Something’s happening in Culver City

They are neighbors here on Main Street, Culver City:

At 3850 Main is artist and architect Gregg Fleishman, creator of geometrical plywood constructions ranging from ergonomic chairs to structural scale models for geodesic buildings. Fleishman, a native Angeleno who has spent the better part of his 57 years in Culver City, has been working magic with birch wood at this address for more than 10 years.

Just a few doors away at 3830 Main is Cliff Benjamin, co-owner of the Western Project art gallery, a bright, airy space that opened less than a year ago. The gallery’s most recent show, of work by Carole Caroompas and Tom Sanford, opened Saturday.

One Main Street business owner is a Culver City lifer, the other, new in town. But from their downtown vantage point, both Fleishman and Benjamin are aware that Culver City -- once known as an affordable bedroom community with movie industry connections and not much else -- is the L.A. area’s newest haven for the visual and performing arts.

Benjamin, 49, formerly director of the Mark Moore Gallery at Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station, has lived in Los Angeles since 1968 but acknowledges he was only vaguely aware of Culver City when he and Western Project co-owner Erin Kermanikian started looking for a place to open their own gallery.

“I was one of the first people to say, ‘Oh, no one would ever come to Culver City,” Benjamin admits. “I looked all over the city. I went from Chinatown to West Hollywood, from the beach to downtown. But then I drove up Washington Boulevard and ended up on Main Street and I said: ‘Oh my God, this is it.’ ”

“It felt like Los Angeles 20, 25 years ago; it didn’t feel congested,” Benjamin continues. “The first time my partner and I came over here, walking down the street in the middle of summer, we said: ‘This sort of feels like Palm Springs, it’s so calm, and the streets are so wide.’ ” Benjamin also liked the idea of being near Culver City’s internationally known landmark of weird science, the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

Possibly the best known Culver City arts venue is the 11-year-old Jazz Bakery, a nonprofit jazz theater in the Helms Bakery building. But with a recent influx of at least nine new or relocating contemporary art galleries, as well as the Nov. 7 opening of Center Theatre Group’s Kirk Douglas Theatre, it’s hard to deny that something new is happening when it comes to the arts.

Even the area’s new Trader Joe’s, open for less than a year on Culver Boulevard, has created a niche to display works by local artists. “We think it’s pretty cool,” says store employee Alex Calder.

In terms of economics, the rarefied world of high-end art galleries and the ever-struggling community of nonprofit performing arts institutions, such as the Douglas Theater, couldn’t be more different.

A CERTAIN SYNERGY

Gallery owners say they are moving to the Culver City area to take advantage of the large, relatively inexpensive warehouse spaces the city provides; they say their well-heeled, international clientele will find them wherever they go.

By contrast, Culver City performing arts institutions like the Douglas -- or the 6-year-old Culver City Public Theatre, which provides free, outdoor performances during the summer at Dr. Paul Carlson Memorial Park -- are often more dependent on the cooperation and financial support of city government. With the aid of the city, Kirk and Ann Douglas, son Michael and other private donors, Center Theatre Group, a resident company of downtown L.A.’s Music Center, has spent $10 million to turn the old Culver Theater movie house into a 300-seat playhouse, including an upper-level classroom and rehearsal space. The “adaptive reuse” project was done by Culver City’s Steven Ehrlich Architects.

Still, both gallery owners and performing arts proponents say that a certain synergy has developed in town that fosters the arts as a whole. “There is definitely a symbiosis there; one creates a buzz for the other,” says Kellee Fritzal, economic development manager for the Culver City Redevelopment Agency.

Says Gordon Davidson, Center Theatre Group’s artistic director-producer: “One of the most amazing things has been the cooperation and participation of both the Culver City Redevelopment Agency and the City Council; without their willingness to participate, this wouldn’t have happened. Plus they put in considerable money themselves, from various sources and pockets, and that pleased Kirk and Ann Douglas; they didn’t feel like they had to do it all themselves.”

Davidson also likes the central location. “It is very accessible to what one might think our regular audience is -- Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Santa Monica -- but it also has Baldwin Hills and Ladera Heights on the other side; that automatically expands the diversity of the audience.

“It’s not quaint like Pasadena is quaint, it’s not ‘old world’ like that, but its scale seems right,” Davidson continues. “It’s not encrusted with that history that can be wonderful, but can also be a mold that you have to fit into.”

Gallery owners and performing arts groups say they also like the mix of commercial and light industrial spaces the city provides. Such structures not only attract artists and performers hungry for gallery or rehearsal space, but also have served as a magnet for architecture, design, entertainment and technology firms, which tend to create visually interesting structures in which to work.

The most visible example of that is the Hayden Tract, home to several contemporary buildings designed by Culver City architect Eric Owen Moss, whose offices are on Higuera Street. Area arts-watchers say they like the raw-edged blend of commercial creativity with the fine arts.

SUPPORT IS STRONG, BUT NEW

Other Culver City architects are Pugh+Scarpa, HOK and Ehrlich, the firm responsible for the Douglas Theatre project. Ehrlich’s Washington Boulevard offices represent the kind of creative renovation Culver City officials love: The firm is headquartered in the former California Municipal Club House, built in 1917 as a dance hall and community center. The building later became a mortuary and had been boarded up for years when architect Steven Ehrlich purchased it in 1998.

Although Culver City’s reputation for supporting the arts is strong, it is also relatively new. One local gallery owner says the city has had to struggle to erase its reputation among artists as a “kind of 1950s municipality” whose government “is an old, white boys’ club with no interest in the arts.”

Artist and 25-year Culver City resident James Dorsey describes the city’s earlier attempts at supporting artists as well meaning but woefully disorganized.

In 1996, Dorsey applied to be part of a Summer Gallery Series, an adjunct to the popular Summer Sunset Music Festival, and was invited to exhibit his work in a city-sponsored solo show at the recently renovated Culver City Hall.

“There was a lady assigned to me from the city, I don’t remember her name anymore, and assistants were going to be there for the event -- but when my wife, Irene, and I got there, there was no one there; we set up everything ourselves,” Dorsey says.

“Then came early evening, and we were supposed to shut things down, and Irene and I realized we were the only people at City Hall. I felt very strange about that, so I called the police. A black-and-white showed up, and the cops told us we couldn’t leave, we had to lock up City Hall. We were furious and left at this point -- I thought, ‘Do what you want to me, but I’m not the idiot in charge of this.’ ”

But Dorsey is beginning to see enough encouraging signs that he might soon look into doing another Culver City exhibition. “There’s a gallery that recently opened up on Washington Boulevard a block from my house, and there are banners around town advertising cafes, and the Sagebrush Cantina will be turned into an art gallery,” Dorsey says. “It’s great.”

The Cantina, on Culver Boulevard, is being renovated and taken over by the Wonderful World of Animation, a Beverly Hills dealer that exhibits and sells animation art from feature films and cartoons. The business will relocate to Culver City after the first of the year and plans to operate a restaurant on the premises.

City officials are quick to say that Dorsey would meet a friendlier city this time around. Economic development manager Fritzal says that Culver City began its quest to become a cultural destination in the early 1990s, when it launched plans to add more parking structures and leased and renovated the Ivy Substation as a performing arts center. The 1907 Mission Revival-style building had once housed a power converter that provided electricity for the Red Cars of the Pacific Railway Co.

The structure stood on land owned by Los Angeles, but Culver City leased it and spent about $2 million on its renovation and preservation as a historic site. The city makes the space available for rental, and it is often occupied by performing arts companies, including Center Theatre Group, which has used it for developmental programs.

But Fritzal says it was not until 2001, when the City Council created a cultural affairs commission, that Culver City began to establish its reputation as a city determined to invest in becoming an arts center.

The cultural affairs group has not only been aggressive in supporting development of the Douglas theater and the city’s existing performing arts institutions -- including the Debbie Allen Dance Academy and the Henry Mancini Institute -- but also has helped privately owned galleries bypass red tape or spruce up their facades or surrounding streets and sidewalks.

The city has provided grants to artists for arts programming within Culver City limits. It also partners with Sony Pictures, whose studios are in the heart of the area, to fund arts grants and programs in the city’s public schools.

Amir Fallah, 24, a master of fine arts student at UCLA, moved to Culver City 2 1/2 years ago to be near UCLA’s graduate studio on Warner Drive. During that short period, the Baltimore native says, “I’ve just seen gallery after gallery moving in.... It’s kind of exploding.

“Hollywood and Santa Monica are old places, they’ve had galleries for a while, and galleries always look for new places,” Fallah says. “It’s kind of like how it was in New York, when galleries moved from SoHo to Chelsea, and now a lot of people are moving to Brooklyn. As soon as one big name moves somewhere, everyone else kind of follows.”

Western Project’s Benjamin has observed the same thing. “There’s this art movement that happens every five to seven years; the most recent development pre-Culver City was Chinatown,” he says.

Fallah and Benjamin are not the only ones to suggest that Culver City is going Chelsea, so to speak -- and the “big name” that made the first move was Blum & Poe, a contemporary art gallery that engaged architects Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena to remodel an unused red brick warehouse on La Cienega near the 10 Freeway. They moved there from Santa Monica about a year ago.

Owners Tim Blum and Jeff Poe say their new 5,000-square-foot gallery has six or seven times more space than their former headquarters. “There was nothing down here, it was just a dead zone,” Blum says. “People were definitely like: ‘Hmmm, is that really such a smart idea, to go down south, down La Cienega?’ But we just had to trust our intuition.”

DESIGN DISTRICT

The ZIP Code is technically L.A., but to the galleries taking up residence near the intersection of La Cienega and Washington boulevards, it’s all Culver City -- although a contingent of design-related businesses in the area, led by Vincent Cullinan, owner of Classic Tile & Mosaic, are making efforts to dub the area the La Cienega South Design District.

Also on the list of new residents: Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, which moved to West Washington Boulevard from its mid-Wilshire home in January; Sandroni Rey, which relocated from Venice to La Cienega, also in May; the Project, which left downtown L.A. and opened on Comey Avenue at Venice Boulevard on Sept. 10; and BLK / MRKT Gallery, which opened about two months ago on Washington Boulevard after vacating the old Wiltern Building at Wilshire and Western.

The new Anna Helwing Gallery opened in July 2003 on La Cienega. Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, also on La Cienega, opened in May after moving south from San Francisco. The George Billis Gallery, in New York’s Chelsea district, opened a branch on La Cienega on Sept. 10.

Mary Leigh Cherry, co-owner of cherrydelosreyes gallery, which occupies a renovated tavern on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles, says that even from a few miles away, she feels like part of a new gallery neighborhood. “We have definitely noticed since last year that people are coming in and saying, ‘Where is Blum & Poe’s new space?’ The Culver City area is generating this kind of excitement.”

New York art dealer Michael Jenkins, director of Brent Sikkema gallery in Chelsea, says it didn’t take long for the East Coast to become aware of Culver City. “I went to L.A. in March to see a young artist, and I’d been to Susanne Vielmetter’s gallery on Wilshire before, and I knew she was moving, but it wasn’t until I was kind of there that I realized that Blum & Poe was around the corner, and the Project was going there. It registered that there was a little neighborhood developing,” Jenkins says.

Culver City officials hope more people from outside the area will discover their “hidden” city. They admit to a dearth of general-interest bookstores and that the area could use more retail shops and restaurants -- but declare themselves ready to expand.

“I happen to live in Pasadena, and Pasadena is so established; Culver City is more fresh, the dew is still on the grass,” says Elaine Gerety, management analyst for the redevelopment agency. “I think of Culver City as the early morning hours, all the excitement, all the wonder. This is definitely a work in progress.”