In the shadow of downtown Los Angeles, adjacent to artsy enclaves of Silver Lake and Echo Park, is a rundown area called Historic Filipinotown, named for its once thriving post-war immigrant community. Until recently, it was gang territory, with tags wallpapering alleys where homeless people slept. But now the homeless people are gone and gang tags have been painted over by colorful murals – more than 110 of them by roughly 80 local and international artists. The gangs are still there, but they leave the art alone.
“One night, I get a knock on the door and there’s this big guy with tattoos all over his face and his arms,” remembers Jason Ostro, owner of Gabba Gallery, which sits on the corner of Beverly and Dillon.
“You the guys doing them murals?” he asked.
Ostro hesitantly responded, “Yeah.”
“I just want to tell you this is beautiful,” said the man who had lived in the neighborhood for 47 years. He told Ostro that he had always wanted to leave, but now he thought he’d stay and see what happened.
For Ostro, it was an epiphany: “I was like, ‘This is the right thing I’m doing, then.’”
What he was doing was curating the neighborhood. A street art connoisseur, he went door to door asking local residents if he could paint on their fences and garage walls in the back alley. Most said no, but when they saw the results at their neighbors’ homes, they began to change their minds. Pretty soon images were springing up by artists like the French-Spanish duo Dourone, who painted a black-and-white masked face staring provocatively from the side of a garage, and Swiss-born Raphael Grischa, who adorned the façade of the Beverly Boulevard building with an eagle in flight. Stormie Mills came all the way from Australia to paint a pair of cartoon skeletal figures playing dice amid murals by artists including Clinton Bopp, Skid Robot and perhaps even the legendary Invader, although Ostro doubts the authenticity of the mosaic artwork.
Using money he earned in music licensing and wardrobe, Ostro opened Gabba Gallery in 2013 just as the city lifted a 10-year ban on murals. As he built his artist network through social media, he spent money from his own pocket in addition to securing a five-figure contribution from the art supply store Blick. Another sponsor was the real estate developer Light Space & Shadow, which was renovating a building in the neighborhood. No one makes any money from the murals, but each gets free promotion, the artists get free space to paint, and the neighborhood moves from blight to bright, as Ostro is fond of saying.
It’s a win-win for everyone, although some would say the paradigm subverts the very nature of street art, a form that has generally thumbed its nose at the laws of the art market as well as the laws of the land. “This is kind of taking any illegality out of it,” Ostro says, adding that he places restrictions on religious, political and graphic sexual content. “Without being neighborhood-friendly, this project wouldn’t work.”
So far it’s worked for everyone but the neighborhood’s homeless population, who, despite the gallery paying them to pick up trash and providing information on nearby shelters, simply moved on when the murals went up and the cameras started to appear.
It’s just one of numerous creeping signs of gentrification. Real estate prices are climbing and new businesses are springing up, such as the soon-to-open café across the street, and the interior design store next to it. One of Ostro’s new neighbors is Alissa Walker, a journalist for Gizmodo who recently moved from Silver Lake with her husband and two kids, drawn to the area in part by the artwork. “The mural movement that is happening in a lot of different cities makes people feel like they should take care of their own cities. It gives you a sense of pride and a sense of neighborhood belonging.”