When Kyle Wilkerson was gutting the interior of the new Sid the Cat Auditorium in South Pasadena, he found reminders of the woman who first made it beautiful a hundred years ago.
“Lucile Lloyd was a prominent [Works Progress Administration] muralist; she did work all among the schools in this area,” said concert 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.”
A few gorgeous floral stencils, small sculptures and a stained glass window remain from Lloyd’s work in the auditorium of the former South Pasadena elementary school, which closed to students in 1979. But she was a muse for the team at Sid the Cat, an independent concert promoter which has put on shows across L.A. for over a decade. It’ll finally have the rambling, meticulously restored historic venue of its dreams opening this fall.
Less than a year after the Eaton fire destroyed Altadena, a nearby neighborhood beloved by generations of musicians, the 500-capacity venue is a sign of new life returning to the area’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 said. “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 at the Sid the Cat Auditorium in South Pasadena.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
Before the pandemic, Sid the Cat — a team of promoters including Wilkerson, Brandon Gonzalez and Sean Newman — thought they’d found their home venue at the Bootleg Theater on the southern edge of Echo Park and Historic Filipinotown. That nightclub was beloved by locals, but closed in 2021 during the apocalypse that COVID-19 wreaked on independent venues. (The space is now 2220 Arts + Archives).
“We loved the Bootleg, but it was DIY from the beginning,” Gonzalez said. “We did the best we could with the tools and the resources we had.”
They kept a packed calendar of one-off shows at venues like the Highland Park Ebell Club, Zebulon and even the Bob Baker Marionette Theater. Acts like Khruangbin, Bright Eyes, Wet Leg, Jackson Browne and Fiona Apple have played their concerts, but it was exhausting managing and rebuilding new concert setups night after night. “Sometimes I felt like an ice cream shop owner,” Wilkerson said. “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 found the South Pasadena Elementary School, which was planned for adaptive reuse into a dining and nightlife destination in downtown South Pasadena. (Sid’s neighbors in the space will include Villa’s Tacos, District Brewing Co. and coffeeshop the Boy and the Bear).
Just steps from the A Line, and boasting a breezeway entrance with a detached bar, ample bathrooms and a gigantic outdoor patio and parking lot, the space was unique for its amenities and history, right in the center of a San Gabriel Valley neighborhood already adored by working artists (Phoebe Bridgers, who played many of her early shows for Sid the Cat, grew up nearby).
The physical structure of a former school turned out to be distinctly useful for a venue — artists and road crew will thrill to a washer and dryer in the green room and a truck-loading dock that connects directly to the rear of the stage.
The pathway leading to the Sid the Cat Auditorium from the bar space of the venue in South Pasadena.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
“It has such great bones that we can kind of step away and let it do its thing,” Wilkerson said. “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 team said they did not take on any investors or partner promoters to fund the venue, and paid for the lease and the construction themselves from a mix of ticketing contracts, savings from show profits 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 said. “It’s literally every dime we’ve ever worked for, and that’s scary.”
The nerve to risk it all on restoring a historic — and all-ages — venue impressed Shannon Lay, an L.A. singer-songwriter whose projects have frequented Sid the Cat venues over the years.
“Promoters have a really unique role in the music scene. They’re the curators, the trusted source,” Lay said. “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 at the South Pasadena music venue.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
For musicians and everyone in northeast L.A., the need for a community safety net became terrifyingly clear during the Eaton fire in January. That disaster, along with the Palisades fire, displaced two distinct communities with deep roots in the music industry.
While high-profile fundraisers like FireAid and groups like MusiCares have steered millions to affected communities, all the larger economic forces that are crushing local artists are still compounding. And as violent ICE raids and a battering ram of tense political news wear down many Angelenos, the musicians and audiences that keep a local cultural scene vibrant are wondering if there’s a future for them in L.A.
“It’s hard to convince people to come out of their house and buy a ticket,” Wilkerson said. “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 new, beautifully restored venue to perform and congregate in might sway fans’ and artists’ decisions just 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 said. “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 corner of the Sid the Cat stage.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
While Sid the Cat Auditorium hasn’t set its exact opening date, nor booked its lineup of shows, the team estimates construction is about 85% finished. With the blessing of South Pasadena city government and local neighbors, they’re hopeful they’ll avoid last-minute permit snags or delays, even as costs for construction and labor for a historic building have skyrocketed post-fires and post-tariffs. South Pasadena Mayor Janet Braun said she’s “very excited” about the new venue, calling it “a beautifully renovated historic space with a 21st century sound system and amenities.”
Finding those lost panels from Lloyd was proof enough to believe that, even after tragedy and years of rebuilding, there’s still beauty worth sifting through 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 said. “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.”
This story originally appeared on LA Times
