Artists Maintain Lofty Demands

School leaders want to unload books, pencils and desks there.

But first, those who live and work in the artists’ loft district in downtown Los Angeles are unloading on school officials.

Painters, sculptors and other artists on Sunday condemned a plan by the Los Angeles Unified School District to build a $23-million central warehouse near the center of the city’s burgeoning arts district.

District administrators contend the proposed 250,000-square-foot distribution facility would save taxpayers money by centralizing the shipping of supplies to hundreds of school campuses.

But artists say the 10 1/2-acre project would wipe out a thriving colony that revitalized a forgotten part of Los Angeles that others had written off 20 years ago.

They assert that if the warehouse is built as planned, the district’s creative atmosphere would be disrupted by the hundreds of noisy trucks arriving and departing each day.

More than 1,000 artists live in 450 studio lofts carved out of formerly vacant factory buildings surrounding the warehouse site, at the southwest corner of 3rd Street and Santa Fe Avenue.

On Sunday, arts district residents mapped plans to fight the project Tuesday before the Los Angeles school board. They hope to convince officials to build the distribution center in an industrial warehouse area south of 6th Street instead.

“I made my protest signs last night. I have friends coming from San Pedro and the Valley to support us,” said Katie McArthy, who writes screenplays and mystery novels in a loft overlooking the spot where school officials want to put 50 loading docks.

Artist and designer George Rollins has lived since 1978 in a sprawling penthouse loft atop an 82-year-old building down the street from the warehouse site. He said sculptors, painters and others rescued what had been a blighted and abandoned section of town by creating what they now call the “downtown arts district.”

So impressed were city officials that a law was passed legalizing residences in the industrial zone.

“This area was in a steep decline. Buildings were half-vacant. Nobody wanted them,” Rollins said Sunday. “We turned the area around with no government grants or Community Redevelopment Agency subsidies. We’re the only people downtown who don’t want to move.”

However, painter David Trowbridge, a loft resident for 13 years, said rumbling refrigerator trucks and tractor-trailers beneath his studio window would chase him out.

Ten-year resident Qathryn Brehm, a painter, said the noise and fumes would force her to pack up her brushes and paints, too.

Conceptual artist Tom Nagano described the artists’ colony as “a spiritual center, an urban village where people walk places.”

Added Richard Hudson, who runs a small theater that showcases local artists’ acting and playwriting talents: “This thing would gut the heart of the arts community here.”

The warehouse site, which was proposed as an MTA subway station site before underground transit development was scaled back, is vacant except for an abandoned, quarter-mile-long former Santa Fe railroad freight dock built in 1906. The land is owned by a private company.

Artist and shop owner Joel Bloom, a 13-year resident, said colony residents have long sought to have the landmark freight building refurbished and turned into additional studio lofts and galleries.

Neon artist Lili Lakich unfurled a protest poster she made that suggests the school district warehouse would “bring drugs, pollution and prostitutes” to the arts district.

Lakich has owned her electric art studio about a block from the warehouse site for 18 years. She complained that school officials never informed property owners of the development plan.

School officials say they issued a mid-September notice announcing that an environmental impact report on the warehouse development plan was being prepared.

Erik Nasarenko, a spokesman for the school district, said that assessment will determine whether changes in the development plan can be made that will limit noise and traffic congestion. It may also be possible for the development to save the 1906 Santa Fe building and incorporate it in its design, he said.

He said the warehouse plan is a result of an outside consultant’s 1995 analysis of school system distribution procedures that recommended consolidation and modernization.

But “this is not a fait accompli. The district is not wedded to this site,” he said. “Development of this site is not a foregone conclusion.”

Nasarenko said the “heavy industrial” zoning of the corner and its proximity to freeways and rail yards make it look like an ideal place for a school warehouse.

But, he said, the artists “are bringing legitimate issues forward.”