Antigua Owner Sees Shop as Cultural Hub

As a youth growing up in Cypress Park, Antigua Cultural Coffee House owner Yancey Quinones would traverse the underground tunnel beneath North Figueroa Street on his way to Loreto Elementary Street School.

The tunnels were built by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation during an era when street cars were the city's predominant mode of transportation. Eventually, motor vehicles took dominion of North Figueroa and when Quinones was a middle school student, gangs claimed the tunnels.

"I still remember the people here shooting heroin," Quinones said this week, as he stood near the steel cage that now surrounds the entrance of the tunnel.

Quinones, who opened Antigua at the corner of Loreto and Figueroa in 2007, now has a plan to revive the tunnels, which have been off limits to the community for years. 

With assistance from L.A. Works volunteers and a $9,000 grant from the Cypress Park Neighborhood Council, Quinones hopes to transform both Loreto Street and the tunnel into a community arts space that will be open during NELAart's Second Saturday Gallery Night.

He's also submitted the project to Good Magazine's My LA2050 competition, which is promising $1 million in total grants to community oriented projects.

"Our mission is to have the old underground tunnel be converted into a beautiful full-blown arts gallery, opened to the public and exhibit local artist within," Quinones wrote in the ambitious project description. "This idea is the first of its kind in Los Angeles and will also be the pilot program to convert all existing city tunnels into arts spaces in the many different communities around the city and eventually county."

Win or lose, the arts tunnel at Loreto and North Figueroa will debut on Saturday, May 11.

"We're still going to do it, even if we don't win," Quinones said. "Our budget is very conservative." 

Though Quinones has the affable manner of a local barkeep, he becomes stern and specific when he discusses the economics of the projects.

Curators will receive a stipend of $150, and the artists who participate in the exhibition will keep every penny from the sale of their art.

"Whatever they sell, that's all their cash," he said.

Quinones said be believes business owners have an obligation to use their shops as a vehicle for community service.

He beams with pride when discussing the countless cups of free coffee he's donated to community groups and bristles with anger when discussing shop-owners who don't allow non-customers to use public restrooms.

"Businesses should be owned by people who live here," he said. "Money's just money, but relationships and networking are all you have, really."

Quinones beliefs were groomed during the year-and-a-half he spent working on his family's coffee farm in Guatemala--time he spent "becoming a human being."

During that time, Quinones said, he witnessed people living at levels of poverty unequaled to anything he'd seen in the United States.

"Everyone should leave and see how other people live, to appreciate what we have here," he said.

But he was also influenced by the experiences of his mother, who fled her family's coffee farm for Los Angeles in the 1965 as leftist rebels engaged in gun battles with the ruling government's army in the hills of Guatemala.

The family was stripped of the coffee farm that they had owned since the 1860s and were unable to reclaim them until the civil war's end in 1996.

"I tend to tell people I'm a social capitalist. I believe in people being able to make money, as long as you take care of your community. That's part my process," Quinones said. "It's an obligation to give back."