Crenshaw

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.