• Democracy for California
• http://www.democracyforcalifornia.com

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San Pedro's Shifting Canvas
Artists wonder if they'll still be welcome as their sanctuary becomes increasingly gentrified.

By John Balzar, Times Staff Writer
December 10, 2006

Artist, art instructor and art gallery director, Ron Linden is talking about a sense of place. He is talking about the curious community of San Pedro at the far reach of Los Angeles and its appeal to the sensibilities of artists who have clustered there over the years.

What he doesn't have to talk about is what you can see for yourself: This is an off-center kind of community at land's end, bohemian, ethnic, inexpensive, historic and just a little shabby — the mightiest industrial landscape in Los Angeles and, at the same time, among the most scenic.

In other words, it's an inspired place for artists.

Linden takes his time as he talks. On this weekday, there isn't a single customer in the atrium gallery. It's so quiet here that you cannot miss the distant sound of hammers.

The rat-a-tat echoing along 6th and 7th streets is the sound of change for central San Pedro, a low-rise pedestrian-scale business district shot through with random approaches to architecture — some interesting, some boarded up, much of it beset with a tired feel of yesterday. The hammering tells of the coming of condos and perhaps the whole familiar package of redevelopment that has transformed so much of Southern California. For San Pedro, this is the sound of hope and of uncertainty.

"I don't know what's going to happen," Linden said with a frown. In five years, "the potential is huge" for the Warschaw Gallery, where he is director, as well as for other galleries that have struggled to take hold there.

But development tends to follow patterns too. Artists reliably foreshadow gentrification, but they don't often survive it.

"I just don't want to see it swallowed up in the suffocating sameness of development," Linden continued. "It's stifling."

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