California Cotton Mills Studios

The California Cotton Mills Company was founded in 1883, and its surviving 1917 buildings on the Fruitvale waterfront were once the largest cotton mill west of the Mississippi — monumental early reinforced-concrete architecture with huge industrial sash windows, closed as a mill in 1954 and listed on the National Register in 2013.

Since 2006 the complex has lived as roughly a hundred rental live/work artist studios across 138,000 square feet, with a small museum of the mill's history in the lobby. This is a genuine working artists' building rather than a condo product — the right answer for a renter or creative buyer-to-be who wants the real thing.