“Cal State Fullerton and the city of Santa Ana have been in the forefront of a national movement to create artist enclaves within cities,” enthuses William Gould, an artist-architect and urban designer-architect from Cleveland. “I came home inspired after I first saw the site when it was in construction. Cleveland is a big enough city to nurture several artists villages… one for the visual arts… one for music and dance… in areas where the artists have already clustered on their own. Your program is unique in that the city made the space available to the university to develop its arts program and connect into the neighborhood.”

The highest praise is embodied by the community support given the Artists Village on the first Saturday of the month, when thousands of people — the pierced, the tattooed, the dreadlocked, easily mixing with the sleekly garbed, the exquisitely coiffured — throng this reclaimed avenue. They stream into Grand Central to admire its art and perhaps even buy a gleaming ceramic bowl or custom-made jewelry glinting with gold and silver or a canvas — filled with map-like lines and forms — by student David Michael Lee, who uses his profits to buy more paint. And with each month, as new restaurants and businesses take up residence in the area, these strollers find more surprises, such as Memphis, the nouveau Cajun restaurant, and the complex of live-work lofts that have been put on the market.

One recent first Saturday, puppeteer Franklin Rosero of Ecuador took his dinosaur outside for an impromptu performance. Weeks earlier, he had been welcomed to Grand Central as an artist-in-residence during a party organized by compatriots Eduardo Villacis, a painter and cartoonist, and his wife, Maria. Franklin lives in a land with few resources and so he creates set designs and puppets, such as his dinosaur, from materials he culls from junkyards.

On the promenade, with brother William manning a control box that opened and closed the animal's eyes, Franklin enlivened the dinosaur with balletic undulations and sudden surges that made the children giggle, recoil and giggle again.

Franklin, who was flying home to South America a week later, was asked what he was going to miss most about his sojourn in Santa Ana. Without hesitation, he answered, “Amigos.”

One of those friends is center director Harris' 2-year-old son Alexander, who's always ready to fold into a student's arms and help with an art project. Alexander's been drawing ever since he could grip a pencil nub, and in two short decades, he could be living in Grand Central himself. By then, to capture the exuberant sweep of the Artists Village will probably require a mural-sized canvas… and the observant eye and graceful hand of a new Michelangelo.

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Inside the center's computer classrooms, teenagers attend after-school classes in Web design and animation.