LOS ANGELES — Jose “Prime” Reza was 11 or 12 when he first met Carmelo Alvarez. The young graffiti artist was working on a piece in an alley late one night in 1983 in the Pico-Union neighborhood of Los Angeles when a man driving a Volkswagen bus pulled up. Reza thought he was a cop or a vigilante, so he started running down the aisle.
“He was painting a Scooby Doo on Venice Boulevard near Union,” Alvarez recalled. “I said, ‘I like your work.'”
Reza stopped running. “My name is Carmelo, I run Radiotron. I want you to keep doing what you’re doing,” Reza recalled. Radiotron, or the Youth Break Center, Inc. as it was officially named, was located just off MacArthur Park in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. It was a place where children could practice the burgeoning art forms of graffiti and breakdancing. Although it was only open from 1983 to 1985, it had a major influence on the emergence of hip-hop culture in Los Angeles.
“I went there a week later. It was pretty exciting for a kid,” Alvarez said. “It was a haven of peace, an alternative for children who were on the street. The schools didn’t encourage you to do graffiti and the programs had been cut.
GRAFFITISPIRE, an exhibition curated by Alvarez celebrating the center’s vibrant legacy, opened earlier this month at the Goethe-Institut Project Space a few blocks from Radiotron’s former location at 715 South Park View Street. (The original building no longer exists, having been replaced by a quintessential LA fashionable mall.) When it opens May 12, street performers and breakdancers who made their Radiotron debut as a teenager, now in his 50s, mingled with a younger generation that followed in his wake as classic hip-hop beats flowed from the DJ’s decks.
Dozens of paintings created over the past 40 years by Radiotron participants and other graffiti artists hang salon-style alongside archival photographs and ephemera. A diverse range of art is on display, from typographic explorations and portraits to colorful abstractions by established and emerging graffiti artists including Reza, Hex, Shandu, Crime, Defer, Zender, Phantom Street Arti$t and Heaven. Adults and children sat sketching at a long table set up aft while veteran breakdancer Bboy Wilpower of Airforce Crew and others took center stage with their whimsical footwork, giving a glimpse of the contagious energy of Radiotron.
At first glance, the Los Angeles outpost of an institution dedicated to German culture and language might seem like an odd choice for a deep dive into Los Angeles hip-hop culture. But since the Goethe-Institut moved to MacArthur Park from its former Miracle Mile location on Wilshire Boulevard in the fall of 2021, programming tailored to the surrounding community has been central to its mission. “We are only good at what we do if we are connected to the local scene,” said Lien Heidenreich-Seleme, director of the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles. Hyperallergic.
The exhibition is part of the Neighborhood Interpretation Center, a Goethe initiative that calls for proposals for major programs for residents of MacArthur Park/Westlake. A selection committee made up of art professionals and community leaders then chooses the projects to be implemented. Five projects were selected in the inaugural year, while three were selected for 2023, including GRAFFITISPIRE.
Despite his near-mythical status in the development of hip-hop in Los Angeles, Alvarez originally planned to open a more traditional performing arts academy. As a teenager, growing up in Westlake in the early 1970s, he attended Barnsdall Junior Art Center, where he recounts a fateful encounter with Chester Whitmore changed the trajectory of his life. “Chester gave me a choice: gang or tap dance. I chose the faucet,” recalls Alvarez. This is how his career as a dancer began, first in tap dancing and then in ballet.
After a stint in New York where he opened a youth center, he returned to Los Angeles, where the building he found for his academy was already central to West Coast hip-hop.
“Before it was Radiotron, it was Radio Club. We went there for the breakdancing…I was 13 or 14,” Defer said. Artists such as Ice-T performed there and Madonna could be seen partying inside. It was the location of the 1983 documentary Break and enter and the 1984 film Lapping’. (Both films featured breakdancer and actor Shabba Doo, who died in 2020. The exhibit includes a memorial portrait of Thundr.) According to Alvarez, the artists painted “Radiotron” above the stage for the film.
It soon turned to hip-hop, with breakdancing downstairs and graffiti upstairs. “It was the beacon room. You can label anywhere: the walls, the ceiling, the tables,” Alvarez said. “I had two rules: don’t scratch anyone and don’t gang write.” Some of LA’s earliest graffiti crews like K2S (Kill to Succeed) and the LA Bomb Squad honed their craft at Radiotron.
At the time, LA graffiti was characterized by stiff capital letters and a monochromatic palette known as the “Cholo Style”. Then Angeleno’s street artists began to see a new style emerge from New York’s subways. Before the internet, they had to rely on movies like Style Wars (1983) and wild style (1983) to get an idea of what was going on in New York, as well as photos brought back from trips they shared at Radiotron.
“All of a sudden you get glimpses of colors, bubbles, sparkles, and cartoon characters,” Hex said. “Wait, they use yellow, orange, purple?! I didn’t even know they had these colors! LA artists began to merge their style with what they saw coming out of New York, forming a new hybrid West Coast style.
After two years and despite a fierce campaign to save it, the club was demolished and replaced by a strip mall. Alvarez moved the center into the bandshell of MacArthur Park before establishing several other youth centers over the following decades. With the arrival of crack cocaine in the mid-1980s and the rise of gang violence, graffiti became associated with crime and authorities began to crack down on the art form more intensely. But for a brief moment in the early 80s, a creative explosion of color and movement took over the streets, offering an uplifting vision of a better world.
“Society’s aggression against all these minorities was very apparent,” Hex said. “When hip-hop arrived, I could become a pop master, a graffiti king, an MC, a DJ or a beatboxer. Kids left what they were born into and they entered this whole new arena. That’s what Radiotron stood for.
