First the Trains, Now the Arts

On a breezy morning down by the old Santa Fe station in San Diego, the palm trees rustle, the rail commuters bustle and, along the platform, the broad doors of an 87-year-old baggage storage building groan open.

Following the footsteps of countless baggage handlers, Hugh M. Davies, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, steps in, looks up at the scarred tile walls and steel trusses that support a 38-foot-high ceiling, and says something no baggage handler has ever said.

“The whole space is thought of primarily as a sculpture space,” says Davies, waving an arm. “It’s about volume, not pristine white walls.”

If Davies has his way, this blue-collar building will be reborn in two years as an exhibition space--which may seem a novel transition, at first glance. But follow the tracks north for 120 miles, to a long-bedraggled, semi-bohemian corner of downtown Los Angeles.

Since September, about 400 undergraduates and grad students have been gathering here to make little wooden models and pace the halls of a vast, concrete curiosity of a building, 40 to 60 feet wide and 1,250 feet long. This is the new home of the Southern California Institute of Architecture: a freight depot, built in 1907 by the same company that built the Santa Fe station in San Diego.

“We like the unrelenting and extreme nature of the building,” says Gary Paige, the SCI-Arc faculty member who served as principal architect of the adaptation.

The prospects may seem dimmer by the day for Amtrak and interstate passenger rail service, but across the U.S., museums and other cultural groups are making over old rail facilities at a startling pace. Within the last five years, redevelopment campaigns in Los Angeles, San Diego, Baltimore, Kansas City, Mo., Tacoma, Wash., and elsewhere have transformed historic railway buildings into museums or campuses, or both.

In Baltimore, where Baltimore & Ohio railway workers laid the nation’s first mile of long-distance railroad track in the 1820s, several buildings from the early years of railroading have been converted to cultural uses, most recently the city’s 1849 President Street Station, which in April 1997 reopened as home of the Maryland Historical Society’s Baltimore Civil War Museum.

In Tacoma, the University of Washington won a 1999 National Trust for Historic Preservation award for its renovation of six brick warehouses in the Union Station district to create a new campus. Federal officials had already turned the main station nearby into a courthouse and filled it with native son Dale Chihuly’s art glass pieces, including a massive cobalt chandelier. Now the campus enrollment has reached 2,000, and in the neighborhood surrounding the terminal, a history museum has opened, the Tacoma Art Museum is putting up a new building (to open in 2003), and a glass museum opened this month.

In Santa Monica, city officials in the early 1990s found themselves in possession of Bergamot Station, a 7-acre rail yard where trolleys stopped as long ago as 1875. There was no grand terminal, just a collection of warehouses. But developer Wayne Blank saw possibilities, made a deal with the city, and put together a complex of more than three dozen art galleries and related businesses, including jewelers, framers, an auctioneer and a cafe. The complex opened in late 1994, and the Santa Monica Museum of Art joined the scene, taking over an adjacent plot owned by Blank and his wife, gallery operator Shoshana Blank, in early 1998.

All these relocations come despite many strong practical arguments against the attempted rescue of a railroad property. Restoration costs can be staggering, surrounding neighborhoods are often rotten, and tales are plentiful of redevelopment campaigns awash in red ink.

But to paraphrase an old Amtrak ad slogan, there’s something about a train station. Admirers cite the soaring ceilings, the broad passages for foot or freight traffic, the bold, purposeful architecture, and, in some cases, the economics. Many rail buildings come cheap because of their location, and many offer the chance to defray costs with preservation grants from governments.

Cultural groups often step into these projects when entrepreneurs fail. In other cases, developers seize upon nonprofits as collaborators when they need a civic-minded partner to ease government approval. In San Diego, for instance, the Santa Fe station’s owner--Catellus Development Corp., a publicly traded offspring of the old Santa Fe Pacific Railroad--has pledged renovation, donation and reuse of the baggage building space (with the museum as tenant) in exchange for permission to build two residential towers next to the tracks.

Not all of these efforts are vast projects full of strange juxtapositions. At smaller stations where there’s less money on hand, local railroad museums often sprout. In fact, the national Railroad Station Historical Society counts a dozen such enterprises in Los Angeles County alone, many stations moved from their original spots to points like the Travel Town Transportation Museum in Griffith Park, Heritage Junction Historic Park in the Santa Clarita Valley and the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds in Pomona. But as redevelopment veterans note, the public can only patronize so many railroading museums

And there are a lot of idle train buildings. Rail historians have estimated that 80,000 rail stations once stood across the U.S., and that 12,000 to 20,000 remain. Although many serve as hubs for bus service and other modes of transportation, fewer than 600 of those stations are served by Amtrak. With federal officials considering a radical restructuring of Amtrak--which many observers expect to result in curtailed passenger service on unprofitable routes--the number of stations awaiting adoption could soon climb much higher.

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, born in La Jolla and headquartered there since 1941, has long embraced conceptual art, sometimes to the great befuddlement of the uninitiated: One installation earlier this year by artist Sarah Sze was a mixed-media work in wood, plastic, paper and metal that, in the museum Web site’s words, “distends, distorts and deconstructs the shapes and materials of a bed, creating a mutant form that defies gravity and the regular geometry of the museum’s architecture.”

Yet the museum’s leaders have also been eager to build a downtown identity. Since 1993, the museum has had a 10,000-square-foot satellite exhibition space across the street from the Santa Fe station, a high-traffic site near not only intercity train service, but San Diego’s light-rail system. Director Davies acknowledges that perhaps because neighboring residential projects have lagged, the satellite facility has never met visitation targets.

The museum’s response: Take more space in a more interesting building.

This campaign intensified in January 2001, when city officials chose the museum in a competition among cultural institutions interested in using the space. (The competitors included the San Diego Railroad Museum, which has for years been using part of the baggage building as an archive repository.) Since then, museum officials have been huddling with the site owner, along with New York architect Richard Gluckman, a seasoned adaptor of commercial buildings to museum and gallery uses, and San Diego architect Milford Wayne Donaldson, a seasoned restorer and adaptor of California rail facilities, including stations in Santa Barbara and San Bernardino.

“I first came in here in the ‘80s, when we were talking to Count Panza di Biumo, a great collector in Italy,” about possible exhibition spaces, Davies recalls. The count eventually sold and donated most of his works elsewhere, but the feel of the space stuck with Davies. Because Amtrak had little need for the building’s generous dimensions, the museum was able to put up a handful of temporary installations there in the 1990s.

For the museum and the architects, the baggage building offers the opportunity to put highly abstract art in a highly utilitarian building and see what happens. (The founders of the Massachusetts Museum of Modern Art did the same thing on a far larger scale in May 1999, when they opened their institution in 27 old factory buildings on a 13-acre site in North Adams, Mass.)

In December, the San Diego museum unveiled its ambitions, and in September, the museum expects to seek a more specific go-ahead from the San Diego City Council. With no details yet, museum officials say, it’s impossible to estimate a budget for the transformation. But their ballpark guess is that the combined costs for the museum and Catellus would fall between $10 million and $20 million.

If the renovation goes as planned and city officials approve a proposed addition that’s also part of the project, MCA San Diego could be showing modern sculptures and art installations in the Santa Fe baggage building by 2004. For the first time, the museum would have more exhibition space along the tracks than in La Jolla.

The station’s exterior is done in Spanish Mission-Colonial Revival style. Designed by San Francisco architects John R. Bakewell and Arthur Brown Jr., it was built by the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway to welcome visitors to the city’s Panama-California Exposition in 1915-16.

Apart from its high ceilings, the Santa Fe baggage space includes clerestory windows, concrete floors, a dozen old benches and a faded 8-by-10-foot green sign that seems to list long-forgotten departures. But it only seems to. The faded sign was part of a work by artist Gary Simmons for a museum special event in the space in 1997, then left behind--a playful hint, Davies says, of the possibilities ahead.

Along with the exhibition rooms, the museum addition would feature offices, a space for special events, and an artist-in-residence studio. As plans stand now, exhibitions would stay up for six months--longer than is typical at the museum’s other location.

Under the proposed deal, the city would take over ownership of the baggage building and an adjacent structure from Catellus Development Corp., and in exchange give Catellus development rights on property it owns nearby. Catellus would pay for exterior renovations to the 13,000-square-foot baggage building, and the museum would pay for interior improvements and a 14,300-square-foot building addition. Still to be decided: the length of the lease and the museum’s annual rent payment to the city--details that will determine in large part whether the museum’s move is a big gamble or an easy bet.

Public fund-raising probably won’t begin, Davies said, until the necessary city approval is in place.

He looks again at those high ceilings, which slope from 38 feet at the highest point to 13 feet at the sides. “The lowest ceilings here,” Davies said, “are the same height as the highest we have in La Jolla.”

Nationwide, the number of idle rail structures has been growing since the 1950s, when the widening freeway and highway network and increase in air travel began luring away train passengers by the millions.

In fact, many historians say the historic preservation movement in the U.S. was basically launched by a railway station--or rather, by the recriminations following the destruction of one. After preservationists failed to save New York’s Penn Station from demolition in 1963, historians say, local and state governments nationwide started strengthening their laws to preserve old buildings.

Train station aficionados won another big victory in 1991 with Congress’ passage of a measure that offers federal aid when local governments return old stations to public use. Erich Strebe, director of planning and economic development for the Las Vegas, N.M.-based Great American Station Foundation, says grants can cover as much as 80% of construction costs, and the new public use need not include train service.

The biggest railway redevelopment and restoration projects in the U.S. in the last 20 years have been retail affairs, including St. Louis’ Union Station reopening in 1985, Washington, D.C.’s Union Station face-lift in 1988 and New York’s Grand Central Station upgrade in 1998. But Strebe estimates that perhaps 250 more modest projects, from campuses to museums to offices, are in various stages across the country.

For an art museum director, just the idea of an idle train station may be enough to inspire dreams of Parisian grandeur. The Musee d’Orsay, once a 1900 rail terminal in Paris, fell idle after World War II and was derelict for decades before its 1986 conversion. Now, as the showcase for France’s most-admired Impressionist paintings and thousands of other works produced between 1848 and 1914, it is among the top tourist attractions in Europe.

But a train is still a hard act to follow. Many of this generation’s most ambitious rail-side redevelopments have been massive commercial failures, leaving entrepreneurs awash in tens of millions of dollars in red ink, and often leaving local governments responsible for enormous empty spaces that can cost a fortune to maintain.

For gory details, ask anyone who lived through the Johnson, Nixon, Ford or Carter administrations in Washington, D.C. That city’s Union Station is known these days as a spectacular redevelopment success, a station-adjacent shopping mall with thick crowds circulating among 130 shops and restaurants. But the mall, which opened in 1988, was not the first redevelopment plan for that station. In the late 1960s, as rail travel waned and crowds thinned in the 1908 terminal, federal officials decided to revive it by making it a National Visitor Center and in 1968 put the National Park Service in charge.

It was a disaster. Through a much-lamented partial renovation in the early 1970s and an opening on July 4, 1976, park service officials spent an estimated $117 million but never drew enough visitors to justify the center’s existence. Although train service continued, the visitor center closed in 1978, and soon the roof was leaking and mushrooms were sprouting in the maple floorboards. It was only after that failure that officials embraced the idea of a shopping mall.

For more recent cautionary tales, look to Kansas City, Mo., where, after $170 million in public spending on a 1999 restoration and adaptation, a science museum and neighboring enterprises in Union Station have struggled with anemic attendance and staff turnover. Or look to Indianapolis, where a mall development in that city’s Union Station closed its doors in 1997, then reopened with tenants including a Go-Kart track and a pair of alternative schools for at-risk teens.

As in San Diego, Kansas City and Indianapolis, most railway stations these days are owned by local governments or for-profit development companies that have been spun off from the old freight rail dynasties.

The biggest mistake these enterprises make when they start redoing a station or depot, says Strebe of the Great American Station Foundation, is presuming that “if you rebuild it, they will come.”

The San Diego and Los Angeles efforts are less chancy projects than most. The buildings they’ve targeted require no exotic materials or heroic restoration measures. Further, the audiences that the San Diego and Los Angeles efforts aim to serve, modern-art enthusiasts and architecture students, respectively, are about as adventurous as consumers get. But whenever people trail after trains, architects and historians agree, the transition is tricky.

For SCI-Arc, an innovative, informal institution with a slim budget and a reputation for creative improvisation, the 1907 Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe freight depot off Merrick Street wasn’t just a singular design challenge; it was a chance to make a true home.

For more than two decades, SCI-Arc had been a semi-nomadic institution, occupying provisional homes in Santa Monica and the Marina del Rey area. But under a deal made in May 2000, the 400-student school took over the graffiti-marred building and began a $6.1-million preservation and conversion effort. (Aided by a $1-million grant and a $500,000 loan from the city of Los Angeles, SCI-Arc is leasing the building with an option to buy, school officials say.)

The building stands in an old industrial precinct that city redevelopment mavens have dubbed the Artist District.

Designed by architect Harrison Albright, the depot was considered a pioneering use of reinforced concrete. While the structure was updated, students and faculty endured a year in neighboring trailers and tents that leaked when it rained.

“There are a lot of things that are really a good fit for us. One is the part of town that it’s in. We wanted to be downtown. We really see this as an opportunity to be a catalyst in the city,” says SCI-Arc faculty member Paige.

Further, Paige says, “the fact that it’s horizontal is emblematic of an attitude that we have about organizations--far less hierarchical than most institutions. The building in a certain way is a physical manifestation of that.”

But it’s not exactly luxurious. The $6.1 million ran out before anyone could buy window treatments, so students improvised shades of fabric netting and cardboard to keep the afternoon sun at bay. Most of the furniture is simple plywood. Also, as the economy turned soft, companion plans for 280 housing units next door evaporated (although possibilities remain open for an 8-acre lot next to the building).

Yet in some cases, the school’s lack of amenities has already done the neighborhood some favors. In the absence of a cafeteria, students get their coffee at nearby Cafe Metropol of the Gourmet Coffee Warehouse, which opened Feb. 4. In the absence of a campus bookstore, they buy their architecture texts at Form Zero, a design bookstore that gave up its Santa Monica address last summer and followed SCI-Arc downtown. And in the absence of on-campus student housing, scores of SCI-Arc students have joined the downtown loft-dweller population, a notable boost for a community whose numbers had dropped dramatically during the economic gloom of the mid-1990s.

The raw and eccentric nature of the old freight depot “goes with what SCI-Arc is known for,” said Johan Roa, 24, of Montebello, an incoming student who has been spending time on SCI-Arc campuses since the school was based in Marina del Rey. “It gives us freedom to do pretty much anything.”

One risk of the move is that the downtown location might scare off prospective students, whose tuition is on average $17,000 yearly. But officials say applications to the school’s graduate program are up slightly, which extends a pre-existing growth trend. Further, adds admissions director Debra Abel, she’s seen a big jump in campus visitors--”hundreds of people, from all over the world.”

Faculty member Paige calls SCI-Arc’s new home “a found object”--one with ceilings up to 29 feet high and broad views of the downtown skyline.

The campus is slightly longer than the Empire State Building is tall, with a wood shop at its south end and a library at the north end. Along the 1,200 feet in between, some stretches are one floor with high ceilings; others are two floors with metal catwalks connecting rooms.

Most of the space is set aside as studios for students, but there are also offices for 60 faculty and 30 staff. Here and there remain “unprogrammed spaces”--corners for which nobody has yet discovered a purpose.

When facilities manager Chris Seals had the building measured in detail recently, he discovered that one end is five feet lower than the other. That’s an imperceptible difference to anybody walking through the building, but for the new occupants, it’s one reminder of the wonders that can be revealed when an old building is made new.

Walking SCI-Arc’s long halls these days, “you can watch history move right in front of your face,” says architect Eric Owen Moss, who took over as director of the school in January.

It seems that just the other day, “that Santa Fe [locomotive] was pulling up. And now it’s a school,” Moss says. “It gives you a sense of the continuity of ideas, and the movement of a city over time. And you have to think, ‘Well, if it’s a school now, what might it be in another 75 years?’ ”

*

Christopher Reynolds is a Times staff writer.