Reinventing the wheel

Marsha Moodle greets guests at a Downey Civic Light Opera performance in 2011. (Photo by Joan Anderson)

DOWNEY – It’s customary for city council candidates, in running for office, to proclaim how they’ve spent most if not all of their lives in Downey and have raised families here as well as devoting a large part of their occupational careers in service to the community--as if that qualified any of them for the complexities and nuances of civic leadership. Looking at this current bunch, you have to wonder if, before they were elected, any of them ever spent much time considering the city’s history, and what’s gone on here.

Case in point: the arts. In its last meeting, as Alex Dominguez reported in these pages, the council adopted a semi-coherent proposal calling for the creation of an arts and culture subcommittee that would tap into the community for citizen ideas on improving Downey’s cultural life.

The message is barely coherent for two reasons. One because it’s too vague, and the other because it doesn’t make sense. There’s a third: the city has tried it before, and it didn’t work. There are others, like, who are these mythic creatures that will miraculously step forth with brilliant ideas on how to jazz up Downey’s moribund arts scene?

The idea has been talked up by Catherine Alvarez, and proposed as a kind of generalized wish list so unpopular with the rest of the council that it took colleague Sean Ashton to translate it for them (she wanted each councilmember to recommend some kind of all-purpose arts advocate from his or her district). Unfortunately, he didn’t help matters by saying, “It’s us the city versus getting input from the community as to what it might want.” Unfortunately, the community has shown no powerful inclination to make the arts critically important, not only to Downey’s everyday life, but its identity, unlike, say, places like Adelaide, Nice, Florence, and Edinburgh, small cities enamored of big ideas.

If it weren’t clear over these past few months that nobody on the Downey city council is remotely informed on the world of the arts—or the many worlds that make up the arts, it became evident in that last session, in which everyone who spoke only made things worse.

Operating the Downey Civic Theatre has been a challenge for the City of Downey. (Photo by Eric Pierce)

“The arts and culture have played a role in our city--a very important role at that—for a very long time,” said Mayor Claudia Frometa. “In fact, there has(cq) been numerous organizations the city has engaged with, such as the Downey Arts Coalition. We have the Stay Gallery that over the years we have worked with them. In fact, the city subsidizes the Stay Gallery area in downtown Downey.

Added Frometa: “The opportunity to bring to our community culture and arts has not been something that we have not provided. In fact, we hold numerous events throughout the year…There is a wide variety of arts that the city has engaged in.”

These claims are as flimsy as her grammar. The Stay Gallery has never been able to make a go of it; the Downey Arts Coalition has grown so ineffectual that there are those out there who wonder if it still exists (it does; at least their website is still up); and as far as Downey’s biggest dog in the culture hunt is concerned, namely the Downey Civic Theater, for ten years now the city has rolled over and allowed the management firm Venutech to pick its pocket.

Mayor Pro Tem Blanca Pacheco’s assertion that the Downey Theater subcommittee would make a similar community group redundant is completely irrelevant, as well as untrue. But you’ll be reading more in these pages about the theater in weeks to come.

Here’s a thumbnail sketch of what’s been happening, or not happening, in the Downey arts scene over the past decade or so, with the proviso that, as everyone on Earth knows, a normal day in the life of the world came to a dramatic halt a year ago with the World Health Organization’s elevation of Covid-19 to the status of pandemic.

The city of Downey, mainly an agricultural community up until the outbreak of WWII, came alive when the aviation industry mobilized throughout Southern California to satisfy the raging demand for military aircraft. Various companies, like Douglas, employed enough people (some as many as thirty thousand) to become small cities whose work force alternated on the job full time, twenty-four hours a day. Downey was one of them. There are pictures of nose-to-tail fighter planes blanketing Vultee airfield, now the site of two semi-desolate shopping malls, ready for battle over Europe and the Pacific theater.

Jobs, housing construction, schools, hospitals, retail outlets, clubs, restaurants and other institutions were developed to serve the growth of new families and communities as Downey in particular transitioned from military to commercial aircraft manufacturing, and then aerospace. Downey became prosperous, economically and socially stable, and culturally cohesive. John Hume parlayed his successful children’s theater into the creation of the Downey Civic Theater. The Downey Art Museum, the first of its kind in Los Angeles County, was deeded into a small building in Furman Park. The Downey Symphony was good enough to perform at the Ahmanson Theater in L.A.’s Music Center. Women’s auxiliary groups formed, and fundraising lunches, garden parties and banquets took place in support of the arts and Downey Hospital. The Meralta and Avenue Theaters drew large audiences, mostly young people, with first-run movies. To borrow from Fats Waller, the place was jumpin’, at least as much as could be expected of a white, suburban, reasonably affluent enclave a short twelve miles from L.A.’s city hall.

Sometime in the late ‘80s through the dawn of the new millennium, the air began to leak out of the balloon. Downey’s best restaurants, like the Regency Room and The Brass Dolphin, began shutting down, as did the hot spot for the young, Mississippi Moonshine. The Meralta closed and the Avenue theater fell into disrepair. Granata’s Italian Villa, founded by Ralph and Jeanette Granata, who later were chosen grand marshalls of one of Downey’s traditional holiday parades, moved their cozy and hospitable spot to downtown Downey and a colder, less comfortable venue.

Jason Marquez, William T. Lewis, Lauren Mayfield, Ed Krieger, Marsha Moode, Laura Rensing and Richard Gould at a rehearsal for “Paint Your Wagon.”

The changes were too subtle, broad and deep to chronicle here, but clearly Downey was losing its mojo, and people like Harold Tseklenis, Frank and Carol Kearns, Val Flores and poet Lorine Parks stood up at city meetings to argue for more vigorous cultural engagement from city leaders. Andrew Wahlquist and a few others formed the Downey Arts Coalition to introduce local artists to the city. In 2005, the city council created the Arts in Public Places, in which they could finance local artists by nicking a small percent of real estate developers’ projected revenues. The council even came up with the identical scheme the current council has adopted: a commission made up of community reps from each District empowered to advise the city on matters cultural and artistic.

Some time later the city raided the Community Services Department to appoint a lazy, incompetent, uninterested and uninformed figure to act as liaison to the community. He refused to hold meetings, and one night showed up at a council session to announce that art was too subjective for anyone to reach conclusive agreement on. It’s conceivable that Caltech seismologists registered the shock of jaws dropping on the Downey City Council dais that night.

That was the beginning of the end. The respected Downey Art Museum is no more. Stay Gallery, despite the Herculean effort of co-founder Gabriel Enamorado, is hanging by a slender thread, The Downey Civic Light Opera, under Marsha Moode, was shut down by the city at the height of its resurgent musical glory in 2013. Virtually no city official will show up at a Downey symphony performance unless assured of some kind of award. Even before Covid, Downey had no night life, no jazz or supper clubs, no vibrant cultural center where kids can hang out all day to observe and take classes in music, dance, acting, writing, designing, composing, stagecraft, and performance art. Downey doesn’t even have a bookstore.

To observe the dreary, dutiful bunch that currently occupies the city council dais is to doubt that any of them has read a book in ten years. What the city needs is a cadre of hungry, ambitious young Turks who will joyfully tolerate and even welcome miserable, discouraging conditions to make their art. The South Coast Repertory currently runs on a $10 million annual budget and $50 million rolling endowment. They started with seventeen bucks and threw their costumes into the back of a 1947 Studebaker to get to their next show. Bur co-founder Don Took said, “I didn’t care if we worked in a toilet. We were making theater!”

Does Downey have any tigers like that pawing at its gate?