geffen’s gift last April of $5 million.

Bergamot’s success and the Taper’s plans underscore the fact that much of Los Angeles’ traditional art audience resides on the Westside. Proximity obviously helps to attract members of this audience, many of whom are reluctant or afraid to drive downtown.

* Ambience: “Most of the credit for the success of Bergamot has to go to the place itself,” says Patchett, who loves Bergamot’s rawness. “The No. 1 thing is the physical existence of the buildings and the place. It landed in our laps. We were very lucky.”

Having limited funds has helped to retain the site’s distinctive character and prevented it from being “turned into Disneyland overnight,” he says. Part of Bergamot’s appeal is that it wasn’t finished when the doors opened last September and that repeat visitors can watch it grow.

Another thing Bergamot has going for it is its comfort level. Though far from plush--with leaky roofs and shared restroom facilities--the fenced complex feels safe. Except for special events when shuttle buses provide transportation from outside parking, visitors can park their cars in the center of the complex and stroll in a quiet, contained setting without encountering panhandlers or having to feed parking meters.

Dealer Rosamund Felsen likens Bergamot Station to a village, where people can walk, look at art, meet their friends and refresh themselves at the cafe. “When people come through my door, they are relaxed, they have smiles on their faces, and they are happy to be here,” she says.

Although it’s sometimes called Los Angeles’ SoHo, Bergamot Station has none of the boutiques, shoe stores and decorator shops that compete with galleries in New York’s artistic enclave. And even though Bergamot looks like a shopping center, all the tenants except the cafe are involved in arts-related businesses--which suits the dealers just fine.

* Players: The biggies are Blank, who developed Bergamot, holds a master lease for the city-owned property, has an interest in the adjacent strip of private land and owns the Shoshana Wayne Gallery with his wife, Shoshana Blank; Patchett, who stepped in with financial support and creative energy; Davidson, whose longstanding quest for a Westside Taper venue is bringing a branch of the theater to Bergamot, and Yamagata, who is providing funds to give Davidson a home for his dream.

Equally important is the mix of entrepreneurs who have set up shop at Bergamot. Art world purists complain about a shortage of high-end dealers on the level of veterans Felsen, Faure and Burnett Miller, but most observers agree that variety has contributed to Bergamot’s popularity and vitality.

“I’m not a joiner,” Faure says. “I like to make my own world. But we have been allowed to do that here. No two galleries are similar.”

Visitors find both cutting-edge and relatively conservative contemporary art at a dozen showcases, photography at the Craig Krull Gallery, Peter Fetterman Photographic Works of Art and (beginning in October) the Gallery of Contemporary Photography, prints at the Bobbie Greenfield Gallery, multiples at the Richard Heller Gallery, artist-designed furniture at the Gallery of Functional Art, contemporary African art at the Ernie Wolfe Gallery and glass works at the Patricia Correia Gallery.

Adding to the mix, veteran dealers labor beside relative newcomers at Bergamot. Krull, who opened his first independent gallery at the complex, considers himself lucky to have landed a space between veterans Felsen and Miller. Furthermore, he says, there is strength in numbers: “Art and museum groups approach us about coming here. If we were all working alone, we would be struggling to get people to come.”

The public will have more reasons to come to Bergamot if the Taper’s plans develop. Ganis hopes to build the Taper’s audience among members of the entertainment community who have resisted going downtown.

“It’s going to be up to us to get the word out to the part of the industry that knows there is theater in L.A.--kind of--but can’t get behind it,” he says. “A gigantic clientele [from the entertainment industry] visits the Taper all the time. But there are still plenty who haven’t been moved enough yet by the theater experience,” who don’t understand how the theater can develop new writers and “performers who make you cry on stage and might be sensational on screen as well.”

But Ron Sossi, artistic director of the prestigious three-stage Odyssey Theatre (on Sepulveda Boulevard near Olympic Boulevard), predicts that the Taper audience at Bergamot “is basically going to be the same as they have downtown” and that the flavor of the more innovative work will still be less adventurous than that of smaller nearby theaters.

Sossi says he is unconcerned about potential competition from the Taper: “Even if they were doing exactly the same thing as us, there is a huge audience for theater in L.A. Theater feeds theater. I don’t feel threatened.”

No one can predict the staying power of Bergamot Station in a town that loves nothing more than newness--and in a region where the gallery scene is perpetually scattered and famously fluid.

MOCA’s Schimmel, for one, wouldn’t bank on Bergamot Station’s future.

“It should be embraced for what it is at this moment,” he says. “But the whole notion of this being the ultimate solution for galleries in Los Angeles, I question. One of the things that I find interesting about the Los Angeles gallery scene is that there is no there there. For the 15 years I have been here, I have seen one place after another proclaimed once and for all as the solution. What I love about [Los Angeles] is that it’s so different from New York, where you have the solidity of 57th Street and SoHo and the Fuller Building. Here the scene is not identified with a specific location, and that seems appropriate to the way we live and move around in our cars.”

Davidson says he wants to believe that the galleries “won’t evaporate,” because they are desirable neighbors and he hopes to cultivate their audience. But he doesn’t think the theater’s long-term success will depend on them. If the galleries fold up or move away after a few years, other arts components are likely to replace them, he says.

But Bergamot’s tenants say they are part of a community that will endure. Despite initial fears about renting space on city land, having the city as a landlord actually lends Bergamot an element of stability that might be impossible with a private owner, dealers say. Furthermore, they contend, Bergamot’s physical containment and concentrated purpose make it quite different from other gallery enclaves sprinkled along city streets.

In Patchett’s view, Bergamot will have a long, fascinating life as an art center if it continues to grow and change, and if the mix of galleries remains interesting: “This really has to be a place where people want to come back.”

* Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica. The complex’s World Wide Web site is at https://www.artdirect.com/bergamot/. Galleries are open Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; Saturday, 11 a.m.- 5 :30 p.m. (310) 829-5854.