Close-up of one of the murals on the sides of The Rose Theater, on Magnolia, in North Hollywood's NoHo Arts District. The indie theater is one of five that have closed due to the loss of business during the Covid pandemic.
About three weeks ago, I picked up a copy of the San Fernando Valley Business Journal, and it had an article about how hard the pandemic hit the NoHo Arts District. I lived up in this area for a year in 1991, when the arts district was just getting started. Seriously, the area was pretty ghetto. Now, 30 years later, the area is really vibrant. The Red Line train stop sits among hundreds of apartments, it's a largely young crowd, 20 and 30-somethings, many commuting to L.A. area to work on the train, pre-pandemic. There are a ton of cool restaurants on Lankershim and in the surrounding area.
But when you walk through the area, you don't see much of "the arts" in the typical, visual way. There are not rows of galleries, like say in Laguna Beach, down in Orange County. The arts in the NoHo arts district has been theater, 22 small, independent theaters. North Hollywood, according to the SFV Business Journal article, actually has, or had, the second highest concentration of theaters in the U.S., only the Broadway/off Broadway Theater District in New York City has more.
The front of The Rose theater in NoHo Arts District.
As the pandemic-induced business shutdown hit businesses at all levels, it was particularly devastating to the small theaters of the NoHo Arts District. They struggled, they got some help from the city of Los Angeles, and from patrons. But independent theaters operate on a very tight margin to start with, and rents were already becoming an issue for them before the pandemic.
The problem with arts districts everywhere is that artists move into a cheap, run down area, and they create art. That begins to attract other artists, and eventually a hip art scene evolves. In the scenes where it takes off, that attracts art enthusiasts, and eventually more business, and later apartments and restaurants and other retail stores. Rents go up, and eventually the artists that sparked new life in the area get priced out of the arts district. Covid put that into high gear. That leads us, as a society, to ask this question:
Do we want to have arts in our arts districts indefinitely?
Another mural from the walls of The Rose Theater.
Or do we want to let this 20-30 year cycle keep playing out over and over, in the cities and towns where solid art and creative scenes actually do build, and begin to flourish? That's a bigger issue to mull over as we head forward. For now, five of the 22 indie theaters that made the NoHo Arts District an arts district, are closed. That's a big hit to all the creative people, and jobs, that depended on those theaters attracting people to the area.
I'm not a huge theater fan, I've been to an indie theater once. But I'm creative guy, an artist and a writer/blogger, and I get that actors become good, and great actors... by acting in front of people. It's no accident that these 22 theaters were in North Hollywood, sandwiched between the TV and movie studios of Burbank and Studio City. The main studio owner interviewed in the SFV Business Journal article was the owner of the 68 Cent Theater Company, on Lankershim. That theater now has a For Lease sign on it.
Creative people create stuff. Good stuff. Bad Stuff. Weird stuff. Art, sculptures, music, plays, books, movies, TV shows, video games, and yes, even blog posts. This creation has re-vitalized many parts of many towns and cities in the U.S., and around the world. So this post is to shine a light on a theater in North Hollywood that has gone dark, and to get us all thinking about the huge role the arts, of all kinds, plays in our lives, our world, and the livelihood of our towns and cities.
After all, what did all of you do during the shutdown? You consumed a TON of other people's creative works, and you probably made a little of your own on social media. Artists are "Essential Workers," we kept you all from going bat shit crazy for the last year. Think about that as we open back up. What kind of town or city do you want to live in?
Don't let the heart of creativity stop beating. #steveemigphotos
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