When Kyle Wilkerson was gutting the inside of the brand new Sid the Cat Auditorium in South Pasadena, he discovered reminders of the lady who first made it lovely 100 years in the past.
“Lucile Lloyd was a prominent [Works Progress Administration] muralist; she did work all among the schools in this area,” stated live performance promoter Wilkerson. “There are photos of her in menswear smoking up in the rafters back in the 1930s. She had a tragic life, and ended up committing suicide. We thought all of the panels she did here were gone.”
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“But then right before Christmas,” he continued, “one of the ceiling panels had started cracking. I looked up and I was like, ‘They’re still there.’ The light was still shining in.”
Just a few attractive floral stencils, small sculptures and a stained glass window stay from Lloyd’s work within the auditorium of the previous South Pasadena elementary faculty, which closed to college students in 1979. However she was a muse for the crew at Sid the Cat, an unbiased live performance promoter which has placed on exhibits throughout L.A. for over a decade. It’ll lastly have the rambling, meticulously restored historic venue of its goals opening this fall.
Lower than a yr after the Eaton fireplace destroyed Altadena, a close-by neighborhood beloved by generations of musicians, the 500-capacity venue is an indication of recent life returning to the realm’s arts scene.
“The first thing we thought of when the fires happened was ‘What can we do to help?’ The second was ‘I wish we were open already, because we could have done food drives and shows to raise funds,’” Wilkerson stated. “It’s a very fragile little ecosystem that we’re a part of here.”
Sid the Cat promoters Brandon Gonzalez, from left, Sean Newman and Kyle Wilkerson onstage on the Sid the Cat Auditorium in South Pasadena.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Occasions)
Earlier than the pandemic, Sid the Cat — a crew of promoters together with Wilkerson, Brandon Gonzalez and Sean Newman — thought they’d discovered their house venue on the Bootleg Theater on the southern fringe of Echo Park and Historic Filipinotown. That nightclub was beloved by locals, however closed in 2021 through the apocalypse that COVID-19 wreaked on unbiased venues. (The house is now 2220 Arts + Archives).
“We loved the Bootleg, but it was DIY from the beginning,” Gonzalez stated. “We did the best we could with the tools and the resources we had.”
They saved a packed calendar of one-off exhibits at venues just like the Highland Park Ebell Membership, Zebulon and even the Bob Baker Marionette Theater. Acts like Khruangbin, Brilliant Eyes, Moist Leg, Jackson Browne and Fiona Apple have performed their concert events, but it surely was exhausting managing and rebuilding new live performance setups evening after evening. “Sometimes I felt like an ice cream shop owner,” Wilkerson stated. “I’d go to the artist and be like, ‘What flavor do you want? You want a seated venue? You want this side of town?’ We loved having options, but we really wanted a beautiful-sounding room of our own.”
In 2022, after they scouted an estimated 150 rooms from the deep Westside to the San Gabriel Valley, they discovered the South Pasadena Elementary Faculty, which was deliberate for adaptive reuse right into a eating and nightlife vacation spot in downtown South Pasadena. (Sid’s neighbors within the house will embody Villa’s Tacos, District Brewing Co. and coffeeshop the Boy and the Bear).
Simply steps from the A Line, and boasting a breezeway entrance with a indifferent bar, ample bogs and a huge outside patio and parking zone, the house was distinctive for its facilities and historical past, proper within the middle of a San Gabriel Valley neighborhood already adored by working artists (Phoebe Bridgers, who performed a lot of her early exhibits for Sid the Cat, grew up close by).
The bodily construction of a former faculty turned out to be distinctly helpful for a venue — artists and highway crew will thrill to a washer and dryer within the inexperienced room and a truck-loading dock that connects on to the rear of the stage.
The pathway resulting in the Sid the Cat Auditorium from the bar house of the venue in South Pasadena.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Occasions)
“It has such great bones that we can kind of step away and let it do its thing,” Wilkerson stated. “It brings out a different level of artistry to put acts in a unique setting that has character and history. If you do this for as long as us, you hear the horror stories on the road, and a space like this stands out on your tour. It has everything you need in a truly walkable neighborhood.”
The crew stated they didn’t tackle any buyers or companion promoters to fund the venue, and paid for the lease and the development themselves from a mixture of ticketing contracts, financial savings from present earnings and a GoFundMe.
“There’s no financial backers. We’re not trust fund kids and we don’t have a bunch of real estate properties making money that way,” Wilkerson stated. “It’s literally every dime we’ve ever worked for, and that’s scary.”
The nerve to danger all of it on restoring a historic — and all-ages — venue impressed Shannon Lay, an L.A. singer-songwriter whose initiatives have frequented Sid the Cat venues through the years.
“Promoters have a really unique role in the music scene. They’re the curators, the trusted source,” Lay stated. “I learned the other night that the venue is entirely self-funded and it kind of blew my mind. I figured there had to be an investor of some kind, but it’s these incredible people and the community coming together to make it happen.”
“It’s important for people to consider that shows are sacred, especially in the U.S. where financial support is scarce,” she added. “It’s a labor of love. We become our own safety net, and we make it work because we need it.”
A dusty glass panel with “Sid the Cat” wording and a scribble of a cat on the South Pasadena music venue.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Occasions)
For musicians and everybody in northeast L.A., the necessity for a neighborhood security web grew to become terrifyingly clear through the Eaton fireplace in January. That catastrophe, together with the Palisades fireplace, displaced two distinct communities with deep roots within the music business.
“It’s hard to convince people to come out of their house and buy a ticket,” Wilkerson stated. “Concert tickets have gone up in price, like everything else. We’ve built a community that people trust, but there are nights that bomb, and we wonder why but most of the time it has nothing do with the art. There are other things happening in the world, or the economy’s tanking. It’s a tough question to answer.”
Having a brand new, superbly restored venue to carry out and congregate in may sway followers’ and artists’ choices only a bit.
“With the current administration, the fires and then the ICE raids, sometimes I just want to coil up in a ball and just be away,” Gonzalez stated. “But we’ve realized a lot of our community want to be together. We posted about the ICE raids and people were like, ‘How can you still do shows?’ Well, we really believe that people can be inspired to make change through the artists that come through the rooms. There’s a lot of power in that and it gives us the will to move forward even though it’s a tough time.”
A sculpture by American artist Lucile Lloyd is at one nook of the Sid the Cat stage.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Occasions)
Whereas Sid the Cat Auditorium hasn’t set its actual opening date, nor booked its lineup of exhibits, the crew estimates development is about 85% completed. With the blessing of South Pasadena metropolis authorities and native neighbors, they’re hopeful they’ll keep away from last-minute allow snags or delays, at the same time as prices for development and labor for a historic constructing have skyrocketed post-fires and post-tariffs. South Pasadena Mayor Janet Braun stated she’s “very excited” concerning the new venue, calling it “a beautifully renovated historic space with a 21st century sound system and amenities.”
Discovering these misplaced panels from Lloyd was proof sufficient to imagine that, even after tragedy and years of rebuilding, there’s nonetheless magnificence value sifting by way of the ashes for.
“People came out after the fires to our shows and told us, ‘I’m so happy to be out and forget a little bit about what just happened to our city,’” Wilkerson stated. “We’re that escape for a lot of people, and they have those four hours where they can get away from all that, enjoy the music and cut loose. It’s such a privilege and we don’t take it for granted.”
