San Pedro Artist's Community in MORE
I was hoping to get some feedback from all of our readers and loveable smart-ass word smiths of Life on the Edge about the recent cover article in the More, San Pedro.
I was very sad to hear about losing a few of our town's great artists to New Mexico and Inglewood because of the soaring rents. It's really scary to think about how it will effect many more of us in the coming months and years. I really don't want to move away from San Pedro; I love it here. Luckily, I have a studio at Angels Gate that is below the going commercial rate, but what about where I live? What happens when our rents sky rocket so high, we get pushed out? So far, the process has been very slow for me, but eventually I too will be faced with the same dilemma these other artists have been facing. Where else will artists go within Los Angeles if they can't stay here?
Artists have given the magic touch to so many great neighborhoods like Echo Park, Silverlake, Pasadena, East Hollywood, Eagle Rock, Highland park.... We start to put the cool into these places, then once Daddy Warbucks moves in, we get bupkis, and are pushed out with the working class poor, and the article touches on this ongoing phenomenon.
But the article ends with a fair dose of optimism. However, I am not so sure it's a very realistic, or inclusive stance on the artists who do not have a supplemental income. Most of the artists I know do not own property. They are not able to sell enough art to get by even if the rents weren't going up.
Marshall is quoted in the MORE as stting that art was bought hand over fist during the 1980s, but I'm not so sure this included all the artists we never heard of. I'm sure they did better than their previous average, but eventually most artists had to leave NYC too. Is it logical to think this is going to happen again with art anytime soon?
What kind of town are we looking at in a couple years from now? The lure that brought the investors down here will not be the one that made this town special in the first place. If the pioneers get the shaft and are ejected out of Pedro, then what will San Pedro be without it artists?
What do you think about this?
I was very sad to hear about losing a few of our town's great artists to New Mexico and Inglewood because of the soaring rents. It's really scary to think about how it will effect many more of us in the coming months and years. I really don't want to move away from San Pedro; I love it here. Luckily, I have a studio at Angels Gate that is below the going commercial rate, but what about where I live? What happens when our rents sky rocket so high, we get pushed out? So far, the process has been very slow for me, but eventually I too will be faced with the same dilemma these other artists have been facing. Where else will artists go within Los Angeles if they can't stay here?
Artists have given the magic touch to so many great neighborhoods like Echo Park, Silverlake, Pasadena, East Hollywood, Eagle Rock, Highland park.... We start to put the cool into these places, then once Daddy Warbucks moves in, we get bupkis, and are pushed out with the working class poor, and the article touches on this ongoing phenomenon.
But the article ends with a fair dose of optimism. However, I am not so sure it's a very realistic, or inclusive stance on the artists who do not have a supplemental income. Most of the artists I know do not own property. They are not able to sell enough art to get by even if the rents weren't going up.
Marshall is quoted in the MORE as stting that art was bought hand over fist during the 1980s, but I'm not so sure this included all the artists we never heard of. I'm sure they did better than their previous average, but eventually most artists had to leave NYC too. Is it logical to think this is going to happen again with art anytime soon?
What kind of town are we looking at in a couple years from now? The lure that brought the investors down here will not be the one that made this town special in the first place. If the pioneers get the shaft and are ejected out of Pedro, then what will San Pedro be without it artists?
What do you think about this?
Labels: art, development, planning
5 Comments:
Unfortunately what will probably happen in San Pedro is the same thing that happens with gentrification everywhere. I first saw this happen in Lowertown St. Paul in the late 70's and very early 80's. Artists inhabited lofts in old industrial and commercial buildings that were literally crumbling and leaning off their foundations, and after years spent building up a genuine community in the area, the developers and landlords said, "Wow, things are really happening in Lowertown!" and refurbished the buildings, raised the rents and essentially killed the area. This is an old story, and one that I have yet to see play out in any way that isn't very bad for the pioneers in the area.
What's disturbing about San Pedro in particular is that the people who want PROGRESS seem to think progress means making everything new and shiny and bringing in a lot of people who don't live in the area to wander around like tourists and buy things. They want to compete with places like Old Town Pasadena and Third Street in Santa Monica, and I don't really see that happening in San Pedro. Obviously people who own businesses and property in town want to make money. But there's nothing new or interesting in their desperate, cookie-cutter dreams. To get city funding to form groups to study options is cute, but nothing more than business-as-usual. And by the time they reach their conclusions and make their recommendations (some time in 2010, no doubt), everyone who makes the place interesting will be long gone, and what will we have? A Disney cruise terminal? Oh boy. Big fucking deal.
It's quite a conundrum, how to make yourself a tourist destination without becoming a Night of the Living Dead Universal Citywalk type theme park. There certainly are places that are interesting tourist destinations, but they didn't become that way overnight, and they usually weren't manufactured, they happened over time. But then Los Angeles has never been a place with a lot of patience, so this isn't too surprising.
san pedro's economic and political leaders have unleashed forces that are very, very hard to stop. there is such a thing as critical mass. if we haven't yet reached it, we're getting pretty damn close.
OK, I read the article today. The first thing that struck me about it is that the writer, Megan Bagdonas, did something that is fairly rare in newspaper journalism anywhere these days, let alone at the Daily Breeze: she analyzed the things that her interviewees said to her, noticed a pattern, and pointed that pattern out without editorializing or otherwise compromising her objectivity. Specifically, she noticed that the people who were least concerned about the economic changes in San Pedro and the effects of those changes on the arts tended to be the people who would be protected from those changes by their personal circumstances. Good work, Bagdonas.
Having tipped my hat to M.B, though, I now have to wag my finger at her for getting a few things wildly wrong. First, the Pacific Trade Center / "old Logicon building" was built in the late sixties, not the eighties. And the eighties may have been a boom time in a lot of places in America, but San Pedro wasn't one of them. Downtown was moribund, the fishing fleet was dying, longshoring hadn't bounced back yet, and few people dared to start businesses here. The Sheraton and Pacific Place (aka the Northrop Grumman building, which Bagdonas probably confused with the old Logicon) were CRA projects that were meant to infuse life into a dead downtown (they failed, but that's another issue). They were the farthest thing possible from symbols of prosperity.
You may have noticed that I haven't commented on what Marshall said about the buckets full of money spent on art in the eighties. That's because the quote in the article is so utterly divorced from any context that I have no idea whether he was trying to suggest that this is somehow going to happen in San Pedro if and when the Botox-and-stroller brigade arrives.
Anyway, that's what I thought of the article. As to what I think about the subject of gentrification and art in Pedro, you can probably guess it. San Pedro's art scene will not be rescued by yuppies with money. You'd have to be wearing rose-colored contact lenses under rose-colored glasses while huffing nitrous oxide at a petting zoo to believe anything so pollyanna-ish. Sorry to have to break this to some of you, but San Pedro in 2007 isn't the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1981. Stockbrokers are not going to start grabbing Pedro artists at random and stuffing $20,000 checks in their waistbands.
About my quote in the article - I did a rather lengthy interview with Megan that covered a lot of territory. If I recall correctly, I was referring specifically to artists in the Venice and Downtown hotspots in the eighties, not San Pedro. Many of the artists who came to San Pedro in the eighties and nineties were either fleeing those scenes, or unable to find a place for themselves in it. There was a lot of money to be made in the eighties, especially to corporate collections, or via agent sales to new money yuppies, if one was willing to do what was selling.
Carol is right - certainly art boom in the eighties didn't spread the cash around evenly. In my opinion, the boom actually had a long term negative effect, concentrating money and critical attention (often undeserved) in an elite of artists, in a matter analogous to the US economy in general.
IMBG - you'd be surprised at how well paid some of San Pedro's artists are, even today. They may not be selling their work in San Pedro, but they do live here.
My take on the whole thing is that the ACE district won't benefit live/work artists in the Downtown core, won't attract new galleries (At least not in the next ten years), but will benefit entertainment businesses, and may stimulate debate on the subject at a higher level than has existed previously.
I feel that there are only two things that can really strengthen the position of artists in the community.
The first is the successful re-development of Angels Gate. I've been working very hard to raise the bar on the quality of the exhibitions, and to re-invent the Studio Artist Program to benefit more people, and specifically those who need the benefit of a subsidized work studio most. Those efforts, along with the proper planning of Angels Gate Park (first meeting April 21 - more details to come - I'll stop shilling in a moment), can create a solid anchor that can provide a point of stability for professional artists, and large "anchor" exhibition/performance spaces that attract others to the community.
That doesn't solve the problem of live/work studios, though. Live/works are a key part of the arts economy - remember, historically artists are artisans and craftspeople, and working out of ones home (in a designated work area) is a very efficient business practice for most artists. I don't see the ACE district as being able to solve this problem. Even if the district makes it easier for people to live/work from a permitting point of view (FYI - most artists will live/work, permit or no), I don't see the ACE district as having the power to control commercial rents for a specific type of business in what will likely be a retail driven downtown. On this level the ACE district may even be counterproductive - if "entertainment" businesses start setting up shop, they will likely drive up rents more aggressively than any other type of business.
So on this second issue, I think it's imperative that we start looking at Warehouse One and the berths adjacent to it as an ideal location for artists' live/work studios. There are literally hundreds of thousands of square feet that go unused 90% of the year. The land is owned by the Port, so it can operate "outside the market" to some degree. This kind of proposal is tied to the "Whatever on the Waterfront" development, and could take years or decades to come online. But if the community really wants artists to have a permanent presence, a project like this would do it.
I've looked around - there's nowhere else in town where you can house the number of artists it takes to be a magnet for activity. There are development companies that develop live/work projects for artist, but I'm still not sold on the long term effectiveness of those projects.
Just to clarify, I wasn't claiming to have an inside line into San Pedro artists' income. I just meant that San Pedro's art scene (to the extent that there even is one) can't be compared to a scene like the LES in the early eighties, which had a huge buzz around it--not just individual artists but the scene itself--that attracted lots of yuppie dilettante money. I just can't picture some hedge fund manager saying to himself, "I just HAVE to impress my friends by getting a piece from one of those artists from the hot San Pedro scene! Now I'll get laid for sure!"
And it's not likely to become that way either, because the extreme infrastructural limitations that you pointed out will preclude the sort of critical mass that causes art communities to take off under their own power.
Yes, Warehouse One should be used for artist live/work housing, and for exhibition space and other cultural and social uses (concert space, coffeehouse, bar, etc.) as well. I think I've ranted about this here before. Things like this have been done very successfully in other cities, often using much smaller buildings, so there's no physical reason it can't be done here. Getting the Port to do it, on the other hand, will not be easy. Nor will it be easy to overcome the resistance of the usual suspects in the local business community, some of whom will probably object to this kind of use for the simple reason that there wouldn't be any money in it for them.
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