From the outside, 1535 Paloma Street on the edge of Downtown Los Angeles is just an aging industrial building that might have closed for good long ago.
But step inside, day or night, and you’ll find a massive, brightly-lit workshop where people using power equipment and hand tools carefully turn raw lumber and salvaged wood into furniture and objects of beauty.
This is the LA Woodshop. By day, it’s a maker space, where area woodworkers, after paying a membership fee, have access to a workspace and carpentry tools. And in the evenings and on weekends, it’s a school to learn skills such as operating power equipment safely, creating advanced cabinetry, and building tables. All of that involves using old-school hand tools that haven’t changed in centuries.
Eric Clem, a woodworker and one of the co-founders of the LA Woodshop, says students here often want relief from tech burnout and endless web scrolling.
“I think it boils down to the fact that there are people that really want to spend their time using their hands,” says Clem. Moreover, he says, many of those who come here are trying to find new forms of creativity and a connection to community in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s nice to be able to see what I can create just in a few hours, once a week. It's really satisfying,” says Danna Vaughn, an interior designer who decided to take woodshop classes to partially escape her online life.
Vaughn is currently turning old pieces of heavy salvaged lumber she found for free on Facebook into wooden platters, bowls, and kitchen stools.
“It's going to take a lot of work to clean up, but hopefully will be worth it,” says Vaughn.
Others here hope to turn woodworking into a new vocation and earn some extra money.
Carrie Ann Canton, a nutritionist, dreams of making bespoke wooden items that she can sell. Canton admits, though, that her only previous experience with woodworking was watching home renovation shows on HGTV.
“That's the closest thing I have come to anything like this,” says Canton. “I hope we all get good enough to sell it. That’s eventually my goal.”
As students work on their projects, Clem and other instructors circle from workstation to workstation, answering students’ questions.
Chris Harris works on crafting a bookshelf for his home. Like many other students at the LA Woodshop, Harris had virtually no woodworking or carpentry experience before taking classes. Photo by Saul Gonzalez.
Student Chris Harris is working on his most ambitious project so far, a bookcase for his Long Beach home.
Having no prior carpentry experience, Harris says woodworking here has taught him both the pride of craftsmanship and just how much we, as a society, waste.
“We get so accustomed to being consumers all the time, where [when furniture breaks] we just throw it out and go to Ikea,” says Harris. “As opposed to being able to put in the love and the patience and the time that's necessary to really build something that is your own.”