There’s a gentle bend along Crenshaw Boulevard, southbound from the 10 freeway, that tells me—always—that I’m nearing home. I feel it in my body. It triggers a wave of emotion—a mix of gratitude and wistfulness and worry. Protect this at all costs.
Outside, a vivid patchwork backdrop whizzes by: the last-century signage—cafés, wig shops, ghosts of nightclubs, fast food, incense shops. And, too, slashed down the center, the progression of the Metro K Line light rail construction, orange cones, canary-yellow directional signs, and those variable-message boards warning “one lane.” The boulevard has been consumed by all this tearing up for years, and that has dramatically altered its feeling. I take in both what’s vanished and what remains, in one glance. I always see both. It’s my Angeleno’s way to navigate a changing place.
I ease into that bend, spot the spire of the Vision Theatre as it rises into view. Its turquoise tower serves as a beacon, a gateway to a specific Black L.A.
On this balmy afternoon, I’m moving with another purpose—threading my way to an interview with Jason Foster, who is the president and chief operating officer of Destination Crenshaw, an in-the-works high-profile civic/public arts project sunk smack within the boundaries of my childhood neighborhood. “It’s coming!” people have reported to me in tones that don’t always convey the full scope of their sentiments. I’m left to wonder: Like a storm? Like a train? Like a lifeboat? Billed as an “outdoor museum,” and slowly materializing along a 1.3-mile stretch of Crenshaw from Leimert Boulevard to 60th Street, the ambitious public-private endeavor has already sprung up as a conversation topic within my artist and community-organizing cohort, buzzing on the edges of my consciousness.
Conceived by the downtown L.A. design firm Perkins&Will, Destination Crenshaw will ultimately consist of four acres of cultural open spaces that will become “the heart of the largest Black community on the West Coast”—according to the company’s website. Slated to open in early 2025, Sankofa Park will serve as the project’s grand focal point, featuring an elevated gathering area. Subsequent phases will include 10 pocket parks displaying work by Black artists with roots in or strong ties to Los Angeles. Destination Crenshaw aims to provide, when complete, both a balm and a boost for longtime residents and business owners in Crenshaw-adjacent neighborhoods—including Leimert Park, View Park, and Hyde Park—who have toughed out the impacts of the K Line, road closures, mazes of scaffolding, stretches of shuttered businesses, and a new demographic moving in and bringing with it worries of place-altering gentrification. The project itself, which has raised $95 million (including $4.4 million from the federal Housing and Urban Development Department’s Community Project Funding grants program), has been buffeted about, affected by COVID-19 slowdowns, material shortages, and unexpected detours, its original opening of spring 2020 pushed back—not once but more than three times now.
Though I haven’t lived adjacent to this corridor for decades, the Crenshaw district is the location that feels the most essential to my story of self. Even in its changing state, it’s one of my cardinal points: it’s the place at which, consciously, my story begins.
Depending on your era drifting in and around it, Crenshaw means: back-to-school wardrobe, early-morning Sunday school, Nipsey Hussle’s Marathon Clothing, plates of donburi, chow mein, or grits at the Holiday Bowl coffee shop, sweaty nights dancing at Maverick’s Flat, your first bank account, weekends “rollin’ the ’Shaw” in tricked-out vintage rides, your first new car from the Ford lot, the somber site of your first homegoing celebration.
I’m tempted, as always, to veer off into a memory tangent, hunting out the past: My mother’s old beautician’s black-tile storefront. The shell of the once-magnificent shopping area—the Crenshaw Center. My godmother’s aquamarine stucco duplex nestled beneath a canopy of bending branches that, once a year, transformed into a jacaranda fantasy. Even a quick run past our old house on 61st. Call it research. Remember why it matters.
ROOT SHOCK
I land a parking spot on Crenshaw near 54th Street. My eyes immediately lock on what once was the Thrifty Drug Store outside of which my mother and I would wait for the RTD bus on the days my father had the car. This corridor has always been a connector, a main stem that helped stitch the story of the city together. Though I’d seen photos of them, I’d missed out on the Yellow Car (part of the Los Angeles Railway system), which also paused here to pick up and let off fares. That was my mother’s Crenshaw story. Now I can ride its ghost path on the K Line train, which my mother (and her mother, too) most likely would be astonished to know exists. “They ripped up a perfectly good system,” my mother tsk-tsked about losing the old trolleys, a statement I remember her punctuating with a decisive snap of her handbag’s clasp. I’ve always associated that particular erasure with money.
Jason Foster feels like someone I already know, the way we slip with ease into the center of the story; the way he acknowledges the thorny topics straight off, not hedging: “I believe in criticism, healthy suspicion,” he tells me. Also, there’s the way he does and doesn’t take up space, both leaning in and creating room to listen. Even given the hopeful scope of Destination Crenshaw’s goals—to beautify and uplift and support—he knows that this community is wary; they’ve weathered heartbreak, pressed for equity that has been slow to come. “It’s about not shying away from that. That’s one thing about this community: they will tell you. I had to work to establish relationships,” he tells me. “I’m very conscious of what I don’t know.”
As we settle into a warm-up chat before he launches the formal PowerPoint introduction to the project, I tell him about some back-and-forth I’ve been following on social media and in online forums, not about Destination Crenshaw specifically, but a general anxiety that Crenshaw residents—and past residents—have begun to express: a mural painted over, a possible closure or relocation of a beloved cultural hub. Foster takes it in, then explains how his goal is “to put more on the hope side.” In other words, to make them feel that this is still home. That it is for you. Us. He then relays an expression that will stick with me for weeks: “root shock.” It’s a term that social psychiatrist Mindy Thompson Fullilove has used to describe the traumatic experience of Black people, specifically, from their being displaced from their homes and community. Shifting landscapes and waves of gentrification leave traces of trauma, an ache that registers in the human body and in the corpus of a community. Foster wants to be mindful of what change can bring.
Originally from Tennessee, he started out as a community organizer before moving here from Brooklyn in 2011 and eventually landing the job of operations manager with River LA, which seeks to revitalize the waterway. About eight years in, he began to hear word of Destination Crenshaw and its ambitions. The project appealed to him, he says, because of its organic origins, as an initiative that grew out of Los Angeles City Council member (now president) Marqueece Harris-Dawson’s office. The proposal was a response to early news that the much-anticipated airport connector line (now designated as Metro’s Crenshaw/LAX Line) would run aboveground, “at grade,” rather than underground. That announcement lit a warning flare of anxiety within the community, as the rail would roll through one of Black L.A.’s main historic thoroughfares. What might that do to the cohesiveness of a neighborhood that was still struggling with the impacts of disinvestment, the nation’s economic downturn, and the steady press of gentrification? Residents didn’t have to read between the lines. They just looked around—compared and contrasted. “It’s cheaper to build at-grade than to build underground or with elevated tracks,” Joanne Kim, then project lead for Destination Crenshaw and senior adviser for Harris-Dawson, told the Los Angeles Times in 2019. “[With] Wilshire, they went underground. Hollywood Boulevard, underground. Westside, they’re going above ground or underground. It’s an insult to build at-grade.”
Foster arrived at Destination Crenshaw in November 2019 primed for the challenge of being part of something unparalleled. He understood: “We have to show what the future can be.” His first, and “chief,” role was financial consultant. “I was moving Destination Crenshaw off of fiscal sponsorship, to a private-nonprofit status, moving us through our first audit,” he explains. “We had raised $52 million. Just enough money to start construction. We did a groundbreaking and brought in 3,500 people to the site of what is now Sankofa [Park] and threw a concert. We had shovels out, you know? Told everybody that this was about to happen…” His voice trails off; I fill in the blank: COVID. “…And four days later, there was the first stay-at-home order.”
That extended interruption forced a pivot. Foster dug deep into his community-organizing background: “We went from moving this project, from what we thought was going to be done in a year, to standing up the community, you know, a rapid-response COVID system.” That meant everything from supporting small businesses and helping them acquire PPP funding to assisting seniors and senior centers to starting work on digital-equity programs. All the gaps that became evident during COVID. “Because we knew if we didn’t do that, it would have missed the core of what this project is for—which is the people.” In those long, isolating months, says Foster, Destination Crenshaw broadened its focus. “I call it a healthy bypass. It was an opportunity to do something hopeful.”
STAYING ROOTED
This is tender landscape. Staying rooted has been no small feat. For decades, Black Angelenos have fought back against restrictive housing covenants, gone head-to-head with eminent domain, seen neighborhoods razed and renamed (see “Poetic Injustice”). Whole enclaves erased from maps. Foster knows about the whispers and the worries. Given Destination Crenshaw’s size, one artist friend asked me, “will it still be ‘community’?” Foster knows that the questions and characterizations loop: “People thinking we’re building a memorial to Black people. Or we’re building ‘the Black Grove.’ ” It’s none of the above. Foster is firm: it’s a dynamic initiative to tell a neighborhood’s, and a people’s, story and actively involve residents—past, present, and future.
This is why invoking Sankofa as a unifying theme for this project is both metaphorical and transformative. The word, with origins in the Twi language of Ghana, stresses the importance of learning from the past, as a way to inform and shape the future. In its most pared-down form, it encourages us, in the present, to “Go back. Get it.”
Foster clicks through his PowerPoint slides showing renderings—tree-lined walkways, artists in their studios, construction workers with heads tilted skyward as they move materials—of the pieces that will form a new Crenshaw. By the time the entire project is expected to be complete at the end of 2025, Destination Crenshaw will be the largest endeavor of its kind in the United States, commissioning works from more than 100 emerging, midcareer, and established L.A. artists. Among them: Charles Dickson, Alison Saar, Artis Lane, Melvin Edwards, Brenna Youngblood, the late John Outterbridge, Kehinde Wiley, and Maren Hassinger.
Wrapped around each decision that Foster and his team will make: What are the stories to be told, what are the neighborhood features to be protected? He underscores, “This is not community development. This is not equitable development. This is reparative. It does have to do with your feelings. Yes, it does have to do with how you feel about your space.”
There’s a reason this is all bound up in feelings.
It’s a reckoning with the past.
CAN WE REALLY LIVE ANYWHERE?
By grade-school age, I had learned the name Loren Miller, but not from the schools I attended. He was mentioned often enough in eavesdropped grown-up conversations, however, that he may as well have been family. A journalist and activist, Miller was also the trailblazing, go-to lawyer for Black Angelenos fighting housing discrimination. He was a scrapper. A hero. A defender of people and place.
Much later, in the classroom, I would learn the names of the men who shaped and styled my local landscape, the names behind the streets I traveled across during my earliest years. A Missouri-born real estate developer and banker, George L. Crenshaw helped develop a couple of upscale residential neighborhoods in Los Angeles—Lafayette Square and Wellington Square—in the early 1910s. He named the 23-mile-long boulevard after himself. His neighborhoods, with their wide, palm-embroidered streets and quaint streetscapes, were, like Leimert Park (also named for its developer, Walter H. Leimert), explicitly cordoned off by racially restrictive housing covenants.
In 1948, Miller, alongside Thurgood Marshall, argued a landmark civil rights case, Shelley v. Kraemer, before the Supreme Court. The court ruled that racist real estate covenants were not enforceable, effectively abolishing them. One of L.A.’s Black newspapers ran the headline “California Negroes Can Now Live Anywhere!”
This ruling became a doorway. “Crenshaw emerged as the major Westside area where Angelenos of color sought to tackle housing discrimination, and among all of its enclaves, Leimert Park served as the entry point,” writes Jennifer Mandel in The Coveted Westside: How the Black Homeowners’ Rights Movement Shaped Modern Los Angeles. Leimert Park was a jewel piece, with its attractive single-family homes, its apartment dwellings, and the Leimert Theatre (now the Vision), built by magnate Howard Hughes and boasting an elegant art deco tower. However, the covenants hadn’t gone away; they just went underground. Mandel writes of how the neighborhood continued to bar people of color from owning real estate with a new, coded form of covenant: the “permanent protective restriction.” It would take more legal pushback, more community organizing to end these arrangements.
Across Los Angeles, Black people fought hard to become rooted. Over the next decades, Black families would lose homes, businesses, and a sense of place through covenants, redevelopment, and eminent domain. There was the routing of the Olympic Freeway (the 10) through West Adams Heights, known colloquially by its Black residents as Sugar Hill. Despite community opposition and lawsuits, the neighborhood was bisected in 1963, altering its character forever. A Los Angeles Sentinel piece in 1966 summed it up this way: “The road could have been built without cutting through the so-called Sugar Hill section. However, in order to miss Sugar Hill, it was ‘said’ that the route would have to cut through fraternity and sorority row area around USC. Sorority and fraternity row still stands and Sugar Hill doesn’t, so you know who won out!”
Whose California dream matters most?
ART IS POWER
Council president Harris-Dawson reaches back into his mental stow of Crenshaw memories, reeling them off like a Kodachrome-carousel slideshow. “When I think about Crenshaw, I think about motion—just people moving. Cars, first, but people walking. Small businesses, people out front sweeping. I think about people selling newspapers. Street-vending rugs on the corner, dresses in front of the Liquor Bank. I think about the motion of life. Of vitality.”
I can hear it, feel it, see it.
“I grew up in South L.A.,” says Harris-Dawson. “My grandparents had a small business on Crenshaw, real estate brokerage. But also, anybody we knew that had a business was on Crenshaw. If you were a good plumber, a good lawyer. If you were a good arts person, you know, you had a presence on Crenshaw. Or within the locus of Crenshaw. Its remnants tell the central story of the height of the Black community in L.A.”
Those remnants, echoes of a time past, can be more than reminders; they can be seeds. “When I was [first] running for office,” says Harris-Dawson, “people’s number-one issue to me was like, ‘What about the rail? Seems like it’s going to ruin our community.’ So it was, How do we take this rail from being a problem to being an opportunity? How do we move off of the position of letting something happen to us and [into the position of] making what’s happening work for us and championing it?”
In 2016, the late Nipsey Hussle, the rapper and entrepreneur, grasped what was at risk. Deep into his own community work, and born and raised in the neighborhood, Hussle learned, in a meeting with Harris-Dawson, that the new Metro, cutting through the center of the boulevard, was deemed a “pass through” by the city. He took umbrage—and later that day tweeted out the words “Destination Crenshaw,” all caps, thus naming both the project and the path forward. There was reason to linger, he knew. To explore and learn.
“How about this time we write the narrative?” suggests Harris-Dawson.
“Building a museum around [the Metro path] made it an opportunity, because there’s no way you’re going to get more eyes than having a train. So let’s capture those eyes, that imagination. Give them a reason to get out and do business with us and consume culture,” he says. “We all know that [Black culture] gets consumed, but our community rarely benefits from that consumption. So this is creating a new platform for new benefits.”
“When we make art, people look at it,” he adds, “and art is a position of power.”
Harris-Dawson wants to address the challenge with dynamism, not with gloom and doom. “There are only a handful of counties in the country that have more Black people than we do,” he says. “There are almost as many Black people in L.A. as in Mississippi. We have the critical mass to have a presence.”
“GO GET IT”
It’s early summer, and I have clicked through the Destination Crenshaw slides, examined the streetscape renderings, studied the architectural plans, and listened to hopes and desires. Yet, I’m still trying to get a handle on how this will feel, how it will merge into the landscape and our understanding of it.
I’ve been inspired by the metaphor of Sankofa and deeply moved by the project’s connecting design motif—a shoot of African giant star grass. The grass, Destination Crenshaw’s fact sheet explains, was “used centuries ago as bedding on ships transporting captive Africans to enslavement,” and it “thrived in alien lands, even in inhospitable conditions.” It is an apt visual metaphor for the project’s theme: “Grow Where You’re Planted.”
Circling home once more, I’m marking the evolution in person, too. Bit by bit. It helps to be up close to measure. I poke my head in at artist-filmmaker Ben Caldwell’s spot, KAOS Network. Situated adjacent to the Vision Theatre, KAOS is Caldwell’s creative incubator space, one that he has operated for more than 30 years. It sits mere steps from Sankofa Passage, on Degnan Boulevard, a community-initiated sidewalk of fame dedicated to Black artists who considered L.A. both home and complicated muse.
Degnan has been a Black artisans’ corridor for decades—another doorway, this one to workspaces for painters, craftspeople, and filmmakers; gathering spaces for poetry and music workshops. Brockman Gallery, owned and operated by brothers Dale and Alonzo Davis, opened its doors here in the late 1960s. Part of a fresh wave of creative spaces that distinguished themselves after the 1965 Watts uprising, Brockman was a leader as an independent gallery “run by artists for artists,” writes Kellie Jones in her lively, comprehensive cultural study, South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. These independent institutions, she continues, “filled themselves up with the energy of change to effect their own transformations of the cultural environment.” Though the space closed in 1990, its imprint is indelible.
From Caldwell’s Leimert Boulevard–facing windows, I can see the coppery-hued deck-like structure of Sankofa Park rising. An echo. From this perspective, I’m beginning to comprehend how the new construction will be woven into the landscape. Another touchstone and gateway to Black L.A.’s story in the 21st century.
Caldwell has long been an anchor, providing background and context for me, especially when I started as a young journalist, attempting to tell my neighborhood’s story. “When I opened this place, I began to study how art works in this America,” he says. “Because traveling around the world with my films, I got to see a lot of different ways that art was being worked with. And I couldn’t understand why we are not participating in the wealth of something we created.”
Caldwell’s words resonate. They thread into what Harris-Dawson put forward in our conversation: Art is power. It’s part of the place-keeping and storytelling. Caldwell gestures toward his own Sankofa icon on his door—a small bird running forward but glancing backward. “Go get it!” Caldwell lifts and shakes a fist. “Go get it!”
This is a dynamic moment for our city, our presence in it, says Caldwell, and as always, people will have to be enlightened along the way. That work, tending space, protecting the essence, never ends.
I look again out Caldwell’s window, and instead of a raised deck, I see in my mind’s eye what could well be a bridge from generation to generation.
RESILIENCE
It’s a few months after my initial interview with Foster, and I’m on my way to walk the site with him. I grab a coffee from a recently remodeled café. Stretched across the bottom quarter of the front window is a ribbon of words resembling an oversize fortune cookie message: “A future memory of home.” I have to think it’s speaking directly to me—to people like me.
When I meet up with Foster, who is business-casual in jeans, sneakers, and a soft navy button-up, his eyes, behind clear-frame glasses, are bright and he’s eager to show me progress. Real progress. “We’re still evolving our story of what a cultural district is,” he tells me. “That’s a community conversation. And being part of this process helps people imagine a future that’s different. One that is for them. One that’s not pushing them out.”
We make our way to the fenced-off work zone, crunching through dirt and concrete toward the structure of Sankofa Park. I stand in the shadows of its sweeping curves, its solid buttresses. I turn to face north and orient myself by focusing on the Vision’s turquoise spire. Foster says that this park will become a new gathering place for the community—for celebration, for protest, for memorial. A way to be in conversation and in fellowship.
A bridge. A sturdy span between what’s here and what’s to come.
After we thread through the site—I make notes, snap photographs—Foster asks if I’m hungry. Before I can answer, we’re already rolling up to Dulan’s on Crenshaw, near 48th. Greg Dulan spent a challenging two-plus years on a major renovation of this spot, an extension of his family’s legacy businesses (Hamburger City, Aunt Kizzy’s Back Porch, and two other Dulan’s locations in South L.A.). This year, he was a James Beard Award semifinalist for his work at this restaurant and at his Dulanville Food Truck.
I wander outside and take a seat on the new patio fronting Crenshaw, waiting for my order of black-eyed peas and for Foster, who has paused to talk Destination Crenshaw business with Dulan (a new mural, sponsored by the project, will be painted on one of his outdoor walls). That afternoon, during the lunch rush, Dulan makes the rounds, sometimes balancing trays. The regulars compliment him on the remodel. The restaurant means a lot to them. A point of pride. It’s wrapped up in memories and ritual. That history fans out in photographs along the dining room’s walls, in the hallways. Everywhere you turn, you can’t escape it. Their history.
“Quite frankly, most people didn’t think we were going to reopen,” Dulan tells me a few weeks later when I’ve returned to speak to him about what it has meant to him to bring this business into a new century along this historic corridor. Given years of disinvestment, the pressures of the pandemic, and the toll of the remodel, “it’s a miracle that I’m still here,” he says.
He is banking on the new energy that Destination Crenshaw should bring to the boulevard. He’s putting his all into it. “This renovation was about getting this building ready for another 50, 100 years.”
Dulan went to 54th Street Elementary, attended “Y Indian Guides” meetups at the church nearby. His family’s entrenched deeply here. “Our…first business in the neighborhood was Hamburger City. It opened in 1975, on Martin Luther King and Hillcrest. Burger and fries for a dollar. Lines 20, 30, 40 people deep. It was a busy, vibrant neighborhood.”
This Dulan’s location opened in the wake of L.A.’s 1992 civil unrest. “I saw the buildings burning,” he remembers, and distressingly, since then, for decades, he says, “there was nothing. No interest. No development. No city programs. I don’t want to say they didn’t care. But there was no focus on this part of the city. So probably, what we’re going through now is probably the best I’ve seen for Crenshaw in quite some time.”
“It’s a double-edged sword,” says Dulan. “Gentrification is real. And when you tap on inflation that we’re dealing with? People are really feeling pressure. And the stress.” But, he adds, voice steely, “I’m resilient.”
The scenario he’s envisioning is not at all illusory—but it’s something Crenshaw has not had on this scale, even in its glory days. It’s defining new territory. The idea, says Dulan, “is that when the tour bus rolls up to Sankofa Park, it would be very nice if they can come a block down and sit in a nice restaurant and have a soulful dinner.” Something to feed their spirits. Have a fresh experience, create new memories. “It’s a sound plan, right?”
Feels like possibility. Tangible, at that.
PERMANENCE
Still, if I’m honest, I find myself wrestling with something different, a part of myself that is struggling with something precious but ineffable. For now, that Crenshaw that my, Harris-Dawson’s, and Dulan’s families experienced together still exists. Present, though fading, it still contains them. But for how much longer? Foster wants us to trust that Destination Crenshaw offers this assurance.
We stand, at the moment, at the middle of the span, between here and there, past and future.
“One of the things that Black people in L.A. really need to think about is permanence,” Harris-Dawson says. “You know, all my life, every few years, there’s a premature declaration of Black extinction here in L.A. And then we ‘pop out,’ as they say. I want to protect the sense of ownership that people have. The sense of it is even more important to me than the legal ownership. The only way you keep a place is if people feel like they own it.”
That means honoring the past, staying rooted in the present, and keeping an eye on the future. “This is the permanent pop-out,” Harris-Dawson says.
We have no choice but to go get it.•
Correction: The print version of this story misnamed the 1948 civil rights case Shelley v. Kraemer as Shelley v. Miller. We have corrected the language online.
Lynell George is an award-winning Los Angeles–based journalist and essayist. She has been a staff writer for both L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles Times. Her work has appeared in various news outlets including the New York Times; Smithsonian; Vibe; Boom: A Journal of California Preservation; Sierra; Essence; and Ms. She was selected to be a University of Southern California Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism fellow in 2013 and received the Huntington Library’s Alan Jutzi Fellowship for her studies of California writer Octavia E. Butler in 2017. She is the recipient of a 2017 Grammy Award for her liner notes for Otis Redding Live at the Whisky A Go Go. George is the author of three books of nonfiction: No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels (Verso/Doubleday); After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame (Angel City Press); and her most recent book, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler (Angel City Press), published in 2020, which was a Hugo Award finalist in the Best Related Work category in 2021.
