Lifestyle
DTLA has a new theater — inside a fake electrical box
By day, you’d be forgiven for walking past the newest theater in downtown L.A.
It isn’t hidden in an alley or obscured via a nameless door. No, this performance space is essentially a theater in disguise, as it’s designed to look like an electrical box — a fabrication so real that when artist S.C. Mero was installing it in the Arts District, police stopped her, concerned she was ripping out its copper wire. (There is no copper wire inside this wooden nook.)
Open the door to the theater, and discover a place of urban enchantment, where a red velvet door and crimson wallpaper beckon guests to come closer and sit inside. That is, if they can fit.
With a mirror on its side and a clock in its back, Mero’s creation, about 6 feet tall and 3 feet deep yet smaller on its interior, looks something akin to an intimate, private boudoir — the sort of dressing room that wouldn’t be out of place in one of Broadway’s historic downtown theaters. That’s by design, says Mero, who cites the ornately romanticized vibe and color palette of the Los Angeles Theatre as prime inspiration. Mero, a longtime street artist whose guerrilla art regularly dots the downtown landscape, likes to inject whimsy into her work: a drainage pipe that gives birth, a ball pit for rats or the transformation of a dilapidated building into a “castle.” But there’s just as often some hidden social commentary.
With her Electrical Box Theatre, situated across from the historic American Hotel and sausage restaurant and bar Wurstküche, Mero set out to create an impromptu performance space for the sort of experimental artists who no longer have an outlet in downtown’s galleries or more refined stages. The American Hotel, for instance, subject of 2018 documentary “Tales of the American” and once home to the anything-goes punk rock ethos of Al’s Bar, still stands, but it isn’t lost on Mero that most of the neighborhood’s artist platforms today are softer around the edges.
Ethan Marks inside S.C. Mero’s theater inside a fake electrical box. The guerrilla art piece is near the American Hotel.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
“A lot of galleries are for what can sell,” Mero says. “Usually that’s paintings and wall art.”
She dreamed, however, of an anti-establishment place that could feel inviting and erase boundaries between audience and perfomer. “People may be intimidated to get up on a stage or at a coffee shop, but here it’s right on street level.”
It’s already working as intended, says Mero. I visited the box early last week when Mero invited a pair of experimental musicians to perform. Shortly after trumpeter Ethan Marks took to the sidewalk, one of the American Hotel’s current residents leaned out his window and began vocally and jovially mimicking the fragmented and angular notes coming from the instrument. In this moment, “the box,” as Mero casually refers to it, became a true communal stage, a participatory call-and-response pulpit for the neighborhood.
Clown Lars Adams, 38, peers out of S.C. Mero’s theater inside a fake electrical box. Mero modeled the space off of Broadway’s historic theaters.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
A few days prior, a rideshare driver noticed a crowd and pulled over to read his poetry. He told Mero it was his first time. The unscripted occurrence, she says, was “one of the best moments I’ve ever experienced in making art.”
“That’s literally what this space is,” Mero says. “It’s for people to try something new or to experiment.”
Marks jumped at the chance to perform for free inside the theater, his brassy freewheeling equally complementing and contrasting the sounds of the intersection. “I was delighted,” he says, when Mero told him about the stage. “There’s so much unexpectedness to it that as an improviser, it really keeps you in the moment.”
A downtown resident for more than a decade, Mero has become something of an advocate for the neighborhood. The area arguably hasn’t returned to its pre-pandemic heights, as many office floors sit empty and a string of high-profile restaurant closures struck the community. Mero’s own gallery at the corner of Spring and Seventh streets shuttered in 2024. Downtown also saw its perception take a hit last year when ICE descended on the city center and national media incorrectly portrayed the hood as a hub of chaos.
Artist S.C. Mero looks into her latest project, a fake electrical box in the Arts District. Mero has long been associated with street art in the neighborhood.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
“A lot has changed in the 13 years when I first got down here,” Mero says. “Everybody felt like it was magic, like we were going to be part of this renaissance and L.A. was going to have this epicenter again. Then it descended. A lot of my friends left. But I still see the same beauty in it. The architecture. The history. Downtown is the most populous neighborhood in all of L.A. because it belongs to everybody. It’s everybody’s downtown, whether they love it or not. And I feel we are part of history.”
Art today in downtown ranges from high-end galleries such as Hauser & Wirth to the graffiti-covered towers of Oceanwide Plaza. Gritty spaces, such as Superchief Gallery, have been vocal about struggles to stay afloat. Mero’s art, meanwhile, remains a source of optimism throughout downtown’s streets.
At Pershing Square, for instance, sits her “Spike Cafe,” a mini tropical hideaway atop a parking garage sign where umbrellas and finger food props have become a prettier nesting spot for pigeons. Seen potentially as a vision for beautification, a contrast, for instance, from the nature intrusive barbs that aim to deter wildlife, “Spike Cafe” has become a statement of harmony.
Elsewhere, on the corner of Broadway and Fourth streets, Mero has commandeered a once historic building that’s been burned and left to rot. Mero, in collaboration with fellow street artist Wild Life, has turned the blighted space into a fantastical haven with a knight, a dragon and more — a decaying castle from a bygone era.
“A lot of times people are like, ‘I can’t believe you get away with that!’ But most people haven’t tried to do it, you know?” Mero says. “It can be moved easily. It’s not impeding on anyone. I don’t feel I do anything bad. Not having a permit is just a technicality. I believe what I’m doing is right.”
Musician Jeonghyeon Joo, 31, plays the haegeum outside of S.C. Mero’s latest art project, a theater in a faux electrical box.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
After initially posting her electrical box on her social media, Mero says she almost instantly received more than 20 requests to perform at the venue. Two combination locks keep it closed, and Mero will give out the code to those she trusts. “Some people want to come and play their accordion. Another is a tour guide,” Mero says.
Ultimately, it’s an idea, she says, that she’s had for about a decade. “Everything has to come together, right? You have to have enough funds to buy the supplies, and then the skills to to have it come together.”
And while it isn’t designed to be forever, it is bolted to the sidewalk. As for why now was the right time to unleash it, Mero is direct: “I needed the space,” she says.
There are concerns. Perhaps, Mero speculates, someone will change the lock combination, knocking her out of her own creation. And the more attention brought to the box via media interviews means more scrutiny may be placed on it, risking its confiscation by city authorities.
As a street artist, however, Mero has had to embrace impermanence, although she acknowledges it can be a bummer when a piece disappears in a day or two. And unlike a gallerist, she feels an obligation to tweak her work once it’s out in the world. Though her “Spike Cafe” is about a year old, she says she has to “continue to babysit it,” as pigeons aren’t exactly known for their tidiness.
But Mero hopes the box has a life of its own, and considers it a conversation between her, local artists and downtown itself. “I still think we’re part of something special,” Mero says of living and working downtown.
And, at least for now, it’s the neighborhood with arguably the city’s most unique performance venue.
The first time Pop’s Social, a catering company in South Orange, N.J., that specializes in dirty soda, served an alcoholic drink at an event, something strange happened.
At the event in December, its nonalcoholic offering, a spiced pear-cider seltzer with vanilla and peach syrups, cream, lemon and cold foam, was a hit. The Prosecco-spiked version? Not so much.
“People were more interested in the mocktail than the cocktail,” Ali Greenberg, an owner of the business, said in an interview.
Dirty soda — a customizable blend of soda, flavored syrup, creamer and sometimes fruit, served over pebble ice — has been crossing into the mainstream for years, especially after the cast of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” the hit reality show that premiered in 2024, frequented Swig, the Utah chain that started it all.
But its reach has gone far beyond the Mormon corridor, and its rise in popularity has dovetailed with an overall decline in U.S. alcohol consumption. “There’s not a lot of Mormon people in our neighborhood,” said Greenberg. “But there are a lot of people who are sober-curious or not drinking.”
The reality show, which follows a group of Mormon influencers in Utah, helped popularize dirty soda beyond the Mountain States and inspired a wave of TikTok videos on the subject. Swig rapidly expanded — growing from 33 locations in Utah and Arizona in 2021 to now more than 150 locations in 16 states — along with other Utah chains, and spawned copycats nationwide.
Dirty soda has joined other Mormon cultural exports, like tradwife influencers, a “Real Housewives” franchise in Salt Lake City and Taylor Frankie Paul, the Bachelorette who wasn’t, that have captivated America.
With the recent rollouts of dirty soda at McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and Dunkin’ — behold the Dunkin’ Dirty Soda: Pepsi, coffee milk and cold foam — and the appearance on grocery shelves of Dirty Mountain Dew and a coconut-lime Coffee Mate creamer for homemade dirty sodas, we may have reached peak dirty.
The idea for dirty soda came out of a desire for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has millions of followers in Utah and surrounding states, to have more options for social drinking, as the church prohibits the consumption of alcohol, hot coffee and hot caffeinated tea.
When Swig introduced dirty soda in 2010, it filled a need, providing a pick-me-up for car-pooling moms and an after-school treat for their kids. It was quickly adopted by many in the community.
“In other cultures, parents go, they pick up their coffee in the morning, and for me and for a lot of my other friends’ parents, it was, ‘Let’s go pick up our dirty soda,’” Whitney Leavitt, a breakout star of “Mormon Wives,” said in an interview.
Leavitt was surprised when her dirty soda order became a recurring question from reporters in recent years. “They were so excited to hear all of the different syrups and creamers that we add to our drinks to make whatever your go-to dirty soda is,” Leavitt said. (Hers is sparkling water with sugar-free pineapple, sugar-free peach and sugar-free vanilla syrups, raspberry purée, a squeeze of lime, and fresh mint if she’s “feeling really fancy.”)
In April, Leavitt became the chief creative and brand officer at Cool Sips, a beverage chain based in New York that sells dirty sodas.
“Mormon Wives” inspired Kaitlyn Sturm, a 26-year-old mother of three from Jackson, Miss., to post recipes for dirty sodas on her TikTok. The one she makes the most contains Coke or Dr Pepper, homemade cherry syrup, a glug of coconut creamer and a packet of True Lime crystallized lime powder, which she combines in a pasta-sauce jar filled with pebble ice. “It kind of has become like a ritual, where I make one for my husband as well, and we have it most evenings,” Sturm said in an interview.
The trend has also hit fast-food menus. The new “crafted soda” menu at McDonald’s is riddled with dirty soda DNA. The Dirty Dr Pepper, with vanilla flavoring and a cold-foam topper, is the chain’s version of what has shaped up to be the universal dirty soda flavor. Since 2024, Sonic, beloved for its porous, soda-absorbing pebble ice, has offered “dirty” drinks — your choice of soda plus coconut syrup, sweet cream and lime.
These drinks might feel new, but there are antecedents in the Italian sodas of the ’90s (fizzy water and a pump of Torani syrup); the Shirley Temple (ginger ale or lemon-lime soda with grenadine and maraschino cherries); and the egg cream, a tonic of seltzer, chocolate syrup and milk. And what is a dirty Dr Pepper with cold foam if not a descendant of the root beer float? “It’s just a soda fountain from 125 years ago,” Kara Nielsen, a food and beverage trend forecaster, said in an interview.
Though Leavitt moved to New York City with her family in December, her dirty soda ritual has remained consistent, with one key difference. “In Utah, we don’t get to walk to dirty soda shops,” Leavitt said. “We have to drive there.”
Annuals include flowers like marigolds and nasturtiums. They grow fast but won’t come back the next spring (though they will drop seeds and possibly propagate). Perennials like lavender and sage will return year after year, but they may take longer to grow. Wildflower and pollinator packets often contain both annual and perennial seeds but are frowned upon by some serious gardeners, because the selection can be haphazard and ill-suited to the area.
It’s a good idea to exercise a little situational awareness. How much rain can you expect? How much sunlight? Dig the earth and feel it between your fingers — is it sandy? Loamy? These are things to keep in mind as you prepare for your journey into horticultural chaos.
“You want to prepare your soil, your site, at least a little bit,” said Deryn Davidson, a sustainable landscape expert at Colorado State University Extension in Longmont, Colo. “Try to get rid of weeds. Make sure the soil is ready to receive seeds.”
Davidson, who has written about chaos gardening, strongly advised covering the seeds with a layer of soil, lest they become bird food. As for watering, that depends on where you live, she added. On the whole, though, the formula is straightforward: “Soil, sun and water is what these seeds need,” Davidson said.
Not everyone is a fan of the trend, or at least the way it has been portrayed on social media. “Nature is not chaos — nature is pattern,” said Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and the author of “Braiding Sweetgrass,” which recommends imbuing modern life with Indigenous wisdom.
“It seems unrealistic,” Kimmerer said of the chaos gardening videos she has watched. The feeling of effortlessness they convey — a common social media effect, almost always the result of deft editing — seems to elide the work that goes into a garden, whether chaotic or not, she suggested.
“I want my garden to be natural and biodiverse,” she said. “That’s a good impulse. I don’t think this technique is going to get you there, but that’s an important impulse.”
Boitnott, the maker of the viral video, offered a simple reason for why chaos gardening has become popular: “It just makes you happy.”
Admission: I suffer from eyestrain. Even right this very second. As a reporter working on a computer more than eight hours most days, my eyes often feel fatigued and itchy by evening.
I’m not alone: More than half of the U.S. population lives with computer vision syndrome, also known as digital eyestrain, and nearly 16.4 million Americans suffer from dry eye syndrome. So I was especially excited to stumble on New Vogue Spa, in the City of Industry, which offers a relaxing, if intriguing, treatment called “Eyeball Care” — something I’d never heard of before at a day spa.
New Vogue Spa is an Asian-style spa with Korean and Chinese influences. The spa’s offerings include massages and body scrubs — I was curious about the “Red Wine Body Scrub” — but I couldn’t help exploring eyeball care, which was much needed after my 50-minute drive from Silver Lake. (The City of Industry is about 30 minutes from downtown L.A. without heavy traffic.)
So it came to be that I found myself lying on a massage table, wearing what looked like protruding diving goggles, with clouds of cool, aromatic steam oozing from both sides of it and engulfing my face. A spindly plastic tube extended from my forehead to the “Eye Spa” machine. Serene spa music, a blend of classical piano and loudly chirping birds, trilled in the background as the machine sloshed and gurgled. It felt like lying, creekside, in a spa robe wrapped in a blanket of chamomile and rosemary-scented fog.
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As my esthetician, Jenny Chen, adjusted the eye mask and added essential oils to the mist, New Vogue manager Lesley Xie explained that the 60-minute, $125 Eyeball Care treatment aims to hydrate and stimulate blood circulation in the eye area, decrease puffiness and dark circles and aid eye fatigue and dry eye syndrome.
“It’s really helpful for overall eye health for people who are on computers for a long time or sleep really late or who are reading a lot,” she said.
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1. The Eyeball Care treatment included a mask filled with cool, aromatic steam to help relieve fatigued eyes. 2. Slippers in the Himalayan Salt Room.
Xie said that eyeball care treatments are common in China. When she was growing up in Guangdong in Southern China, elementary school students were given a break every afternoon to perform “eye exercises,” which involved gently massaging pressure points around their eye areas, for 5-10 minutes.
“It released eye stress because we studied from eight o’clock in the morning until almost noon time,” she said. “It was a break for our eyes to prevent nearsightedness and tired eyes.”
New Vogue Spa’s treatment was supremely relaxing from the onset — part Head Spa, part facial, part eye care. Chen began by massaging my scalp for about 10 minutes, as I tried not to fall asleep.
Next she cleaned my face, applied massage cream and gently massaged my face and eye area, manipulating the outer corners of my eye sockets as well as under my brow bones and on my temples. She was precise and firm but careful — as she pressed on the outside corner of my eye, I felt tension draining down the side of my cheek and neck.
Esthetician Jenny Chen conducts “Golden Eye therapy” on reporter Deborah Vankin.
Xie said the massage is based on traditional Chinese medicine, focusing on stimulating acupressure points around the eyes.
“Gentle massage of these areas is believed to help promote blood circulation, relax the muscles responsible for focusing and relieve visual fatigue,” she said. “While it’s not a medical treatment for vision conditions, it’s widely used as a preventative and restorative method.”
The massage was followed by “Golden Eye therapy,” during which Chen used an electronic device on my face with a metal roller ball on it. It uses “ultrasonic vibration technology,” Xie said, to help the skin absorb the applied moisturizing cream and combat eye puffiness.
The main event was the “cooling steam therapy,” which Xie said was meant to be calming and refreshing and help relieve tired eyes. Chen fitted me with what looked like an enormous diving mask that quickly filled with cool, hydrating mist — I felt droplets of water dripping from my eyes and down my cheeks. The Eye Spa machine uses a “cold mist atomization process,” Xie said, “that disperses micro-particles of moisture combined with soothing essential oils.”
At the end of my treatment, Chen gave me under-eye gel pad masks, for added hydration, while conducting one last head massage. She applied moisturizing eye cream, face cream and sunscreen before sending me off.
Dr. Kristina Voss, an ophthalmologist with Keck Medicine of USC, was enthusiastic about the Eyeball Care treatment.
“It sounds wonderful. Anything that makes you feel good, I generally support,” she said. “It sounds safe because they’re not putting pressure on the eye. Direct pressure on the eyeball [is dangerous]. And I’d be nervous if they were putting something in the eye, but they’re not. Steam, or even cool condensation from a humidifier, is effective for dry eye. Massaging pressure points probably doesn’t treat dry eye, but could potentially treat eyestrain or tension headaches that can be interpreted as eyestrain.”
Los Angeles Times features writer Deborah Vankin inspects her eyeballs after her treatment.
Temporary relief aside, however, Voss warned that the treatment is not a replacement for seeing a doctor if a condition is ongoing.
“It’s relaxing and complementary to a doctor’s dry eye treatments — like medicated drops or in-office treatments — but it’s not a simple fix or cure all,” she said. “Ongoing doctor’s care would be important.”
After my treatment, I was invited to linger in the co-ed Himalayan Salt Room and Red Clay Room or woman-only spa area, complete with a warm soaking tub, lounge area and treatment rooms for body scrubs. (I skipped the adjacent New Vogue MedSpa, where you can get botox, dermal filler or microneedling treatments.)
Guests are also treated to a cup of homemade snow fungus tea (made from tremella mushrooms) with a single jujube, or red, date, floating inside. New Vogue makes a fresh batch every morning for guests, simmering the collagen-rich drink so long it becomes somewhat gelatinous.
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1. The Himalayan Salt Room. 2. The co-ed lounge area. 3. The Red Clay Room.
“Snow fungus focuses on deep hydration and skin plumping, while red dates support circulation and a healthy glow,” Xie said, calling the concoction “a warm bowl of snow fungus and red date soup.”
I can’t speak to the medicinal benefits of snow fungus tea. But after a glass of the warm, woody-tasting drink — together with the hour-long tension-taming eye treatment — I saw the world in a whole new way while walking out the door: clearly, from a relaxed perspective and with the bigger picture in focus.
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