Dear friends and members of the Brain Trust. We lost a charter member with the death of Ed Fuentes, who apparently suffered a fatal heart attack, according to Facebook.

Ed was the subject of my first column at The Times and I was so pleased to let latimes.com readers know about him. A huge loss.

(You see some of Ed’s work whenever you read the Daily Mirror because he designed the nameplate. It took him all of 20 minutes. He asked me later if I wanted to freshen it and I said no, it was perfect just as he had done it. And bless him, he did it out of friendship.)

In every sense, Fuentes is larger than life. He’s not exactly tall and not exactly slender, often a bit rumpled, with a few days of stubble and a full head of hair like coarse steel wool. He’s always equipped with at least one camera and a broad sense of humor. In fact, when he said we could meet at the Pie Hole, a restaurant on Traction Avenue, I thought he was joking.

It is his passion for downtown L.A. that has set him apart, chronicling its renaissance and emerging arts community over the last half a dozen years in a series of blogs that give a sense of the area’s history as much as its beauty, including his own View From a Loft and, most recently, Departures for KCET.

He may be little-known to large segments of the city he loves, but in downtown, his voice has endured.

Here’s the link.