CULTIVATING THE ARTS -17

In the 1990s, a chunk of Downtown Los Angeles was dominated by drug dealers and gangs. Artists, art galleries and like-minded urban pioneers helped fill vacant buildings and vacant lots while taming the mean streets of LA's Main Street.

Tom Waits wrote a song about The Nickel, an oddball ode to the hustlers, pimps, lost souls and worse who inhabited 5th Street. No corner was worse that 5th and Main -- before the arts changed everything.

"In the late '90s, more drugs were sold on that corner -- 5th and Main -- than anywhere in the world," said Brady Westwater, a character as big and over the top as the star struck and quake-prone City of Angels, who calls himself the unhired, unpaid "curator" of Downtown Los Angeles. "On the longer blocks, 80 to 90 drug dealers were out leaning against a building or standing on the sidewalk waiting for cars to drive up to buy drugs 24 hours a day. They had tents there that they rented to people crawl in and do their drugs."