More than freeways, the east-west and north-south streets of Los Angeles—the arteries that connect the city end to end—unlock the city’s narrative, how it segues and transitions from one style, thought, intention, declaration to the next,” writes journalist Lynell George in her 2018 nonfiction collection, After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame. This observation applies especially to highly mythologized South Central Los Angeles. Of all the city’s neighborhoods, there is hardly one more defined by long streets than South Central, the place where three generations of my family on both sides made their home.
Generations of Angelenos find these roads sacred. George writes that her father “used to recite the names of major surface streets like liturgy.”
Streets like Crenshaw, Western, Normandie, Vermont, Figueroa, and Central stretch for miles across multilayered landscapes, bisected by thoroughfares like Adams, Jefferson, Slauson, Florence, Manchester, Century, and Imperial. Traveling down them, you can see fluctuations in socioeconomic conditions and commercial, industrial, and residential uses. And smaller enclaves exist within Greater South Central. Crenshaw, Leimert Park, Hyde Park, Watts, West Adams, Jefferson Park, Chesterfield Square, and Canterbury Knolls.
Popular movies and music lyrics depict South Central as a swirl of palm trees, gangs, and housing projects—but there’s much more here than that. The dailiness that quick visitors might miss includes blocks and blocks of century-old bungalows and family restaurants selling barbecue, soul food, pupusas, and burritos next to mechanics, liquor stores, small motels, and, in late 2024, on streets like Adams and Western, mixed-use projects with seven-story luxury condos above empty storefronts.
The topography inspires crime novelists like Walter Mosley and Gary Phillips, as well as other writers and artists whose works expand our understanding of the place. I first met Phillips in Leimert Park at EsoWon Books in 2010 and have known him for almost 15 years. He and Mosley have written about the dozens of jazz and blues clubs that were once on Central Avenue. Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, built over 33 years, inspired assemblage artists Betye Saar, John Outterbridge, Judson Powell, and Noah Purifoy after 1965. Years later, from the Watts riots and South Central’s cultural swell, the Watts Writers Workshop emerged and birthed poets like the Watts Prophets and Kamau Daáood.
As the years went on, the same exciting spirit enlivened venues like the World Stage in Leimert Park, where the fever continues to this day. Meanwhile, local artists like Noni Olabisi, Richard Wyatt Jr., Michael Massenburg, Mike Norice, and Brittney S. Price painted murals depicting the streets’ history along Imperial, Jefferson, Vermont, and Crenshaw. While South Central’s hip-hop has received the most fame of any of the artistic works from the neighborhood, it hasn’t all been gangsta, as the Pharcyde, Jurassic 5, and Freestyle Fellowship demonstrate. Listen to “Park Bench People” by the Fellowship for a deep dive into Leimert Park.
And Phillips, who grew up at 59th Place and Flower, is among South Central’s most prolific chroniclers, allowing the region’s dailiness to take root in readers’ imaginations. Almost all of his fiction takes place here, including Violent Spring and his other Ivan Monk books. The books in his Harry Ingram series, One-Shot Harry and Ash Dark As Night, are both set in the 1960s, around the Watts riots and civil rights period.
The 2022 anthology that Phillips edited, South Central Noir, includes his introduction, which meditates on the geography. “South Central,” writes Phillips, “is defined as roughly thirty-three square miles: Washington Boulevard to the north, Imperial Highway to the south, Alameda Boulevard to the east, and Crenshaw Boulevard to the west.” Phillips does not include nearby Inglewood or Compton within the boundaries that he proposes demarcate the region, but thanks to rappers Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Kendrick Lamar, the world conflates this larger area with the neighborhood as Greater South Central.
Phillips holds a special place, he told me via email, for Figueroa, one of L.A.’s longest streets, “for its infamy, it’s hot-sheet motels and liquor stores in my old neck of the woods—running farther south to where Empire Liquor Mart once was, where Latasha Harlins was killed by Soon Ja Du, to Harry Bridges Boulevard in San Pedro, named for the harbor’s red labor leader, and all the way north through Highland Park and now all its eclectic shops as gentrification is battled.”
Figueroa extends over 25 miles, with 70-story skyscrapers, massive stadiums like Crypto.com Arena, the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, and the Los Angeles Football Club’s BMO Stadium by the über-wealthy University of Southern California. Nonetheless, much of Figueroa’s core is in South Central just miles south of all that money. In 1964, legendary crooner Sam Cooke was killed on Figueroa and 92nd at a motel one block away from where Harlins would be killed 27 years later.
Many do not recognize the area’s long-standing diversity the way that Phillips does, though notably Nina Revoyr’s 2003 Southland spotlights Crenshaw’s multiculturalism in a novel bridging 1965 Watts with the 1990s. The Crenshaw District was once America’s largest Japanese American neighborhood, and a small Japanese American community still remains there. Importantly, Crenshaw’s coalition of Japanese, Jewish, and African Americans in the early 1970s brought Los Angeles’s first Black mayor, Tom Bradley, to power in 1973. Bradley’s campaign served as the model for Obama in 2008. Phillips counts both Revoyr and the Japanese American noir author Naomi Hirahara as good friends, and as I recall from our conversations, he knows this history of solidarities and differences well. Perhaps this is why the protagonist’s girlfriend, Jill Kodama, in Violent Spring is a Japanese American judge.
Despite the neighborhood’s evolution over the past century, some of the older landscape endures: pockets of immaculate Craftsman, Spanish Colonial, and storybook homes in Jefferson Park, Angeles Mesa, and Chesterfield Square with families, like mine, who have been there for generations. As a scholar of Los Angeles cultural history who has taught in two high schools and one college in South Central, I revere these streets. I currently teach in Watts less than a mile south of the Watts Towers, which were created from the ground up, one layer at a time with found objects Rodia had collected along nearby railroad tracks. Most mornings, I drive by the Towers before class just to see the sun sparkle off the seashells, tile, and glass embedded in the sculpted metal tentacles reaching into the sky.•
Join us on November 21 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Phillips will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Naomi Hirahara to discuss Violent Spring. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
