Leimert Park: Black LA's Cultural Center Without a Landmark

Leimert Park was built in the nineteen twenties as a whites-only residential neighborhood. By the nineteen seventies and eighties, those covenants were gone, and the neighborhood had become something the original developers did not intend: the cultural center of Black Los Angeles.

The commercial corridor on Degnan Boulevard and Forty-Third Place filled with galleries, bookstores, coffee houses, and jazz venues. The Anansi Bookstore. Fifth Street Dick's coffee house. The collectors and musicians who had been working in South LA's cultural scene for decades made the Village at Leimert Park their gathering place.

The World Stage, at forty-three forty-four Degnan Boulevard, was the nucleus. Jazz drummer Billy Higgins co-founded it in nineteen eighty-nine as a performance space and workshop, a place where musicians could play for small audiences and teach one another. Wynton Marsalis played there. Kamasi Washington, who would become one of the most significant jazz composers of the twenty-first century, developed much of his musical identity there.

No cultural institution in the Village at Leimert Park has a federal or state landmark designation. The entertainment-industry monuments of Hollywood are meticulously catalogued and protected. The cultural center Black Los Angeles built without the city's help has no plaque.