EVER SINCE CLAUDE MONET recorded gray smokestacks on the riverbanks at Argenteuil, France, industrial modernity has stood at the heart of artistic production. Think Diego Rivera’s “Detroit Industry Murals,” 1932–33, Charles Sheeler’s crisscrossing conveyor belts, or Bernd and Hilla Becher’s taxonomic grids. Yet few if any of these artists can claim to have experienced these spaces as has Anthony Lepore, whose modest studio a roughly five-hundred-square-foot open-top box is positioned squarely in the center of a working factory floor. To visit the artist, you must enter a nondescript warehouse at the edge of LA’s Lincoln Heights, before wending your way past rows of workbenches where seamsters hand-sew garments with meticulous attention. The sounds of conversation, laughter, norteño music, women singing in unison, and the general din of machine-assisted labor echo off the walls.
What most stands out from a recent Frieze week party at Del Vaz Projects, an art space housed in Shirley Temple’s childhood home, is not so much the memory of Instagrammable ephemera or bacchanalian events but rather a feeling of open-heartedness.
EASTSIDER-It’s no surprise that the Ave 34 Project has a troubled and slimy history.
And now we find that after the Planning Commission gave the go-ahead for the project, new evidence proves that there
are harmful toxins at the site.
The History
With a lot of help from Michael Henry Hayden, Richard Larsen, and Lincoln Heights Intel, we discovered during the Planning Commission hearing back in September of last year, that potential toxic chemicals underground were being ignored:
“Case in point a property next to the proposed building project, has known and serious pollution problems. Yet the Determination letter from the Planning Department simply indicates that there are no anticipated problems.
ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT
-In a busy five-acre industrial pocket of Lincoln Heights, north of Downtown Los Angeles, zigzagged with metro lines and freeways and car-choked roads, developers plan to build a 468-unit apartment complex called the Avenue 34 Project.
But the project, which provides 66 units for “very low income” households, can’t escape the area’s polluted legacy.
That’s because the site sits adjacent to Welch’s former industrial dry cleaners that operated for nearly 70 years. During that time, massive amounts of toxic chemicals and solvents, including possible carcinogens like trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE), leaked or were dumped into the soil and groundwater, requiring extensive cleanup. The Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) recently ordered the developers to conduct tests on the proposed building site, which detected elevated levels of these same chemicals, among others.