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The Los Angeles Woman's Building

During the eight months of searching for a new home, the physical and economic situation at the Woman's Building remained ambiguous. Several component groups dissolved or withdrew, stating reasons ranging from an inability to attract customers due to our location (the Grandview site was in a busy working-class neighborhood on the east side of town) to political, professional, or personal differences within the particular group. While we had origina11y been able to pay the monthly rent out of the cumulative sum paid the residents, the loss of groups made it necessary to search more actively for individuals and groups who wished to perform, read, rally, or celebrate.

In an effort to continue to exist within these contradictions, we incorporated into the search the requirements of all the groups and individuals that had participated in the first two years of the Woman's Building. Most women assumed that we would find a building with all of the advantages and none of the disadvantages of the first and with all the newly articulated needs fulfilled. However, our work and optimistic visions were identified with the first spatial environment we had renovated and used for two years. Few women were able to envision the Woman's Building program housed in other spaces.

The spatial requirements we defined reflected our experience at the Grandview site. We wanted comparable square footage, spaces that could accommodate the types of activities we had developed. We needed public performance space, since it had been the major source of rental fees for concerts, performances, and dances at the Grandview site, despite the lack of professional lighting, seating, and sound equipment. The commercial operations within the Woman's Building-Sisterhood Bookstore, Womantours Travel Agency — needed easy street access, preferably on the first floor. The Woman's Graphic Center also needed space on the ground floor to accommodate heavy presses and paper stock. Office space was required for the administrative functions of the building, as well as for the resident professional services provided by individual therapists and attorneys who wished to continue to locate their offices in the Woman's Building. Appropriate spaces for a cafe, exhibitions, and classes were also needed.



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Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
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The symbolic requirements had become clearer also. Our space could not be private if we were to be seen as an effective participant in the public sphere. The building would have to be a discernible unit, not embedded in other structures that could limit the value or scope of our work. If those female attributes— designated in and generally relegated to the home, such as caring and mutually supportive relationships —were to be valued as appropriate to professional work, then we could not tuck the space away again in a residential neighborhood. It would have to be accessible to as broad a public as could be found in a city in which neighborhoods tend to be homogenous by race, economic status, and often political and professional affiliation.

We looked at automobile showrooms and body shops, churches, fire stations, and small factories. We found absolutely nothing we could afford until June 1974, the deadline for our departure from the Grandview site, when a building was found that fulfilled more than a couple of our requirements, while adapting to our economic constraints. Despite its limitations, we responded to this buiding's potential and as officers of Women's Community Inc., Arlene Raven and I signed a five-year lease agreeing to pay $1,000 a month in rent.

The Spring Street Building
The difficulties associated with the move threatened to destroy our young institution, and while the Spring Street building offered a home and some possibilities, it also had severe drawbacks. The main positive characteristic was cost— we were getting 18,000 square feet of space for 5.5 cents a square foot, when previously we had seen no building for under 11.0 cents a square foot. (At the Grandview site we had paid only 3.5 cents a square foot!)

The Spring Street building was a three-story red brick structure, easily discernible as a unit. It had originally been designed as the administrative offices of the Standard Oil Company of California in the 1920s, and had been converted into a warehouse in the forties. Virtually all of the marble had been ripped off the floors and the internal walls had been removed. The central core had originally been illuminated by natural light