It Takes a Village: Art and Gentrification at Santa Ana’s Santora Building
(article penned in March 2017)
I suppose I could start with the roof, that it’s concrete, pitched low behind stucco scalloped parapets the color of imitation sandstone. Then, maybe, I do the obvious pivot to the building’s peculiar archway entrances, that there are three of them — one center, flanked by two corner bays — at the feet of triplet towers that trisect the building’s streetside facade, facing Broadway Avenue.
I would insist that these towers are not the point-peaked, vaulted halls designed by Old World Goths. Rather, that these towers are descendents of the frenetic stucco reliefs sculpted by colonial Spanish architects, builders of the New World. That they sit low and wide, only two stories high, crowned by tangled stucco designs that sprout from the top frames of the second-story windows.
I could mention that it’s called Churrigueresque, this ornamental technique of casting building facades, that the architect Frank Landsowne indulged when drawing up the building’s schema in 1928. That the fussy stonework upon the building’s brick and mortar base miraculously survived the devastating 1933 Long Beach Earthquake, one of the few structures left standing among the leveled rubble of young downtown Santa Ana. That during the decade after the quake, during the drunken and starved twilight before the great Pacific war, the building would famously host Hollywood’s young and beautiful — Lucille Ball, Joan Davis, Jack Benny — who stuffed themselves with “the best food in Orange County” at the luxurious Daninger’s Tea Room on the second floor’s west wing. I could point to the gargoyle faces and demon dancers disguised in the cornices and curlycue clutter, who peer out onto the sidewalk, to the street itself, to the empty, refurbished storefronts across, perhaps straight at me. I may or may not be staring back.
But I won’t start there. I won’t start at the Santora’s facade because from it there is nowhere to go. While the Santora is so iconic that it is preserved as a National Historic Landmark and as a de facto hub of downtown Santa Ana, the building’s arresting looks remain arrested in time.
From the outside, it appears as it did when it first opened in 1928, its exterior painstakingly maintained, its promise as a commercial district centerpiece fixed in the year before the financial ruin of the Great Depression. Like its face, even its name — Santora — is a glamour. It evokes some mythic conquistador, shrouded in romance, handsomely laying claim to savage lands. In reality, Santora is “Santa Ana” and “Orange” phonetically squished together.
The building was the vision of the Santora Land Company, a monied conglomerate of local financiers, bankers, capitalists who dropped $150,000 (over $2 million, adjusted) to “erect a building that would be the most beautiful in the district,” according to Oliver L. Halsell, one of the Company’s stakeholders. In fact, most city historiographies laud its architecture above all else — its aesthetic bloodline reaches back to the Spanish Colonial 16th and 17th centuries and is so jarringly anachronistic that it is timeless — with oblique mentions of the once-fashionable Daninger’s Tea Room, favorite haunt of pre-war Hollywood stars. No mention of the galleria of small family-owned storefronts that lined its Broadway Avenue face. Never the shop arcade rounding its second floor loft.
The Santora, the rarefied beauty of downtown, seems always on the cusp of something, suspended like Frost at the crossroads, always bursting with some unrealized potential energy that its various owners and occupants through the years have projected upon its stone and plaster face — a face that, for all its fabulous idiosyncrasies, has all the anonymity of a blank mask. Feeling Frost-like too, in pursuit of any real sense of the Santora, I paid a visit to the Orange County Archives in Santa Ana’s Old Courthouse.
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The Old Courthouse stands grandly among the plot of street blocks collectively known as Heritage Square. It is bright brick-red and its Romanesque facade, with all its cornices and rounded arches, provides relief from the inoffensive grids of office parks and the henge of gray slab buildings that contain the daily paper-pushing of Santa Ana’s city government. Suits and homeless folks amble down the boulevard, past patina-coated twin cannons — the Vietnam War memorial placed before the old building’s front steps. Men in starched army regalia, handsome in the most prosaic sense, pose under the front doors’ archway, where inside, families speak in multiple native tongues — Spanish, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Korean — all overlapping, bouncing in reverb from the floor tiles, to the wrought-iron banisters, to the high-vaulted ceiling, the Tower of Babel in toppled-over Jenga blocks. They issue passports here, marriage licenses too. Under the choral chatter of immigrant families, the click-clack of a bride’s slingback heels matches in step with her groom’s square-toed oxfords. They’re riding the wave of newlywed, officially-notarized euphoria, and in their wake the witnesses of their union follow — moms and dads hand in hand in their Sunday best, as friends snap photos.
But, lying beneath the second floor’s spirited clamor — the small, everyday instances evincing that the bureaucracy does, in fact, work — the Archives and its caretakers sit stuck in time. While the second floor boasts the immediate results of the ongoing project that is the city of Santa Ana, Susan Berumen and Chris Jepsen sit one floor below among a trove of old stacks of marriage licenses, file-folders of hand-sorted documents, the notarized unknowns of decades past. They are the prefects of the Orange County Archives, a repository of property records, birth certificates, scrolls of tax arcana much too old to be kept in the Hall of Records, where the bookkeepers’ boss, Hugh Nguyen, the city Clerk-Recorder runs a less analog operation. Less paper-reamed file cabinets, more humming Intel servers; less first edition books, more last Excel software updates. Most of the records stored in the Archives date from before 1960, ranging back to the turn of the century when William Spurgeon — one of Santa Ana’s incorporators — leased that first raw patch of wilderness. The second floor hosts the celebrations and issues the papers, but, as the years pass and marriages endure or run their course, and immigrants bore deeper roots in the city, all proof of their persistence will, somehow, find its way to the first floor of the Old Courthouse to room 101, preserved in paper.
But time does not move in such broad gestures. Time slogs on, unconcerned, treating us in granular turns, increments that are recorded, at least, by the bookkeepers. Deed transfers, name changes, divorces, newspaper clippings of city council minutes, mortgages and bankruptcies. The textures of public life beneath the public square.
Like most historical places, perhaps as a consequence of manipulating time itself, the day passes differently here. You can easily fall into wormholes, timewarped, enthralled by portals to lives not your own — from the mundanity of city life from the vantage of low-level city officials and their dreams as to what Santa Ana could become, to the fruition of these dreams and their consequent frictions.
And it isn’t long before you’re swimming in criss-crossed dates, scrambled records scalloping your tabletop, like an almanac spilled over.
I can’t help but ponder the archives’ impending digitization. What will change? What will stay the same? Susan and Chris sit behind their low oak desks, eyes fixed on blocky Dell monitors running 5 generations behind the latest. They browse news clips on Yahoo and MSN and AOL with an outdated Internet Explorer window running Flash video, on a Microsoft OS at least 200 rounds of software optimization behind. Even the hyperbolic time compression of the web — perhaps the largest communal archive ever compiled — cannot resist the paperback inertia of the Archives and its collective gravity well of documents.
It is here, among the stacks, where I find the few articles that mention the Santora Arts Building. And yes, expectedly, by virtue of its architecture, it graces black and white two page spreads of dossiers detailing Southern California’s modernist colonial buildings. The record seems to jump from the shuttering of Daninger’s Tea Room in 1944 to the mid-to-late 1980s, when the Santora — among other iconic downtown buildings — piqued the interest of an emerging class of local real estate developers. These new urbanists rode in on the cash-crests of twin waves: one of private investment and one of reliable federal grants courtesy of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, which shed red tape and made it easier for communities to allocate federal funds flexibly as block grants into city projects, given that developments adhere to the Act’s key national objectives. Some key goals: to conserve properties of historic or aesthetic import, to eliminate “urban blight”, and to revitalize blight-stricken neighborhoods by encouraging new money to move in and displace these concentrated low-income zones — the solution was dilution. The city government switched roles from that of regulator to stimulator, dissolving robust welfare programs and forming public agencies dedicated to courting private investment. This deference to the market effectively mapped out the private-public topography of Santa Ana as neoliberal utopia, prepping the veins of downtown Santa Ana for a hypodermic shot of pure capital. These developers say that Santa Ana lucked out, in some perverse way, because its core infrastructure was left behind in the post-war development boom of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s that erected master-planned bedroom cities like Irvine and Tustin to the south, Westminster, Fountain Valley and Costa Mesa the smear of suburbia to the west. On one hand, Santa Ana’s local economy remained homegrown and loyal to its working-class Mexican base who populated downtown apartment complexes and the surrounding seven barrios; on the other hand, it provided the still-water that bred an “urban blight” that was so painfully visible downtown — overcrowding, gang violence, the scourge of crack cocaine. As a result, Santa Ana’s architectural aesthetics — the Santora Building a crown jewel — remained untouched by those earlier bulldozer-happy development trends.
Developers in the 1980s discovered that “rehabilitation” netted a higher ROI than the demolish-rebuild tactics of yore. It turned out that Americans had a deep longing to feel some connection to national heritage, to graft onto some larger storied past. And what better national quilt to refurbish than untouched — albeit crumbling — downtown Santa Ana. In 1989, the Economic Development Corporation of Santa Ana began meeting monthly in a decrepit, mold-soaked crack-den chapel — what had become of the Santora Building. And the following year, the Santa Ana Council of Arts and Culture met for the first time under the leadership of Don Cribb, who would turn this place into a city, a fully-fledged city with a distinct center, a distinct culture, by manufacturing what all great cities up and down the golden coast had.
They would weaponize art.
“What is it that draws people to Laguna Beach, parts of Los Angeles, San Francisco?,” asks Don Cribb in a 1994 essay called “How the Arts are Helping to Save Santa Ana.” “Is it not the cultural districts with the unique restaurants and shopping opportunities? It is often the arts that spawn or sustain these areas and are a constant presence.” The redevelopment corporation, under the aegis of the city, bought this vision of a culture-led downtown investment. Cribb, who reviled growing up in crime-ridden Santa Ana, laments what he perceives as the end of a city’s natural cyclical decline that “drove important prosperity from the community,” the axial racism of White Flight defused by the colorless language of a free market. It made sense then that the colorblind “arts” would make Santa Ana palatable and draw that prosperity back.
Cribb imagined an enlightened socius and its benefactors: advertisers, interior designers, artists and their dealers, writers and their agents, software engineers, new media workers, of course architects, professionals, the well-to-do intelligentsia of the “creative class.” Fixated on grafting SoHo onto Santa Ana, Cribb’s dream would ultimately culminate as the Artists Village — a mixed-use urban center packed with studios and condos, galleries, handcrafted bric-a-brac, cafes, late-night bar scenes and restaurants, the amenities of any city’s arts district. Never mind the rhythms of an indigenous downtown already established long before this centralized beautification project: La Quatro, Fourth Street, just a block to the east, the predominantly Hispanic stretch of downtown businesses where since 1916, seamstresses have billowed quinceañera and wedding dresses to sequined life, where the mango ladies have lined their antojito stalls with spiced fruits like gems, where Mexican entrepreneurs have set up shop in storefronts when no other developer would even drive through the area. No, La Quatro and its bustling businesses, according to the rubric of redevelopment, were non-entrepreneurial, too alien for the city’s fantasy urbanite — the young professional, upwardly mobile and comfortably middle to upper-middle class, hip, childless, an innovator. White. Cribb and the new urbanists on the redevelopment committee set their sights beyond the barrio, to the village — The Artists Village.
Cribb continues, “If we could establish an atmosphere for the artists, where the real blood of the creative world flows, we would develop an interactive space with a legitimate heartbeat.” And just one year after dreaming out loud, in 1995, Cribb’s Council of Arts and Culture cut the ribbon for a newly renovated building, a transplanted heart to pump “the real blood of the creative world” for the downtown renaissance, a “legitimate” heart conveniently already branded a cutesie portmanteau the likes of SoHo, SoMa, Nolita: the Santora Arts Building.
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The Santora is best understood three floors below the smeared colors of its central glass skylight panes, two floors below the carpeted arcade of galleries and offices and studio spaces, down those creaky floorboard steps, and one floor below the oxblood terrazzo lobby that opens to Broadway Avenue — in the basement. And to understand the basement means to understand its past tenants: the artists who once called the basement home.
If the Santora’s facade is its mask — its Jungian persona, the outward-facing impression of the space — then, tucked away from the daylight eyes passers-by, obscured by the facade’s self-insistence, the Santora’s basement is the Jungian shadow — the generative impulse, animalistic, repressed, unknowable Truth. At least, this is what Matthew Southgate says as he gazes at the building across the street, his eyes squinting over a craft pilsner, his third so far. He switches registers, regresses, now invoking adulterated Freud to characterize the structure: the basement harbors id, while the second floors answers to the managerial ego. The face, sublime and original, seats the super-ego, righteous and critical. He sips, rips a hoppy burp. Matthew is an artist. He used to work out of the Santora.
A Santa Ana native, he, like so many squarely upper middle class Orange County teens breaking into the hazy dawn of the early 1990s, spat MTV-malaise from his second-story bedroom window at the drag of McMansion suburbia. Orange County was always a place to escape for this misfit, always a point of departure. An education with San Francisco Jesuits at University of SF and a few years making a name for himself in the Bay Area art scene found him back in the Southland, due to the foggy city’s incessant rent hikes for one, but also because he’d been hearing promising word of Santa Ana’s Artists Village making rounds — that it was actually dope, and that there was serious money circulating — people were buying. That rent was pocket lint. And so, through some curatorial connections, Matthew snagged a few vacancies — one at the uber-hip Orange County Center For Contemporary Art, a couple at smaller galleries that peppered the freshly minted arts district — to make his first moves back home, and, unknowingly at first, heeded the new urbanists’ sirensong of downtown rejuvenation.
It is the spring of 2007 and Matthew Southgate stands before a subterranean art gallery, the very first patrons see once they descend the short flight of stairs to the Santora’s basement. In his hands, a bone-white packet of papers — the lease for the studio space. His name and initials splash the pages and resemble the calligraphic stonework that wreaths the building’s face — tightly curled, exuberant script. After years of schmoozing, boozing, folding himself in with the village artist community — finding his rhythm in the Don Cribb’s art scene heartbeat — Matthew was tapped by a retirement-bound gallery owner to sublease her space, this piece of prime real estate at the hub of the Village, for the discounted rate of a sublet. “Of course it was a big deal but it didn’t register at the time,” Matthew says. He wasn’t exactly a greenhorn, having opened and hosted his own shows across the county, making his reputation known and respected. Likewise, his new basement neighbors were nearly all old friends he’d likely already broken bread and uncorked wine with. Matthew named his project Studio del Sotano — literally, basement studio. Purposefully generic, without the shroud of entendre and specificity of ego, the walls of Studio del Sotano expanded and contracted like an aortic valve, circulating all the basement’s elements. “Eclectic,” says Matthew. “That’s the word, yeah.” Other artists who occupied the Santora echo “eclectic,” with wistful eyes, when asked to describe the Santora’s atmosphere. “Organic” and “spontaneous” are systematically used as well, and tumbled from mouths with the same nostalgia, perhaps a gentle chuckle too, at some hazy memory. Matthew remembers the Santora building that never closed for the night, that always teemed with artists — friends — chin-deep in flow states or anxious catatonia, either way disappearing into their crafts. He remembers drunken tristes on the palette-stained checkerboard floor, against murals, on paint-wet canvases, the clinking of spent bottles of Zin. The vibrancy of a conservatory in the dead of night: half-nude actors conjuring scenes while designers fussed about costumes, moonstruck acoustic guitarists plucking ballad chords to jazz birds, the drum n’ bass beats of pop-up electronic dance parties one night, gutter-punk mosh pits the next, chaotic collaboration. Heady tête-à-têtes among those emboldened by jugs of well wine. Getting stoned on the roof like gargoyles. Or out in the back alley, by the dumpsters. “It wasn’t obscene or decadent,” Matthew insists. “It was liberated.” This prevailing ethos took root in the renovated Santora years before Matthew took paint to Studio del Sotano’s storefront name plaque — the unspoken ad hoc code of artists’ communes since the first bohemia: art, for its own noble pursuit.
Sort of.
Matthew’s memories tease bohemia from the imagination — but a one-to-one comparison is too fraught, the analogy too reductive. The place was not without controversy beyond the illicit drug use. One of Matthew’s neighboring gallery owners was accused of sexually harassing multiple women and drunken underage girls during an event held on March 8, 2011 by Grrl Fair, an artists’ collective. Though some members of the collective filed a police report, the accused was never officially charged. And though most Santora artists knew about the incident, and that these accusations were not the first of their kind, their mouths remained shut, to keep intact the Santora’s reputation as a cultural hub and gallery space. Even then, the basement studio and its fellow tenants were never a wellspring of high art, not a memory palace sedimented by a communal history. Rather, it existed moment to moment always negotiating the contentious cultural identity that results from making art while satisfying the earthly coil of the market, where art is stock and reputation is everything — the paradox of the the master-plan redevelopment helmed by new urbanists.
It was phase one of imagineering a Downtown Santa Ana: to deploy the Santora — a repurposed retail arcade — as a mopped-up atelier, with a suite of city policies to contrive an arts district around this arbitrary centerpiece of a city corridor where men strapped with glocks and sacks of dope skulked their gangs’ turf perimeter nightly, where enterprising women sucked on cigs ’til dawn as they scoped out johns. The Santora artists, though, unwittingly executed their job as laid out by the city’s new urbanist redevelopment regime. In exchange for a finger on the city’s purse-strings, the artists played cultural intermediaries for the creative city — greenlighting the district as revitalized, ready for patronage and capital investment. They stretched norms circumscribed by middle-class possibility beyond beige swaths of suburbanization, luring the young and like-minded with the pro lifestyle of metropolitan aesthetes. The artists spun cultural capital — purveyed golden strands of “cool” — and gilded the blighted barrio, until around them a Village rose: bistros, boutiques, artisan cocktail bars, and beer-gardens sprouted from cracks in the sidewalk to cater to a new consumer cohort — the mobile middle and high income classes.
The artists’ off-kilter taste-making, through the alchemy of real estate speculation and commerce, inflated property values with what was effectively a shift in optics and shuffled police patrols. Downtown’s “walkability” quotient rose and steadied middle-class jitters: the imagined community of relatively affluent cultural literates could finally walk about the Village, gallery-hop, hang out past 8:00 p.m. But, these small changes were the first few hairline fractures at the faultline of the growing Artists Village — foreboding a demographic shift ultimately evinced by the displacement of low-income residents, notably the incremental evictions served to the overwhelmingly Latino residents of the apartment complex across from the Santora. Now the units have been refurbished, rebranded the Artists Village Apartments, laid out and priced with the young urban professional (“Work and play!”) in mind. So it goes. So much for dilution.
It wasn’t some Faustian bargain on the part of the artist tenants at the Santora to stoke the slow burn of gentrification. Nor were they naive to similar patterns reshaping city centers the world over — especially Matthew, who dodged the Bay Area rent boom before San Francisco’s housing issue got exponential. But in the seven years that Matthew kept the doors of Studio del Sotano propped open were as if he’d been sucked into the edge of a churning whirlpool he could have never avoided. He’d soon realize that the very artist’s colony he’d helped establish, the enriched Downtown he’d curated to “cool,” swore no allegiance to him or to his community.
It started in late 2010, with the garish plastic box-frame signs the building’s owner and artists’ landlord, real estate tycoon Mike Harrah, installed on the Santora’ facade. They advertised Harrah’s sports bar venture, Original Mike’s, its jumbotron screens and karaoke nights. “It was ugly, and not just aesthetically. They didn’t even showcase any of the galleries or artists in the building itself,” Matthew says. The signs proved potently what Matthew had known all along — that the Santora and its tenants were expendable, or at least peripheral to the surge in Santa Ana’s nightlife scene. In the years before, the artists had grinned and bore Harrahs’ neglect that kept the Santora in a state of disrepair — threadbare carpets, ceilings streaked brown with water damage, a terminal termite infestation, the grime-pocked bathrooms. “He was a slumlord,” Matthew says of the absentee owner. But Harrah’s neglect also allowed for the Santora to become a veritable artist underground, beyond direct managerial control. All the same, as the building languished rent crept up, tenants were priced out, and Matthew — kept insulated from the increasing rates by his sublease — saw the basement change from artist underground to activist hotbed.
Matthew, a self-described lone wolf, would play diplomat in this emerging community of merchant-artist-activists with Studio del Sotano, the artistic nucleus of the Santora, as its political center. The studio hosted the homegrown Artists Village Alliance of Santa Ana, a motley crew of Villagers who demanded a dedicated liaison between the city council and the Village. They contended that they resuscitated downtown Santa Ana with culture and most saliently, capital, and demanded a seat at the table with developers and land-owners, who they saw as inducing a “Lagunization” of the Village — sidelining the concerns of local artists for a hip, expensive nightlife scene that ironically displaced the very artists that inspired its existence. They wanted in on the boom of new-wave gentrification. But the group could not find their footing on the slippery terrain where art meets market meets the state. Overlapping the hyper-local concerns of the Alliance, the national Occupy movement took root in the fertile ground of the Santora basement. It was a partnership that made sense: the Great Recession tightened belts around artists’ necks, and Occupy supplied the simple antagonistic language of a unified 99% against a cabal of state-sanctioned elites — the unequal relationship of the landlord and tenant scaled-up. Local immigration activists from El Centro Cultural de Mexico added another layer of complication to the fight for the Santora. Because here, in the basement, the fight for the Santora was a fight to define complicated Santa Ana itself.
The center did not hold. According to Matt, “Hashing out the history of the world every week wears you out.” The Alliance dissolved into the chorus of protests — radicals decried the Alliance agenda’s moderate, incrementalist approach to effecting change; Mexican and Chicano artists found greater affinity with Santa Ana’s immigrants rights movement; others defected as developer-apologists who proselytized the gospel of whipping the Artists VIllage into shape with the redemptive power of retail. Tenants continued to drop off, a slow erosion.
A new coalition, The United Artists of Santa Ana, formed in 2012 in direct response to the potential sale of the Santora to Irvine’s Newsong church, a modern Christian ministry that imagined the space as hallowed ground. The coalition framed Newsong’s acquisition of the Santora as an inquisition of the Artists Village, doubting the compatibility of organized religion and offbeat bohemia. The sale fell through, due in large part to the media stink stirred up by the coalition who insisted that the Santora building be expressly used for the arts. It was a brief moment of victory, hope rays peeking out at the artists. But, undercutting the dramatic aesthetics of the win were the entrenched realities of real estate and government. In 2001, city council entered a development agreement with Mike Harrah, footing $450,000 of a renovation bill with the stipulation that for the next ten years, 80% of the Santora had to be occupied by artists. This clause was the only paper-proof protection that Santora’s artists had from the city. Coinciding the clause’s expiration was Governor Jerry Brown’s 2011 order to dissolve all California redevelopment agencies — those regulatory public-private bodies that originated places like the Artists Village and provided them an official channel to influence the tides of urban policy. With oversight dissolved, gentrification became the pet project of free market forces. It was only a matter of time before Harrah found another to purchase the beautiful, decaying Santora.
In the meanwhile, the artists celebrated. On a balmy evening in July 2012, the Coalition threw the Santora a Roaring ‘20s-themed 84th birthday bash, a thinly veiled victory parade that endeavored to show the community and city council that artists animated the Santora — not real estate developers — and that they deserved protecting. A peculiar dissonance hung over the revelry — Clara Bows and Charlie Chaplins danced to a DJ’s decidedly 21st century set; a pop-up speakeasy dispensed Prohibition-era cocktails to taco-stuffed hipsters and flappers; in front of a no smoking sign, a jazz ensemble jammed new melodies out of old standards. The party celebrated the preservation of the Santora’s 84-year history, a narrative consolidated 20 years ago — when the Artists Village was just Don Cribb’s hypothetical cultural colony — by revisionist redevelopers as a marketing campaign that smoothed the tension of new beginnings into commodified uniqueness. To match its distinct architecture, the redevelopment corporation crafted Santora’s origin story, a redemptive golden past to justify the anaesthetic “urban renaissance.” The Santora was 83 going on 84 going on 20, a disorienting festival that uprooted the building from its contested past and precarious future. Instead it stood as backdrop, subsidiary to the spectacle of consumption: the martini bar, the bar and grill, the family restaurant (“We serve beer and wine!”), the shoe boutique/art gallery, the streetwear boutique/art gallery, the cafe/art gallery where crowds of young, costumed patrons accumulated. “It was authentic because it was organized by artists for artists, without excluding the entire community,” says Alicia Rojas, a founding leader of the Coalition and head party planner. “Getting more money into the Village was always a good thing especially for the small business owners. The Santora brought a community together that night, like it always did.”
And who’s to say that the experiences of those middle-class partiers and passers-by that night weren’t authentic? A neatly packaged simulation of cultural authenticity shaped by overarching market and state forces that map historic downtowns into surveilled, secured, and seductive tourist zones — is this not just the new authentic of a post-industrial city? The authentic lives of a privatized public, the commerce community, the new urban middle-class and its aspirants — stroller-pushing moms sipping green juice, some rising corporate suits sifting through emails, graying hipsters flicking through some dense L.A. Times feature on their tablets, MacBookish students flurrying fingers on keyboards, all tracked on the same Wi-Fi network. Either taking note of or else willfully ignoring the city’s austere gaps in public services, and the conspicuous absence of many Latinos at all in these places, basking in the lifestyle of Nuevo Santa Ana.
But, as with any city, the right to lay claim to “authentic” urban experience is always under active debate. That night, in the basement, Matthew, Alicia, and their fellow Santora artists officially revealed a mural they’d worked on for the past few months to the applause of Santa Ana city council and the mayor, who no doubt saw the moment as ripe for a photo-op. “It was a real communal effort. Everyone got their input heard and included,” said Matthew, who is credited as the piece’s creator. Called “Surreal Santora,” the mural washed an entire wall with a dreamy portrait of the Santora in the landscape of some Dali reverie. Its composition called to memory that scene in “The Wizard of Oz,” where Dorothy and the three members of her found family skip arm in arm on that iconic yellow road that snakes up to the Emerald City, which rises in spires on the horizon. Oz’s yellow bricks were rendered the black and grey checkered floor of the Santora’s basement in a precise optical illusion, so that, from the very front, you felt as if you could skip right into the painting. Against the burning backdrop of an orange sunset — or sunrise, depending on who looked — stood those green spires, covered by a facade this time, the face of the Santora. Like its subject, the mural was arresting and its beauty demanded attention. Some might even have read its vibrancy as a sort of hopefulness that signalled a secure future for the artists that called the Santora home. But, to Matthew, the mural held deeper, more ominous meaning. “The green spires represent the power of money, which support the thin facade of the building, which is the Santora. Its influence depends on the shared illusion that money has power to keep the Santora from crumbling,” said Matthew, citing inspiration from classical readings of “The Wizard of Oz” as a potent political parable about the illusory influence of the American dollar after the gold standard was abandoned; the Santora leaned on the unstable infrastructure of capital.
Just nearly 18 months after the mural’s inauguration, a Newport Beach-based real estate mogul named Jack Jakosky purchased the Santora for nearly $6 million. He immediately painted over the basement mural, contracting a team of anonymous painters to splash white paint over the artists’ shared vision without any attempts at discussion or diplomacy with the Santora’s tenants. “It was basically him saying, ‘Fuck you, this is my building and I’ll do whatever I want with it’,” said Matthew. Not long after this, Matthew himself was priced out of the Santora, along with most of his old neighbors. Jakosky took white paint to the Studio del Sotano’s logo as well. Though Jakosky renovated the ground and second floors with desperately needed fixes, he gutted the basement and coated all of its walls in off-white paint. Its checkered floor was washed, now gray like concrete or still sewer water. A curfew was established — get out by 10:30 or you’d be arrested for trespassing. Surveillance cameras were installed, dotting the walls like plastic sentries. And the crowd that once enjoyed their nights at the building dispersed into other city galleries, to other cities in general, or else exclusively online, a great diaspora of the artists that once occupied the Santora.
Herald of the Artists Village movement, the Santora is multiplicitous, a changeling building whose form itself does not change, but whose function yields to its observer — a trick of the light and memory. It is a stonecraft ode to colonial Spain, a high-Baroque mandala, erected with the blueprints of a Depression-era mini-mall, not of a grand cathedral. It is the vague recollection of some ideal urban past, a fantasy that gropes for a history that might legitimize the gutted, modernized interior of a building that was never meant to, necessarily, be. It is the scourge — a condemned crack-den; the garden — a creative commune; and the deliverance — a corporate conference room. It is public’s community; it is private’s commodity. “The Mothership,” as Matthew calls it. It is bohemia with rent. Hierarchy in latitudes. The artist, the consumer, and the entrepreneur.
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“All right, quiet on set!”
“Act one, scene nine, take one.”
Clack! Rolling.
The student film crew settles into focused silence — eyes and lenses, ears and boom mics train on the scene unfolding for the very first take of the very first day of filming.
The crew does not speak under orders, but the assistant director’s call for a quiet set is unintelligible to the rhythm of life around the Santora Arts Building. The Santora’s floorboards whine under the crew’s and actors’ feet as they climb the lacquered stairs to the second floor landing, while the door of a lawyer’s office space clatters shut like a snare drum phrase. Out of the hair salon-cum-art gallery called Atilano hums the atonal whir of a Brazilian blowout over a circuit party dance track. The low rumble of rush hour traffic, a bass line of rev’d engines on asphalt, undercuts the carefree exchanges between pedestrians enjoying the Friday afternoon. But the crew pushes onward. The $500 they dropped only booked the space until 6:00 p.m., and director Sam Crainich doubts she can ferrett more funds from the film department. Scoring the discounted rate was hassle enough. So, she remains nonplussed by the ambient residue of business-as-usual at the Santora. Not that there’s much business transacting here, as usual — never mind the muted blowdryer-electronica from Atilano’s storefront, which is usually shuttered closed, lights dimmed, stereo stopped, except for this afternoon’s unfortunately timed appointment. Otherwise, this is a sleepy building, colored only by incidental sounds, the sounds of comings and goings and whatever streetside excesses seep into the grand lobby of the Santora.
The film’s called “River” and it’s Sam’s senior thesis project. In broad strokes, it’s a story about River, a fringe figure that is neither and both man and woman, a non-binary artist in a world of hyperbolic state-policed binary. Naturally, River’s tribe lies in the underground, the shadow-world of bohemia, where black and white, in and out, man and woman, smear into the other and allow for a sort of emergent, expansive art to happen, a suspect art that the powers that be want totally, undoubtedly erased.
Today’s scene has River and a close friend attend a gallery opening curated by sanctioned tastemakers — a thinly veiled propaganda exhibition, tailored to the all-seeing eye of the state. And Sam is blind to her scene’s historical resonance. “I mean, I knew the Santora was used once-upon-a-time exclusively for art,” she admits. “But I didn’t know about the evictions and all that drama.”
So, why did she choose the building in the first place?
“I don’t know…,” she demures. “I just knew I had to film here when I first saw it. It’s gorgeous. The building just begs to be filmed, don’t you think?”
