Latino Museum Wants to Stay Put

The Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture is so starved for cash that it hasn’t staged any shows, employed any staffers or maintained any regular business hours at its downtown Los Angeles exhibition space for more than a year. Yet now that city officials have come courting with an offer of more than $2 million, the museum’s board is rebuffing them, or perhaps playing hard to get.

Why? Because that city money would come in exchange for the museum’s most precious asset--its wholly owned property at South Main and East 1st streets, across the street from City Hall.

The city and state have redevelopment plans for the block and the area around it, including a new Caltrans building and a public plaza, and those plans depend in part on razing the largely idle museum property at 110 S. Main St., among other buildings.

That property, assessed at $2 million in 2000, was donated to the museum in 1999 by the Bank of America. It includes not only 22,000 square feet of exhibition and office space in a central location, but also a parking area that board members say generates passive income of a few thousand dollars every month.

“We want to stay there,” said Juan Gomez-Quinones, president of the museum’s board of directors and a history professor at UCLA. “We believe in central downtown. That’s why we’ve been here.”

If the museum has to move, he added, “where are we going to end up? In some warehouse in the boondocks? We don’t have any Eli Broads on our board, and we’re not going to have any,” he said, naming the arts patron whose fortune and fund-raising have figured prominently in the construction of the high-profile Walt Disney Concert Hall nearby.

Even though the museum owes roughly $400,000 for former employees and other creditors, and even though board members have no concrete plans for reopening or specific programs, Gomez-Quinones said, he prefers to hold out, wait and see. He has, however, attended meetings with city representatives.

“We have made a specific offer. In fact I just came from a meeting,” said Gerry Miller, the city’s assistant chief legislative analyst, speaking on Friday afternoon. Miller said city officials have suggested possible alternative locations nearby, but declined to name them, or the city’s most recent offer, because negotiations are continuing.

Gomez-Quinones said city officials have offered “slightly more” than the $2-million assessment assigned to the building in 2000.

The goal, Miller said, is “to find a solution that works” for all parties. But he also noted that plans call for city officials to condemn properties whose owners refuse to sell. In condemnation, government agencies decide the price they will pay to property owners, which can result in lower compensation than in a negotiated purchase.

City officials have scheduled a Dec. 11 City Council public hearing on a proposed ordinance authorizing condemnation of the property, Miller said. If the council approves that measure and negotiations continue to bear no fruit, Miller said, the next step is Superior Court, where the city would seek a judge’s approval of the proposed condemnation.

Without an agreement between the city and the museum, Miller said, “it would take several months before we would actually have possession of the property,” potentially delaying parts of the Caltrans project.

Meanwhile, Gomez-Quinones said, “we hear that it’s going to happen ‘tomorrow,’ but I’m not so sure. I don’t think the prospects for these large construction projects today are even what they were a year and a half ago.” Gomez-Quinones also decried the “arrogance” of city officials in grabbing the land where the museum stands.

The property on Main Street is part of an ambitious redevelopment plan involving the city and the state, a big-name architect, a land swap and the government acquisition of several privately owned properties.

On one downtown block bordered by South Main and South Los Angeles streets and East 1st and East 2nd streets, the city intends to buy up several properties, including the Latino museum, then trade them to Caltrans, so that it can build new offices.

Then on a neighboring block that’s mostly occupied by old Caltrans offices, the block bordered by Spring and Main streets and East 1st and East 2nd streets, the city wants to build a public plaza.

Despite the unfinished land acquisitions, Caltrans announced Nov. 8 that architect Thom Mayne of Santa Monica-based Morphosis had won a competition to design its new $171-million offices, and said construction was scheduled to start in early 2002.

“Nothing’s for sure, but that’s our target,” said Mark DeSio, a spokesman for the state Business, Transportation and Housing Agency, who added that the state’s timetable is based on assurances from city officials who have responsibility for striking deals with owners of affected properties.

The Latino museum’s roots date to fund-raising efforts begun in the late 1980s by founder Charles Calderon (a Democratic state senator from Whittier from 1990 to 1998). It opened as a downtown exhibition space in 1998, with Calderon serving as board chairman. The organization drew most of its funding from Sacramento (where Calderon’s brother, Thomas, a Democrat from Montebello, continues to sit in the state Assembly), but little from the city, county and state agencies that traditionally evaluate museums and make arts grants. Late last year, amid canceled exhibitions and claims of unpaid staff salaries and other bills, the museum’s board accepted Calderon’s resignation and appointed several new members.

Since then, the facility has been served occasionally as a venue for special events. The next such event is a Dec. 12 “evening of poetry, art and music,” co-presented by the museum and Amnesty International in honor of Mexican human rights attorney Digna Ochoa y Placido, who was killed Oct. 19 in Mexico City.

But the absence of ongoing programming leaves the city of Los Angeles, with a population that is 46% Latino, among the few major U.S. cities with no museum devoted to Latino culture. (The nearest such institution is Long Beach’s Museum of Latin American Art, which opened in 1996.)

The Latino Museum’s board of directors’ top priorities, Gomez-Quinones said, are paying off creditors, and then developing programming. “We do have grant money, but to continue to receive that money, we have to be operational,” said Gomez-Quinones.