Crenshaw, Los Angeles
The Crenshaw District is located in southwestern Los Angeles, California. It derives its name from Crenshaw Boulevard, one of the district's principal thoroughfares. It is generally considered to be a part of South Los Angeles.
Geography
The Crenshaw district is bordered by Chesterfield Square on the east, Hyde Park on the south, View Park-Windsor Hills on the west, and Leimert Park on the north. The district's boundaries are roughly Van Ness and Arlington Avenues on the east, Vernon Avenue on the north, the city limits of Los Angeles on the west, and Slauson Avenue on the south.
Education
The regular high schools for this area are Susan Miller Dorsey High School and Crenshaw High School, which is south of Martin Luther King Blvd. and east of Crenshaw Blvd. Crenshaw High School achieved notoriety in August 2005 when a Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) committee stripped the school of its accreditation. The accreditation was restored in February 2006 on a conditional basis.
New Design Charter School is a charter school in the area.
Neighborhood
The Crenshaw district is a largely residential area of single-story Mediterranean bungalows and low-rise apartment buildings, with an industrial corridor along Jefferson Boulevard. Developed from the early 1920s onward, Crenshaw was initially a very diverse neighborhood of whites (including many Jews), Slavs, and Latinos). As with most of Los Angeles, covenants on property deeds barred African Americans and Asian Americans from owning real estate in the area. During preparations for the 1932 Summer Olympics, which heralded Los Angeles' arrival as a major world city, Crenshaw's medians and sidewalks were planted with hundreds of the towering Mexican palms that, to this day, dominate the area's otherwise low-rise skyline.
After the US Supreme Court nullified segregation covenants in 1948, many white Crenshaw district residents fiercely resisted blacks' westward movement into the area, but the growth of suburbs ultimately led to most whites' departure and their subsequent replacement by blacks leaving South Central and Japanese returning from internment during World War II. (Most of the Japanese left Crenshaw after the Watts Riots of 1965, returning to previously Japanese-heavy areas like West Los Angeles and Torrance.) Since the 1970s, Crenshaw and neighboring Leimert Park have since formed one of the largest middle-class black neighborhoods in the United States, despite heavy damage from the 1992 riots and the 1994 Northridge earthquake. However, the growth of the gang-dominated crack cocaine trade in the 1980s made Crenshaw district one of the most violent neighborhoods in Los Angeles, with the stretch of Crenshaw Boulevard between Slauson Avenue and Adams Boulevard remaining a virtual free-fire zone for years.
Recently, with increased middle-class African-American migration to newer neighborhoods such as the Antelope Valley and Moreno Valley, and with the increase in Latino immigration, the African-American character of the neighborhood has been diluted.
Notable Buildings
The Crenshaw District is known for the Baldwin Hills Mall shopping area which is home to a tri-level Walmart, one of the largest in the country. Although Crenshaw Christian Center, home of the Faithdome, is often mistaken for being in the Crenshaw District it is actually located further south. Before moving to its current location, Crenshaw Christian Center was located in Inglewood, California on Crenshaw boulevard and Hardy-thus giving the church its name. After moving to its new location, the name was retained; therefore causing confusion with those not familiar with the church, its present location, or the Crenshaw District.
Crenshaw Boulevard
Crenshaw Boulevard is a major thoroughfare for Los Angeles County. It starts at Wilshire Boulevard in Hancock Park and passes several demographically diverse areas to end in Rolling Hills. Tracks for the No. 5 Los Angeles Railway "yellow" streetcars [1] in the 1920s through 1950s ran in the median between Leimert Boulevard [2] and the city of Hawthorne. Since the abandonment of the streetcars, the former railway median has been narrowed, the driving lanes improved and the street reconfigured with center-strip landscaping in some areas.
Bold textDemographics:
The population of Crenshaw in 2006 was around 27,600. This is a majority black area, which blacks make up 73.34% of the population, followed by Hispanics, which they make up 16.89%, Whites, 3.37%,American Indian, 0,43%, Native Hawaiin & other Pacific Islander, 0.20%, some other race, 9.20%, two or more races, 9.32%, and 4.35% of the population were of the Asian descent.
Notable residents and natives
- Kenneth Hahn, (1920–1997) Los Angeles County supervisor
- James Hahn, mayor of Los Angeles, 2001–2005
- Arthur Lee, rock singer
- Darryl Strawberry, professional baseball player
- Eric Davis, professional baseball player
- Ice Cube, rapper (member of rap group N.W.A. and Westside Connection) and actor
- Ice-T, rapper and actor
- Geoffrey Styles Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce