Bergamot Station Arts Center home to 20+ fine art galleries (since 1994) is under threat of demolition by its owner, the city of Santa Monica.
In February 2025 Santa Monica City officially reclassified the land that Bergamot Station Arts Center lives on, as surplus.
In June 2025 they invited commercial developers to submit proposal plans to lease the land to demolish the Bergamot galleries and replace it with a private development project.
Currently, the city of Santa Monica does not require the new development plans to include any spaces that prioritize the preservation of the existing galleries or any culture/art. The city only requires that it fulfills the minimum affordable housing units that the ‘surplus’ designation mandates (707 units over 5.6 acres), meaning roughly only 20% of the available footage to build is to be designated “affordable housing”. The rest of the development is likely to be proposed standard market-rate apartments.
Via surplus land laws disguised as affordable housing policy, the city has paved the way to hand a historic arts center over to private developers for profit.
The city of Santa Monica still has an opportunity to give Bergamot Arts Center the property redevelopment it deserves, just like they originally outlined in their 2013 Bergamot Area Plan.
For decades, the city has recognized Bergamot Station Arts Center as an essential cornerstone of Santa Monica’s heritage.
Until this year.
By changing the land designation of this historic arts center to ‘surplus’, the city has declared it no longer values culture.
Bergamot Station Arts Center is a cultural landmark to Santa Monica. It has housed 20+ fine art galleries and public arts/non-profit programs for over 30 years. Some of the current gallery tenants have been renting space since the day that it opened in 1994. Bergamot Station Arts Center is free to the public to visit and experience. It has one of the highest density of individual galleries in the world, and there are almost no places that exist like it.
Santa Monica city has declared itself an ‘arts city’. According to their own data in the 2011 Los Angeles Otis Report (p.116) 9% of Santa Monica’s total workforce is in the creative industry, the highest in the nation, where the national average is ~2%.
Santa Monica owns many other parcels of land where housing can be developed, and even other ‘surplus’ land that does not house a cultural community.
So the question remains:
Will Santa Monica preserve the integrity of the arts landmark that Bergamot Station Arts Center currently represents,
and if not,
then why are they fast-tracking cultural demolition in a city that literally brands itself as arts-forward?
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