Soul Searching on Spring Street

When the artist otherwise known as Gronk first moved to downtown Los Angeles in the early 1980s, he found it “littered with all these little bits and pieces,” the raw materials that furnish a creative mind. Drug dealers and prostitutes prowled the streets near his apartment. For years, there was no trash pickup at his building.

But Gronk also found beauty in the fluted facades of the old Beaux Arts buildings, in a sign bizarrely advertising “teriyaki burritos,” in a sudden blast of salsa from the sidewalk below. While today some still see his neighborhood as a ghost town of begrimed edifices and glassy-eyed beggars, Gronk perceives it as a mother lode of contradictory human experience. While others bemoan the city’s historic core as an embarrassing eyesore, he regards it as a kind of vast, ever-changing archeological site where past and present cultures jostle and converge, layer upon gritty layer.

“There’s still beauty here,” says Gronk, nee Glugio Gronk Nicandro, an East L.A. native and internationally known artist and designer who has lived in the same Spring Street loft for 13 years. “Of course, there’s a lot of poverty, and that’s not going to go away, but the beauty exists now. And it’s vibrant.”

It’s also changing--fast. And that has some longtime downtown connoisseurs and loft-dwelling artists like Gronk wondering whether their neighborhood is in danger of sacrificing the beautiful and the complex for the expedient and the exclusive. As a recent wave of new upscale residential development nears critical mass, and an influx of professionals slowly alters the area’s complexion, questions abound about downtown’s future identity.

Because downtowns historically have emblemized the cities that surround them, they tend to be fiercely contested spaces whose purposes and “meanings” are subject to debate. Downtown L.A. is no different in that sense. So whose version should prevail? Does downtown need to be quieter? Livelier? Greener? Cleaner? Safer?

What’s the priority--a Ralphs, a Home Depot, a small park, a neighborhood watering hole? Does being an urban pioneer mean you have to put up forever with back-alley crack heads and homeless men relieving themselves in your doorway? If downtown pursues an aggressive course of gentrification, will it lose the restless energy that draws people there in the first place?

Those were some of the thornier themes that grew out of a public meeting last week at the Los Angeles Theatre Center regarding the future of downtown’s Old Bank District, a roughly eight-block area stretching south along Spring and Main streets from 2nd to 7th streets, plus a smaller chunk of Los Angeles Street within spitting distance of Skid Row. City officials are seeking input from residents and business owners on how to spend $3 million of federal Housing and Urban Development block grant money targeting the Old Bank District, one of 14 city neighborhoods to receive the funds.

Gronk, whose funky industrial building lies near the district’s southern boundary, didn’t attend. But if he had, he would have heard a battery of city bureaucrats, along with Tom Gilmore--the media-savvy former New Yorker who has become the personification of downtown’s residential resurgence--do their best to assure the mixed audience that the funds will help address the neighborhood’s most frequently cited problems (vagrancy, bus traffic, lack of shopping and green space).

Gilmore, whose booming voice and tight end’s physique underscores his go-get-’em attitude, operates three residential properties in the Old Bank District along Main and Spring between 4th and 5th streets, one of which, the San Fernando Building, is already nearing 100% occupancy. Converted from former office buildings, Gilmore’s 250 total units sport a high-ceilinged, concrete-floored, postindustrial elegance and fetch prices that start at $790 and reach $6,000, per penthouse, per month.

With his rah-rah salesmanship, Gilmore has spotlighted downtown residential living more than any developer in decades. And this latest re-imagining of downtown is fueling an expansion of the area’s apartments and condos, which the Los Angeles Downtown Center Business Improvement District reckons will swell by 50% over the next three years to more than 18,000 units.

Yet the current housing boomlet, stoked by soaring Westside real-estate prices and mounting disgust with long-distance commutes, has created tensions between developers, on the one hand, and the city’s poor and others who relish and cultivate the enclave’s eclectic vibe. As downtown’s latest tide of “pioneers” arrives, some are asking whether urban sensibility is mostly a function of income, ethnicity and occupation, or is more transcendent and harder to define--a penchant for a particular type of human contact, a need for a shared past and future, enacted in close quarters.

Eyeing Newcomers With a Measure of Distrust

On a recent night, Gronk crossed his black Converse high tops and kicked back with several fellow loft dwellers at an impromptu late-night bull session. The group constituted a sort of microcosm of the city’s Latino intelligentsia: an artist, a writer, a Chicano studies professor, a film and TV composer, an urban planner. The tone was genial, the lighting subdued.

The real problem with downtown lately, Gronk and his friends half-jokingly agreed, is “those people.” Westsiders. Trust-fund babies. New tenants who demand that their bohemian pleasures be liberally sweetened with suburban amenities. Landlords who previously recruited artists to help make downtown “safe” for gentrification, then jacked up their rents so only lawyers and screenwriters could afford it. Developers who fail to discern that the area, far from needing to be “saved” from Third World destitution, is already teeming with life--rich, poor and middle-income, Spanish- and English-speaking, white, black and brown.

“There’s life here, people live here, but because they’re Central Americans or Mexicans, they’re invisible people,” says Ramon Garcia, a Cal State Northridge assistant professor who lives across the hall from Gronk. “It becomes like a colonial mentality: You’re developing something where there’s already development.”

Another longtime resident, Joseph Julian Gonzalez, fondly remembers the days when downtown building codes were rarely enforced and landlords and tenants operated under a don’t-ask, don’t-tell policy that gave free reign to artistic experimentation. Then, in the last two or three years, the neighborhood suddenly became “hot.”

“Once that started happening, the rates started going up, and we started getting more of the traditional kind of tenants and the building started losing a bit of that bohemian kind of feel it once had,” says Gonzalez, who has composed music for Kronos Quartet, feature films and “Resurrection Boulevard,” Showtime’s new drama series about an East L.A. Latino family.

“I don’t know, maybe I’m romanticizing it too much,” he continues. “To me, it seems like there’s a group of people that most of them came from wealthy backgrounds who came to live out some sort of bohemian fantasy, and then there’s the artists.”

But even artists, a notoriously opinionated group, don’t see downtown identically. Painter Jett Jackson moved several years ago from downtown proper to the Santa Fe Art Colony, a few blocks southeast of the city center. She loves being surrounded by fellow artists: You can pop next door and “borrow a cup of tequila or turpentine” day or night. But she thinks artists need to be more realistic and accommodating about downtown’s changing profile.

“There’s a hunger out there for this kind of space. Whether you’re an artist or not, it has an appeal,” she says. “If all of this bellyaching was directed in a more positive direction of educating developers about this massive desire for loft living, that would be positive bitching.”

Developer Gilmore thinks “there’s a line somewhere in the middle” between downtown as fashionable slum and downtown as Universal CityWalk.

“I’m not real sympathetic to people who want a squeaky-clean city, because I feel the nature of cities is not to be squeaky-clean. But I’m also not real sympathetic to urban grunge chic. I don’t buy into the reality of either of those. I think cities are more real than that on both sides.”

Gilmore says his own tenants are seeking to adapt to downtown as it exists today, as they demonstrated by their questions at last week’s city-sponsored meeting. “They’re trying to figure out how do we fit in, and they’re not planting a flag declaring ‘New Yuppieville.’ They’re interested in urbanism, and urbanism means a lot of different things to different people.”

Fusing Many Visions Into One Neighborhood

But can many different urbanisms add up to a coherent, organic, fully functioning central city? It’s the same question being posed in urban cores across the country, from Manhattan and Chicago to San Francisco’s Mission District, central Hollywood, Santa Monica and Old Town Pasadena.

David Cobb seems positive he’s found a livable, workable version of downtown, though he’s only lived there a few weeks. Walking home last week from the city’s Q&A; session, past shuttered liquor stores and a man with electric hair muttering to invisible adversaries, Cobb, a political consultant, says his main problem with the neighborhood is the buses that queue up along Spring Street late at night, bouncing the noise from their idling engines off the surrounding walls.

But when Cobb reaches the 10th-floor loft he shares with his partner, lawyer Doug Wance, calm descends. The couple’s 2,200-square-loft is still raw and mostly empty. But the men are planning to add some homey touches: a pool table, “a little Moroccan area” and a Buddha fountain to match the Buddhist shrine that Cobb keeps near a window overlooking Spring Street.

Lighting a candle, Cobb points with pride to a photo of himself with the Dalai Lama next to a printed meditation: “As long as space remains / As long as sentient beings remain, / Until then, may I too remain, / And dispel the miseries of the world.”

Wance appears less sure of the serenity of his new surroundings. Glancing out a window, he notes a forlorn building across the way, darkened, though it’s barely 8 p.m.

“You know it’s a bad neighborhood,” he says, “where you have to close the porn shop early.”