Culture in the Canyon : Recreation: A 1920s-era clubhouse is home to a secluded city center that offers arts, crafts and sports in Rustic Canyon.

On a typical weekday, Jan Damiano is going gale force--grabbing phone calls, greeting moms and tots and doling out the sort of advice that usually comes from a shrink or big sister.

When a mother calls trying to squeeze her son into a tennis class after his piano lessons, Damiano harrumphs into the receiver: “He’ll probably live to be 95 and he’ll wonder why he had to do everything when he was 7 years old.�

Damiano cajoles a newcomer into joining a group of basketball players (“You’ll like ‘em�), tosses names for program mailings into her cigar-box filing system, rummages for sugar beneath an office table and consoles little ballerinas when the dance teacher’s car breaks down and class is canceled.

Damiano--native Chicagoan, English lit major, chunky jewelry lover and proud wearer of a Muscle Beach T-shirt--is director of the Rustic Canyon Recreation Center, an offbeat, bohemian kind of park/rec center operated by the city of Los Angeles.

A holdout against the usual no-frills municipal buildings, the center is housed in a Mission-style clubhouse, circa 1923.

It is swathed in bougainvillea and sports a red tile roof that peeps through a latticework of eucalyptus and sycamore trees--proof that it was once the meeting place of residents of this hillside community tucked between the bluffs of Santa Monica and the Pacific Palisades. (It’s no wonder that in “A Single Man,� canyonite Christopher Isherwood described the early center as “a subtropical English village with Montmartre manners.�)

More than a half century later, the woodsy enclave hasn’t changed a lot. Families stroll along winding traffic-less paths, a country stream meanders through grassy lawns that look like meadows. And the rich and famous who live nearby still mosey over to the center’s pastoral park for a game of tennis or for a dip in the pool.

“It’s a little bit of heaven down there,� says parks department spokesman Al Goldfarb. “A lot of people don’t know about it.�

And nothing could make those who do know happier.

After a recent magazine article extolled the canyon, arts and crafts enthusiasts were joking that neighbors were out putting up detour signs at the canyon’s main entrance.

Nobody denies that it’s a clubby sort of a place--but in a family, almost frumpy, way that touts tradition, community and the sort of bygone small-town virtues urbanites pine for.

Indeed, the Monday morning ceramics class has become so famous that, according to lore, places are passed down from mother to daughter.

In timbered halls at the center, adults learn everything from yoga to jewelry-making, ceramics, painting, sculpture, calligraphy, piano and guitar, not to mention conversational Russian.

Children just high enough to reach a stove try their hands at enchiladas and strawberry shortcake in cooking courses, while other youngsters take classes in guitar, piano, painting and sculpture, ballet, jazz, ceramics and musical theater.

Taught by community artists, courses are $15-$60 for eight to 10 classes.

In the sports domain, there are tennis lessons ($48 for eight weeks) and free first-come dawn-to-dark play on six clay courts; an old-fashioned grassy baseball field; weekly badminton and volleyball games; duplicate bridge for senior citizens; picnicking and swimming from June 27 through Labor Day.

Three children’s summer camps in sports and the performing arts are already filled.

The center’s popularity is not new, dating back to its origins as a stag club for the Uplifters, the city’s movers and shakers who wanted a country place where they could cavort and, frankly, get inebriated during Prohibition.

The Methodists of the straight-laced Palisades would peer down on the sinners and pray for their souls, according to Randy Young, self-appointed historian of the area. (“Rustic Canyon and the Story of the Uplifters,� written in 1975 by his mother, Betty Lou Young, is the official tome on the period)

But Uplifters were not nabbed for their tippling, says Young, in part because both the sheriff and city police chief were members in good standing.

After building a clubhouse--a polo field, lawn tennis court and a chef were also part of the rustic life--Uplifters put on plays and art exhibits for their own enjoyment and eventually brought out their families, building cabins in the surrounding glens. About 30 of the original cabins remain, most now restored and expanded.

When the Uplifters disbanded in the 1940s, Young says, the main building found its way into the hands of a Greek shipping magnate who threatened to develop the land into a subdivision.

But oil company heiress, Maple Machris, a nearby resident, saved the day, buying the old place and donating it to the city for use by the public.

And so it remains--a surviving bit of Utopia that continues to live up to its name.

Rustic Canyon Recreation Center, 601 Latimer Road, Santa Monica, (310) 454-5734. Registration for summer programs is under way.