City's image makeover focuses on creating center of culture. (Spotlight on Cerritos).

CERRITOS is still known largely as the place with the gigantic auto dealer complex, which generates more revenues annually -- $948 million -- than any other dealership complex in the world.

As lucrative as those 25 dealerships may be for the revenue base, officials in this city of 52,000 are looking to boost Cerritos' image beyond that of a car-buying mecca -- in fact they want it to be the cultural center for this portion of L.A. County.

Using the nine-year-old Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts as the focal point, this city two miles northeast of Long Beach on the Orange County line is making over its downtown area.

As an engine for the makeover, the city has been purchasing 30 art pieces for public display. Additionally, the council passed the Artwork in Public Places ordinance in 2000, mandating that all private developers of buildings more than 300,000 square feet include an art piece valued at a half percent of development cost for public view.

A $10.2 million museum near the performing arts center is in the design phase and a $35 million renovation to the expanded 88,000-square-foot Cerritos Library was completed last March.

Several art pieces currently hang in the library, which also houses more than 200,000 books and a 15,000-gallon aquarium.

"It's a quality of life issue," said Mayor Bruce Barrows. "Art is one of the attractions. For a city like us that is locked inland, we've had to create our own draw for people to come here."

Roots in farming

It's a far cry from its beginnings as a dairy farm community. In fact, the city was incorporated as Dairy Valley in 1956, only to change its name 11 years later to Cerritos. (The area was originally part of a Spanish land grant called Rancho Los Cerritos.)

When land prices skyrocketed during the 1970s and 1980s, many landowners who had run dairy farms for decades sold out and retired.

"It was all cows here," City Manager Art Gallucci said of the 1950s. "There was just a few thousand people but there were 80,000 cows. They value of land went up and the dairy people started selling to housing developers."

The first major business venture was the Los Cerritos Mall, build in 1971 (since expanded to 1.3 million square feet) and Cerritos Auto Square, which was developed by the city's redevelopment agency in 1981 to boost tax revenues beyond what had been an industrial base of warehouses and distribution facilities.

The city first used its sales tax money for infrastructure that included a drainage system, a potable water system, 135 miles of roads and 24 parks.

A 20,000-square-foot library was constructed in 1973, followed by City Hall in 1976, with a 20,000-square-foot expansion of the library in 1987 and the 130,000-square-foot Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts in 1993.

Currently, the city collects $24 million in sales taxes annually, much of it from the auto dealers.

Cerritos residents don't pay utility user or library taxes and is one of 130 cities statewide that assess property owners less than the traditional 1 percent tax rate -- a result of the city collecting so much in sales tax revenues.

Asian-Americans make up 58 percent of the city's population of 52,000, a striking contrast to 25 or 30 years ago when the community was predominantly white. The median price of a single-family home reached $400,000 last year, up from $224,000 in 1997.

Center of activity

The centerpiece of the cultural push has been the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, which opened within the 125-acre Towne Center development in 1993 with a week of performances by Frank Sinatra. City officials said that by building the center they felt they would be able to use it as a drawing card to attract business.

Since then, the 1,900-seat facility has attracted many of the world's top talents, including a command performance by the Royal Shakespeare Company for Charles, Prince of Wales.

Other projects slated for the downtown area include a $50 million, 165,000-square-foot office building being developed by Transpacific Development Corp., set for completion next month and a Kohl's Department Store scheduled to open next March.