Arts District New Hot Spot for Gallerists to Hang

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While downtown L.A.’s Arts District has seen a boom in residential development and an influx of restaurants, the most recent group garnering attention, fittingly, is arts businesses.

Contemporary and modern art gallery Hauser Wirth & Schimmel will open its blocklong space at 901 E. Third St. in March, a month after visual arts bookshop Hennessey + Ingalls is expected to complete its move to One Santa Fe. And just across the river in Boyle Heights, New York’s Maccarone Gallery launched its L.A. outpost a couple of weeks ago.

“Between retail, restaurants, the arts and then also residential, the growth within all those categories in that concentrated area makes it appealing,” Brett Hennessey said of moving his family’s shop from Santa Monica. Finding cheaper rent than on the Westside didn’t hurt either.

While some big foot-traffic-generating developments won’t be completed for another couple of years, Hennessey said that won’t hurt the bookstore. It already gets a hefty share of business as a destination shop for architects, students, interior designers and professionals in the advertising and film industries.

“We’re doing this looking long term,” he said.

For former Museum of Contemporary Art curator Paul Schimmel, the Arts District’s “industrial grandeur,” light and tremendous space were necessary to realize his new project with international art gallery Hauser & Wirth.

“The kind of space we were looking for, nothing came even close,” Schimmel said of his 100,000-square-foot, seven-building complex that will house exhibitions, a restaurant, bookstore and open courtyard.

Across the river, the namesake gallerist of Maccarone’s L.A. outpost said she was also blown away by the “endless amounts” of space in the area. But having other artists nearby proved the biggest pull.

“There’s not just my warehouse, there’s a plethora of them concentrated in this area,” Michele Maccarone said. “If you’re thinking about the neighborhood, the proximity to the Geffen (Contemporary museum), Grand Avenue, now the Broad, it’s kind of a no-brainer.”

It’s a Match

Downtown Center Business Improvement District is playing matchmaker with the recently launched Startups in the Sky, a series of soirees held at a different downtown office tower each month.

The audience for the series is tech company executives. The aim is to introduce them to downtown properties with vacancies that could easily be filled by, well, tech companies.

“Part of it is about downtown as an innovative district, and part of it is about the towers themselves … highlighting the towers as really dynamic places for technology companies to locate,” said Nicholas Griffin, the BID’s director of economic development.

The first event, held Sept. 15 on an empty upper floor of the 1.3 million-square-foot Gas Co. Tower at 555 W. Fifth St., was sponsored and hosted by building owner Brookfield Office Properties Inc., downtown’s largest landlord. The event was produced by TechRise, a company responsible for tech mixers on the Westside, which will partner with the BID on future events in the series.

“(TechRise) came to us because they think downtown is becoming more of a tech scene,” Griffin said.

At the inaugural event, a panel of L.A. tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists – including Judd Schoenholtz, chief executive of real estate startup Open Listings – discussed downtown’s potential as a tech hot spot while food was served by local eateries and live artists created original works. There was also a DJ set and a hacking workshop.

More than 250 people attended, including developers, startup founders and venture capitalists, Griffin said.

The series is a spinoff of the BID’s Get Urban initiative, which offers tours of downtown creative office space on the fourth Thursday of each month.

“We will be working with all the big property owners on this rotating event,” Griffin said. “We will bring tech people downtown to buildings with empty creative office space, playing somewhat of a matchmaker and presenting a vision of what’s possible.”

New Tune

How do you follow a phenomenon like Taylor Swift? With a legend like Frank Sinatra if you’re the Grammy Museum.

The downtown attraction saw some of the best attendance numbers in its six-year history thanks to the soon-to-close Swift exhibition and is hoping its upcoming display on Ol’ Blue Eyes can prove at least as popular as the one it’s replacing next month.

“Thus far in 2015, the Grammy Museum has experienced a remarkable 26 percent increase in attendance from last year,” said Bob Santelli, the museum’s executive director. “With the opening of ‘Sinatra: An American Icon,’ we expect to maintain that number, or even better, increase it.”

Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the crooner’s birth, the exhibit – running Oct. 21 to Feb. 15 – will feature rare photos, family mementos, personal items from belt buckles to bow ties, artwork, recordings and some of his gleaming Grammys.

The exhibit will launch with a charity gala dinner and concert, co-hosted by Steven Van Zandt and Max Weinberg of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, at L.A. Live’s Club Nokia on Oct. 21. Proceeds will benefit the museum’s music education initiatives.

Staff reporters Marni Usheroff, Hannah Miet and Sandro Monetti contributed to this column. #DTLA is compiled by Senior Managing Editor Jonathan Diamond. He can be reached at [email protected].

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