Anaheim Seeks to Boost Its Cultural Profile

Mention Anaheim and many people think: Disneyland. If not the Magic Kingdom, then Edison Field, the Mighty Ducks or the Convention Center might pop to mind.

What Anaheim isn’t known for is the arts, or for being a mecca of fine culture.

The city has no symphony, no indoor playhouse and only one small museum.

“There are a lot of things we’re missing,” said Joyce Franklin, director of the Anaheim Museum.

After years of talk, the city has finally started to make the arts more of a priority and is spending $100,000 on a consulting firm to help craft a cultural plan.

The blueprint’s purpose is twofold: to gather arts and cultural organizations under one roof, facilitating awareness of existing resources, and to provide a vision for the future.

“I see the plan as doing both things,” said Carol Latham, president of the Anaheim Arts Council. “People need to know what’s available, and they also need to know what’s possible.”

The consultants, from the firm of Wolf, Keens & Co. of Cambridge, Mass., have spent the last few months interviewing prominent community members about their ideas for Anaheim’s artistic future. On Monday, the firm will begin gathering input from residents and local leaders at a series of public meetings. The final proposal should be ready by about June, said Latham.

She admits that economics is a key motivator behind the recent push. Anaheim loses money to other cities when its residents and tourists search for something with more cultural depth than Disney Ice or an Angels game. And because Anaheim doesn’t currently have a cultural plan, organizations in the city have had difficulty getting grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and California Arts Council, Latham said.

The loss of potential funding frustrated Councilwoman Shirley McCracken during her tenure as president of the Arts Council from 1992 to 1996.

“The first question on the grant applications always said, ‘Do you have a cultural plan? Please attach it,’ ” she said.

Without that grant money, initiating new arts programs is extremely difficult, as McCracken found when launching the annual spring Children’s Festival. “It took longer to get it going,” she said.

Before she was elected, McCracken had urged the City Council to develop a cultural plan but received a lukewarm response. When she joined the council in 1996, she began encouraging the city’s staff to research a proposal.

Last fall, a grass-roots cultural campaign led by Latham had business, church, school and arts leaders writing letters and making phone calls in support of a plan. And on Oct. 5, the council unanimously approved $100,000 for the consultants.

Because the firm has just begun its task of shaping the city’s future arts endeavors, the campaign’s potential for success is still an unknown. Nonetheless, supporters have been quick to offer ideas, including: highlighting Anaheim’s ethnic cultures, a theater, a history museum, a children’s museum and a symphony.

Many hope Anaheim’s expansion of the arts will keep more money at home.

Downtown Anaheim Assn. Director Joe Honescko complained that often visitors with time to kill venture outside the city.

“Even when they call asking for a shopping mall, we have to say, ‘Go to The Block in Orange,’ ” he said.

Honescko’s job is to draw people downtown, a task he believes will be easier under the umbrella provided by the cultural plan.

Everyone also agrees that a city valuing the arts will benefit its children. “Any time you build up the cultural part of a community, you enrich children’s lives,” said Roberta A. Thompson, superintendent of the Anaheim City School District. “The arts are something that too often gets pushed aside because of other demands.”

Because of budget cuts in education, a whole generation of children has missed out on the arts, said Anaheim Museum’s Franklin. She’d like a children’s museum, a history museum and an expansion of the existing museum, which she says is bursting at its seams.

But she wants more than that. In an ideal world, she said, visitors would encounter a vital, bustling downtown.

“If we could keep it centralized, where we could go from the ballet to the museum to the theater, that would be a wonderful way to set it up,” Franklin said.