There's something alive in the heart of a city that has for decades been sorely lacking in visual grace.

In a section of this Orange County city which once had a "don't-go-there" reputation, artists can be found lounging around, talking about postmodernism, complaining about the cost of opaque watercolors, drinking espresso and dreaming about what the future will hold for them when they have left this place.

The place where all of this is happening -- or just beginning to happen -- is the Artists' Village in Santa Ana, a roughly mile-square neighborhood designed to be a home for college students starting an art career and older artists and emigres from other countries who need a welcoming place to work.

The neighborhood is filling up with galleries, studios, coffee houses, restaurants and other signs of the bohemian life.

And while these artists learn their craft, they will be giving life back to buildings that were mostly born when art deco was the reigning style and people were turning optimistically to a century of peace after the horrors of the Great War.

An important step in the neighborhood's renaissance was taken in 1994, when the city of Santa Ana commissioned a feasibility study to find out if a SoHo-like district could be built on the graffiti-scarred shell of downtown. The study concluded that with the right mix of refurbished old buildings, new facilities, parking and ancillary services, the neighborhood could come to life.

But the area also needed a ready source of inhabitants. That ended up coming from California State University, Fullerton, and its Grand Central Art Center of nearly 45,000 square feet, a combination of studios and living spaces for artists and a large gallery named for the 1924 building that houses it.

The building offers living space for Cal State faculty and art students as well as studios for drawing, painting, graphic and exhibition design, photography, sculpture, ceramics and crafts.

The Grand Central Art Center, conceived as the heart of the nine-block-square Artists' Village, also includes computer labs, classrooms, an art sales and rental store, a printmaking studio, a restaurant and a small theater that will serve as home to the Alternative Repertory Theater.

The brick-facade Grand Central Market building dates from the 1920s, but there has been a market on this site since the turn of the century, when the area served as a central marketplace for all of Orange County.

In earlier decades, the market stretched farther than it does today and was redolent with the products of rich Orange County farmland. That is gone today. A few mature trees break up what is otherwise a firmly urban, anti-rural setting.

Across Second Street from the Cal State gallery complex is the Santora Arts Building, constructed in 1929, that welcomed diners and shoppers with grand Spanish-revival fripperies. The building once hosted a jazz club in its basement and was home to Daniger's Tea Room, which served an orange sticky bun that can still bring tears to the eyes of those who savored it in their youth.

But both marketplace and the Santora Art building fell on hard times in the middle decades of the century as the city languished in the doldrums between being a new city bright with promise and an old city burnished with experience.

People took their surplus income and their surplus hours to the suburbs. The city grew poorer and more peripheral, filled with immigrants whose experiences did not match the promise of the American dream.

Some people have been trying for decades to revive the downtown section of the city, like Reuben Martinez, who owns Martinez Books and Gallery.

"I think that now we are just starting to get critical mass for this project," he said. "The involvement of Cal State Fullerton was very important, and now Cypress College and Chapman University want to get on board. I think that they realized that this is really going to be something, and we welcome them and anyone else interested in giving the arts a home in Santa Ana."

Along with veterans like Martinez are relative newcomers like Don Crib, who has been promoting artists' villages in both Portland, Ore., and New York City and was one of the irresistible forces in bringing Santa Ana's about.

"This whole idea has been the result of lots of hard work by a lot of different people, and support from the city," Martinez said. "And it is definitely not just a fad. We are here to stay because of the unity of the community. A lot of downtowns have tried similar experiments and have, sadly, failed to make them work.

"But I think that for us the timing is good, the city is 100 percent behind us, every element of the community has gotten involved, the artists are here. And because of that I know that we will succeed.

"And also because of the fact that we have invited every kind of artist to be a part of our community. Race doesn't matter. Gender doesn't. Where you come from doesn't matter. How old you are is not important. The question is, so you want to make art?"

Mike McGee, who served as project coordinator for the Cal State Fullerton facility, also expressed optimism about the future of the downtown area, although he does not believe the neighborhood has quite reached the point where sliding back is impossible.

"I believe that this is just a beginning. Five years ago this part of town was like a ghost town except for the people sleeping on the streets," he said.

"All that has changed already, and once the restaurants open and other businesses begin to move in, I think that this city will astonish visitors with its vitality."

Helping out the neighborhood will be the tenancy of at least one large advertising firm, McGee said, as well as the natural urban maturation process.

"It's something like a garden," he said. "We have very tenderly planted all of the right elements, but things still look a little unsettled. Roots haven't been put down yet. But when they are, then the neighborhood will be healthy and whole and flourishing, as if it had naturally grown here this way."

Published 8/15/1999