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Downtown from View Park. LA Observed file photo.
The unincorporated community of View Park has hillside views of downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood, mountains and I imagine the ocean if you look the right direction. It also has lots and lots of palm trees and prewar, Spanish-style Los Angeles homes. All of this is why more and more people want to buy there, why the real estate prices are going up, why there's a boom in remodeling and why there's a push to nominate the neighborhood to the National Register of Historic Places as a special place before it is too heavily altered.
You have to know a little of LA County's history to know why any of this is controversial, beyond the usual neighborhood unhappiness with change.
View Park, in the hills west of Crenshaw Boulevard, was originally marketed to white home buyers, as most of Los Angeles was — either through racist covenants in property deeds or by overt redlining. When black families did begin moving in during the 1950s and 60s, almost all of the whites left, as they did in South Los Angeles, Inglewood and other areas that became integrated. View Park, and its cousin neighborhood Windsor Hills, formed part of the most affluent majority African-American community in the LA area, possibly in the West. It's been called the Black Beverly Hills; President Obama held a fundraiser in View Park in 2012. Many of the new home buyers are white and younger. Ensuing cultural tensions, fueled in part by the continuing drop in the size of LA's black population, caught the eye of a reporter at the LA Times.
From Angel Jennings' Sunday story:
Longtime residents of View Park have a thinly veiled code for the signs of change they see in their upscale neighborhood: "joggers" ... "dog walkers."
"It's like an alien sighting," says Karen Martin, who grew up in this hilltop community framed by La Brea Avenue and Crenshaw Boulevard. "We never saw them before."But now they are back. White people. With fluffy dogs. And fluorescent Spandex.
And for some longtime residents who cherish View Park as a symbol of African American success and a stronghold of black culture, that's unsettling....
Author and analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson, who lives in Windsor Hills, says that he understands why some of his View Park neighbors are sensitive to the arrival of new white residents — including those joggers and dog walkers.
"We have so few areas," he says. "So little turf that we can call our own. This is yet another invasion by another group coming in to destroy both the culture, the lifestyle and the economic continuity of our area."
Sounds as if the oldtimers like Hutchinson and the newcomers, who see a new light-rail line coming down Crenshaw Boulevard making View Park desirably transit-close to more of the city, have aligned into camps with rival websites and rhetoric flying both ways.
Then there is this not really related facet, but which echoes past examples of Los Angeles Times geography tending to be a little more off than you want from a hometown newspaper. We're talking about a Crenshaw-adjacent area that is south of the Santa Monica Freeway and south of Adams and Jefferson and Exposition boulevards. In fact, if you draw a line across from Martin Luther King Boulevard and Leimert Park, View Park falls just a hair below that line. None of you out there, I feel pretty confident, would lump View Park into the Westside. For some reason, though, the Times website labels this as a Westside story. The bug that labels the story "Westside" also includes a curiously obtuse set of tags, as you can see.
Maybe it's a web traffic trick, or someone at the LAT who is new to the city saw that View Park lies westerly of downtown so slapped on the Westside label. For the record, the Times' own mapping project puts View Park in the South LA region, which isn't a perfect grouping either, but which makes more LA geography sense than Westside.
Previously on LA Observed:
Obama heading to View Park this morning
Just where is downtown Los Angeles anyway?
LA Times' quirky quake story generator strikes again
Even Silver Lake doesn't want you to call it 'Eastside'
LA geography lesson o' the day
Palm tree mania along Angeles Vista Boulevard..
