Downtown Arts District Fair Aims to Bring Loft Talent Out Into the Open

Like countless other downtown artists, craftswoman Mary Lou Ynda knows the funky warehouse-crammed area she calls home gets a bad rap among the citizens of Los Angeles.

Sandwiched between Little Tokyo and the banks of the Los Angeles River, near some pretty untidy blocks where trash tumbles in the street and the homeless wander, the Downtown Arts District near 3rd Street and Traction Avenue has been considered, well, somewhat artless.

On Saturday, artisans, entertainers and local business types set out to change that.

They gathered for the first annual Downtown Arts District Fair, a three-block mecca of food, sculpture, art and jewelry vendors as well as about 30 bands performing on two stages. The fair continues today.

“This area has earned a bad reputation and I’ve got to say that some of it has been deserved,” said Ynda, who has a loft in the area where she paints watercolors and fashions pieces she calls wolf head fetishes. “Just a few blocks away, it’s pretty much of a toilet. My car’s been broken into several times.

“But the Arts District is a safe, secure little community. We want to get the word out to people there’s a bunch of lively, die-hard artists here who deserve to be supported.”

The two-day event, co-sponsored by the Downtown Arts Development Assn. and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, features futuristic, industrial furniture as well as paintings, pottery and the occasional piece that was, frankly, hard to describe.

MTA officials, who provided booths, portable toilets and advertising banners, said their proposed nearby Metro station made them a member of the community.

At the center of this hoped-for revival is businessman Joel Bloom, 49, who owns Bloom’s General Store. The eclectic store, with its adjacent restaurant, is the unofficial heart of the area, serving about 700 artists who keep lofts there and who coined the name Arts District for their neighborhood.

Standing beneath his rustic tin-plated store sign, he said the fair was an effort to get local art out of the lofts and onto the street where it can be appreciated and sold.

“The problem is we’ve always been dismissed as that industrial area east of downtown,” said Bloom, who has lived in the neighborhood for 12 years. “Well, we’re more than that. There’s a heart here. And a soul.”

Bloom said city officials planning the nearby “Little Tokyo East” Metro station walked the area recently and “realized there was actually a thriving neighborhood here” and offered to help sponsor the arts event.

As they set up their booths Saturday morning, several artists said that it was about time the city acknowledged there was a center of such creativity in the shadow of downtown.

“We’ve never had much notoriety before, so a fair like this makes sense,” said pottery artist Scott Berry.

Once the site of several Indian communities, the area was also home to the Wolfskill Orchards and the nation’s first commercially grown orange trees in the 1820s, said Paul Mackley, director of the Wolfskill Theater, named after pioneer planter William Wolfskill.

The area became a residential hub until the advent of the railroad lines in the 1890s, when it took a decided urn toward the industrial. The arts community was founded in the 1970s when artists began flocking to the cavernous former factories.

Artists say the old hotels, a former coffee factory and deserted churches supplied inspiration for their art.

Said Tamara Long, a 39-year-old Long Beach native who has lived in the area for seven years: “These old gray buildings just evoke creativity in a person.”

While public appreciation is the ultimate goal, she called the artist colony a gritty group that would nonetheless survive.

“The artists will be here whether anyone knows about us or not,” Long said. “If the public wants to hop on the train and help support us, all the better. Do or don’t, we’re still gonna be here . “