CITY SMART / How to thrive in the urban environment of Southern California : Here, They Tap Into Their Muse : Creative Ideas Ferment and Flow at Old Brewery, Now an Artists Complex

For 99 years it was a place where malted barley, hops and water were blended into beer. These days, it is where a mixture of recycled steel girders, old bricks and new tricks is turned into art.

It’s The Brewery, a 20-acre colony at 2020 N. Main Street east of Downtown Los Angeles where a rusting industrial plant has been converted into one of the nation’s largest arts centers.

Gone are miles of pipes and copper fermentation tanks that produced millions of gallons of Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer. In their place are hundreds of artists’ lofts where sculptors, painters, digital imagers and others create a steady, if not eccentric, flow of artwork.

Its residents say theirs is a city in the middle of the inner-city.

“It seems like you can find whatever you need right here,” explained Kenneth Kim, an architect who draws residential floor plans in a corner of the brewery that once housed huge fermentation tanks.

Woodworkers whose studios are in the former bottling area help build backdrops for photographers. Welders assist sculptors. Painters help filmmakers doing music videos.

“If I lived in an apartment somewhere I’d never have gotten involved in a lot of the work I’ve done here,” said painter Iva Hladis, who customized her 1,500-square-foot studio with a mezzanine kitchen, bathroom and sleeping area two years ago.

“This is a place where you can build you own dream and live it. If you come in at 3 in the morning you’ll find somebody else coming in too, or somebody who is still up working.”

Screenwriter Mark Concha outlines his plots and polishes dialogue on a computer set up inside the vault at the brewery’s onetime accounting office. He shares the converted office space with digital designer Nicholas Scaturro.

He disassembled the combination lock to the steel door in the vault’s two-foot concrete walls just to be safe. “But it’s so quiet around here that I don’t have to close the door. We’re isolated enough to where we’re not bothered by outsiders or by crime,” Concha said.

On the other side of the old brewery, photographer Ed Colver has lived and worked for 12 years in a two-level, 1,800-square-foot loft that was once was a beer vat area.

A recycled metal spiral staircase leads to a neatly maintained living space decorated with authentic Craftsman style furniture.

His studio’s 22-foot ceiling gives Colver plenty of room for his photographic work, which includes some 400 record album covers and countless magazine illustrations. Just as important, it gives him hobby space.

Colver creates one-of-a-kind sculpture from discards and antiques, whimsically juxtaposing gizmos and gadgets to simultaneously stun and titillate.

Near the center of the studio is “Bound for Glory,” the twine-and-flag-wrapped figure of a body in a wheelchair that he assembled two days before the start of the Gulf War. Above that is “A Well-Hung Klansman,” a white-hooded figure dangling from a carefully knotted rope.

Despite the iconoclastic nature of The Brewery’s residents, many contend that the most unusual character at the 16-building compound is owner Richard Carlson.

“He’s a real pioneer--this a big playpen for him,” said Clark Stevens, whose architecture office is in the Brewery. Added abstract painter William Quigley: “I decided to move here after Richard showed me his own house that he has built here.”

Carlson and wife Kathleen Reges live in an eye-catching steel-and-glass aerie perched atop an 80-year-old concrete manufacturing building at the edge of The Brewery grounds. The prize-winning residence was featured in last month’s Sunset Magazine; the industrial building beneath it has been turned into a gallery for emerging artists.

Carlson, 44, is quick to point out that his house was designed by Brewery tenants, Roto Architects Inc. And suggestions from other Brewery artists--many of whom will participate in an annual open house Nov. 4 and 5--are evident throughout the place.

Carlson, his father, Arnold, and brother Steven purchased the plant in 1979 after Pabst closed it, citing outmoded production facilities and a shrinking market share. The plant opened in 1880 as the Los Angeles Brewing Co. It had become the Eastside Brewing Co. when Pabst acquired it in 1946, Carlson said.

The family--relocated from New York--was looking for industrial property to develop, Carlson recalled. But when the city enacted a 1981 law allowing artists to live in industrial zones, they decided to experiment with loft space. By city regulation, only bona fide artists can live in the facility or others like it nearby.

Rents in the $1,200-a-month range keep the 250 lofts almost filled. Thirty new spaces are added yearly by converting other buildings--or by purchasing industrial buildings in such places as Burbank, disassembling them, and then rebuilding them at The Brewery.

Developers from across the country have inquired about converting their own abandoned manufacturing plants into artists colonies. But most back off when Carlson tells them they’d better be prepared to move into the decaying industrial area and run it themselves.

You can’t just build it, he said. You have to live it.