Neighbors With Wish for Brighter Future Rekindle Holiday Tradition

It only took the flip of a switch Saturday evening to set a three-block section of South-Central Los Angeles ablaze with festive Christmas lights.

But there was much more than that to the energizing that was taking place along 92nd Street between Central Avenue and Avalon Boulevard.

One hundred families hoping for brighter days for their community resurrected a 30-year-old neighborhood tradition of lighting their street with thousands of twinkling holiday lights.

The strings of lights, which were wrapped around well-manicured houses and hung from parkway trees, had been packed away after the 1977 energy crisis and never plugged back in.

But if ever the lights were needed, this was the year. So the 92nd Street Better Home and Improvement Club, with its African-American and Latino membership, decided to get busy.

“We all wanted something that would help bring us back together,” club President James Peters said. He is a retired administrator who has lived on the street 43 years and launched the street’s annual Christmas decorating tradition in 1963.

During the 1960s, the spectacle turned 92nd Street into a landmark each December. Trunks of front-yard trees were wrapped in silver foil. White cotton “snow” covered the lawns. And then there were the lights.

“Hollywood didn’t have anything on Watts in those days,” said Margaret Young, who has lived on 92nd Street since 1947. “Traffic was bumper-to-bumper each night. This street was famous.”

By Young’s standards, seven-year resident Louis Fuggins is a newcomer. But he said he vowed to move there after driving through the neighborhood each Christmas.

“This is the kind of neighborhood I always wanted to live in,” Fuggins said Saturday.

Residents credited Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas for arranging lights to be donated to those who did not have any. Police Explorer Scouts and neighborhood youngsters helped senior citizens string their lights.

“I used to enjoy the lights each Christmas when I was in junior high,” the councilman said. “I wondered if they’d ever come back. Now they have.”

Homeowners on neighboring streets predicted that the tradition will spread their way.

“This has been a bad year. But this means people can come together,” said Ferdia Harris, who has lived on 94th Street for 43 years.

“We all have to come together.”