It suddenly dawned on me, in February of 2014, that it had been in mid-February of 1995 that Bloom’s General Store opened. It had actually opened a few weeks prior, along with Coffee Strippers and they blocked off the streets, put up a music stage and threw a grand opening party.
So I posted a video of that magic night when Alberto made espressos on the back of his flame-throwing espresso rod – It was a large flatbed truck with a giant flame coming out of the rear and atop the bed sat Al, dressed as a fireman, sitting at a counter with an espresso machine, pulling espressos.
This insane contraption stood as a symbol of what the whole neighborhood was becoming – a functional artwork that produced something. And that is what it is now – manifesting the vision of Joel Bloom, Alberto Miyares and a few people who were fed up by a legion of users sucking the blood out of Downtown Los Angeles…
You see, by then the whole neighborhood had been home to hundreds of people for almost twenty years. A lot of them were drug refugees and others were artists, or at least people who called themselves artists. A lot of them look back on being there as a highlight. Lots of people in Los Angeles visited the neighborhood and the abandoned authenticity of the experience was something they took home with them. Maybe they spent the night there once and maybe they left after five years of developing and mastering a drug habit but they all took one thing from the neighborhood. They took ownership. How does an owner collect his rent on a neighborhood that he does not in fact have title to?
Easy. Every time that neighborhood is brought up, the “owner” gets to insist that he was there when it mattered, that he was there when it was real, that he was there in its golden era and that we all must pay tribute to the fact that said golden era has long passed and that we never enjoyed it like the “owner” enjoyed it.
So somehow my posting a video of a 1994 Traction Avenue street fair evolved into comments from people reciting lists of places that existed downtown prior to 1994, most of which were long gone by 1994. All of downtown LA was suddenly the arts district and a gaggle of proud parents were piping in about the good old days.
The nostalgia wave on my FaceBook page implied that the Arts District had not began with the opening of Bloom’s General Store. Yes there were places like the Brave Dog in Little Tokyo and Gorky’s a mile and a half away in the garment district where young disaffected people would gather in downtown in the late 1970s and all of the ’80s and the memory of these times rings as a benchmark of actually being in the world and living for most of these people, who are now old enough that the good days behind them way outnumber the good ones ahead of them.
And so I took it as a kind of scolding, which perhaps it wasn’t but it was. You see there was no bunch of whinier self-entitled white kids in the entire universe than the fucks who came to downtown LA in the late 1970s and all throughout the ’80s to party. Now that isn’t the worst thing in the world but the lack of self-awareness as they pissed on and shit on the neighborhood for their own pleasure is something that needs to be addressed.
First and foremost, Downtown LA was shitty. It completely lacked amenities. The buildings were inhospitable to domesticity. It was the domicile of scary outsiders avoiding contact with people for scary reason. The artists who moved into these cheap neighborhoods were NOT the scary people. The egos of the first and second wave of people who settled the industrial part of Downtown east of Alameda now inscribes upon themselves an edginess and worldliness that was laughably absent in the present. “Slumming It” doesn’t even scratch the surface. I wouldn’t belabor the point if their wasn’t the ever-present cackle of superiority rolling of their self-assured tongues that I would never understand what the present day arts district was like before my time.
Well… I understand how it was enough to appreciate being there the day it was rescued from that gaggle of cheapskate life-stylers, hobbyists and parasites. There were always good, interesting, creative people east of Alameda. There were also mountains of complainers, takers, users, bastard lowlife backstabbing connivers and that motherfucker next to you as you pass the joint and he takes the biggest hit and nobody even knows who the fuck he is except that he is here all the time and never ever has his own shit to share. Lots of those types. An endless supply of those types.
Hollywood was where the jarheads, the westsiders and the Valley types went for “edgy” back then. Downtown people were there because it was cheap, it was isolated or they had too many run ins with Hollywood and couldn’t go back. So any time someone tells you they were downtown “when it was cool” or implies some sort of glory years, understand for your own complete knowledge of what is what that, yeah, they had a great time, downtown made for some uninhibited partying, but also that by them being there that they TOOK from the neighborhood. There was no GIVING. There was fun, amazing art, wild nights, crazy times, lots of sex and drugs and rock-n-roll but there was no community outside of a circle of friends who knew where to buy pot without driving to Hollywood or coke without driving to Mar Vista. Oh sure there were art studios galore and stabs at running art galleries and organizing exhibitions and there were little spots where people hung out and felt kinship, but all the while the neighborhood was shit, no community in any sense of manifesting as neighbors one relies upon – the folks who lived there put up with the people who hung out there just shitting on it more.
And then the LA riots scared the shit out of everyone. May of 1992 began the whitest flight from many parts of Los Angeles. Downtown, untouched by the riots, was a symbol of “urban” to every scared bastard nearby and every rent-wiring parent abroad. The place cleaned out. The rents went down. The crackheads moved in even deeper. The car break-ins (always a problem that the glory years crowd never did anything about besides complain) were the definition of regularity. The folks who stayed were forced to actually care about it all.
In 1993 George Rollins (a property owner who lived on his property) organized a neighborhood watch. The cars were not going to get broken into any more. Joel Bloom would call city hall on nuisances large and small. Alberto was like the new sheriff and wasn’t always kind to the people who were parasiting off the neighborhood the most. And lots of people in the neighborhood understood the efforts and joined in. Plenty more just did their usual jackoff complaining but people for once told them to shut the fuck up. At his his underground club THE CLUBHOUSE Alberto had a sign that said RESPECT was earned not given. Every momma’s boy who thought he was IT because he went downtown and was a radical artist by by virtue of the loft near where people sold drugs on the street was put on notice. You won’t be accepted here if you aren’t part of the solution.
The solution was to not tolerate the sociopathy of crack cocaine smoking. Bloom knew every cracksmoker because who else buys a new lighter every day at the store. And he told everyone who smoked crack and we all knew who to watch out for and when the day came that the guy asked to borrow a hundred bucks when we all said no the puff of smoke was in another part of the city quite soon. None of this was erased in a day an not all of it left entirely, but the legendary tolerance of downtown, the place anyone could visit, shit on and leave smiling, those days were over. There were obstacles.
Bloom’s eventually moved into the Coffee Strippers storefront and Joel Bloom made sure to navigate city hall on behalf of the neighborhood. The trees got planted. And the Artist District thrives today, totally different from the days of the cracksmoking whiners and much different from the day the streets were blocked off by Bloom and Alberto to signal that a new era had begun. But anyone who says they were there before then but wasn’t there then is just a user, not to be trusted.