Death of a Dream : Fire Squelches Some Big Plans in South Los Angeles

It was envisioned 20 years ago as the bustling retail center of a “new city within the inner city,” a 10-acre shopping plaza surrounded by stylish apartment complexes in a unique development named Ujima Village in the Willowbrook area of South Los Angeles. Renting the 300 low-income apartments was easy, but the project’s creators could never find a developer to complete the shopping center or businesses to occupy it in the mid-1970s. For 12 years, the shell of a shopping center sat vacant.

On Monday, several Ujima project leaders surveyed the remains of their building, gutted by a wind-swept fire that destroyed the 35,000-square-foot, L-shaped structure just as they were finally entering negotiations to develop the site either into the long-sought shopping center or senior citizens housing.

“This just about destroys the original concept,” said James Wilson, a member of the board of directors for the Ujima Housing Corp. “We were all ready to start bringing in the bids. It had been such a long process, and now it’s destroyed.”

Arson investigators with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department arrested a 26-year-old transient, Rodney Gill, at the scene on suspicion of recklessly igniting a fire. Gill apparently lit a small fire inside one of the vacant buildings to keep warm, a sheriff’s spokesman said. He was being held at the Carson sheriff’s station on $5,000 bail.

Firefighters said the building was engulfed in flames when they arrived shortly before 5 a.m. Sunday. Strong winds hampered firefighting efforts, rapidly fanning flames across the roof and diverting water. It took nearly an hour to extinguish the blaze at 941 E. 126th St., fire officials said.

The $400,000 building was not insured because costs were “prohibitive,” said Kenold Seaton, president of the nonprofit corporation.

“We only have a couple thousand dollars in our accounts,” he said. “I just hope we can help in tearing it down and leveling the area now.”

The fire ended the long struggle, mired in financial troubles, to build Ujima Village. Ujima is a Swahili word meaning group effort and responsibility.

The plans for the village were created by a coalition of 55 black organizations in the late 1960s. It was to include 700 apartment units, a shopping center, parks and a family development center to provide job and counseling referrals. A nonprofit community development corporation was formed to guide the project.

But only the first phase of the development was built: the 300-unit apartment complex and a portion of the shopping center. The $6.7-million loan from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development was the first and last money that Ujima’s backers received, Wilson said.

The group ran into trouble with its construction firms in the early 1970s and later was found to be in default in government interest payments, Wilson said.

In 1985, the mortgage for the apartment complex was transferred to a private investment firm and the Ujima group kept the shopping center buildings for development, a HUD spokesman said.

The only tenants in the shopping center for the past year have been a small church, the Christian Bible Kingdom Deliverance Ministries, which operates a food pantry and offers family counseling, and an independent movie production company.

John Henry, who ran the small film production company, said he lost about $40,000 in equipment in the blaze. He was in the middle of moving out over the weekend when the blaze struck.

Monday, Bishop A.J. Carpenter and members of his congregation surveyed the severe smoke damage to their small church. Inside it looked as if a fresh coat of black paint had been evenly applied over everything--floors, pews, organ and piano.

“It’s such a shame. Such a waste for this to be destroyed now,” Carpenter said. “We couldn’t get a shopping center for the people after all these years, but at least they had a church at their doorstep.”