Altadena’s Gallerist
Ben, Citizen of the Year, wears a crown made by artist friends.
By Mark Goldschmidt
When we returned to Altadena in 1998, my 9-year old daughter and I walked up to McGinty’s vintage clothing shop just up Lake from the hardware store on Mariposa. My daughter had grown up in Bangkok, and to her Altadena was deadsville. Her face just lit up when we walked in his Vintage Underground shop filled with interesting clothing, great colors, a cafe, and a big guy with tattooed arms and torso who radiated energy and bonhomie. That was when I first met Ben McGinty.
Ben closed the Vintage shop not long after, but kept the place, where a year or two later opened the Underground Art Society, a co-op gallery for local artists. Every month a new artist would be featured at a gala opening party, and every month Ben would have rearranged the place, a whole new floor plan, a maze of cabinets, screens, and sculpture, the walls completely covered with paintings. He had phenomenal energy and enthusiasm.
The Underground Art Society became a nexus for an Altadena art scene. Art appreciators, artists and would-be artists, and people of all ages, came and hung out at the gallery. The openings had a pleasant happy vibe, the butt-to-butt crowd trended bohemian/intellectual. It was fun and quite wholesome. Altadena was inexpensive in those days, and home to many artists and musicians. The Underground Art Society became a haven for artsy youth, one place in town they were welcome on a Saturday night, and it became something of an incubator for future artists.
When the building was sold in 2005, Ben moved just up Lake into the old barber shop (now Cafe con Leche) and took over a driveway and little parking area behind, and opened The Gallery at the End of the World.
This was the happening place for the next five years, with regular evening openings, a courtyard full of art, a fire pit, musicians and a mammoth trumpet vine that Ben arranged to partially roof the courtyard space.
That ended in 2010; three years later he reopened on Mariposa where his shop remains today. For a while it hosted gallery openings, but after Covid it has become what it is today, a quality vintage clothing and antique shop with interesting art and the pick of the merchandise Ben acquires in his estate sale business.
In 2017 Altadena Heritage nominated Ben for the Altadena Chamber of Commerce Citizen of the Year. There was some push-back: he runs a business, he should be Business of the Year. But others of us who had experienced his creativity and hospitality knew Ben as a major force in Altadena’s arts scene, and thus a local Citizen Hero.