City Breaks Ground on New Arts Center

The Canoga Park Elementary schoolchildren busily painted wooden “medallions,” their T-shirts and themselves.

The brightly colored medallions will decorate the fence of the new city-run Canoga Park Junior Arts Center at Remmet Avenue and Sherman Way, where officials gathered for a ground-breaking ceremony Thursday morning.

Eric Delgado, 10, said he was looking forward to the center’s opening in early 2001.

“You get to do art and get clay classes too,” Eric said. “I’m going to get to draw more often.”

The center will have three classrooms where people can learn watercolor painting and mask-making. It will also feature an exhibition space, a mural in its garden and a kiln for pottery.

“It’s an oasis for children to develop creative and positive ways to express themselves--not on the side of buildings, but in classrooms,” City Councilwoman Laura Chick said. “We need a place like this so our children aren’t wandering on the streets getting into trouble.”

Families and the elderly will also be able to use the arts center, Chick said.

Last year, the city purchased the building for about $235,000 in Proposition K money, part of a $25-million bond measure voters approved in 1996. The 3,000-square-foot structure, built in 1928 as a Pacific Bell warehouse and operators’ manual switching station, will be restored to its original Spanish architecture.

It will cost $1.2 million to restore the building, which was damaged during the 1994 earthquake. The city’s Cultural Affairs Department will operate the arts center.