Hidden Charms : Festival Gives Visitors a Glimpse of Leimert Park, an African-American Cultural Haven in Southwest L.A.

This is a place where on a recent Friday night, people strolled the streets at midnight without fear. They browsed through cluttered art galleries, shopped for handmade earrings and drank espresso at sidewalk tables while listening to the smoky sounds of jazz.

It’s the kind of place Los Angeles often dreams of being. But dream no more.

With so much of Los Angeles so often dismissed as a wasteland of crack and gangs, the Southwest L.A. neighborhood called Leimert Park is a little-known diamond in the rough that rises above the urban madness. It is a haven for artists, poets and musicians and a tribute to the success of a string of businesses owned and operated by African-Americans.

“Leimert Park hasn’t just been refurbished,” hairdresser Marc Bradford said as he gave a woman a Saturday morning perm. “This neighborhood maintains on its own. It’s a cultural hearth, a place we have always sustained.”

Organizers of the 1993 Los Angeles Festival, which opened this weekend, selected Leimert Park as a hub of its events, including a celebration of gospel music and guided Art Walk tours. The neighborhood was supposed to showcase the festival, but it seemed Saturday to be the other way around, giving people from as far as Sherman Oaks a reason to discover a pocket of town where poetry readings and writing workshops thrive as easily as the corner dry cleaners that serves the residents.

“I’ve lived in Los Angeles for a hundred years, and I did not know exactly where Leimert Park was,” Brentwood teacher Zanne Taylor said as she surveyed a boutique stocked with clothing made of the traditional African kinte cloth. “Anybody can come here and shop. A lot of women like to wear these things; they are beautiful.”

The merchants and residents of Leimert Park resolved long ago to keep the lid on crime, the sidewalks swept, the facades freshly painted and all graffiti obliterated. People sometimes soak up jazz and coffee until 6 a.m. at 5th Street Dick’s Coffee Co., a regular hangout for the Watts Prophets Poetry group, jazz drummer Billy Higgins and assorted rap singers. Kenny Kirkland and Branford Marsalis have been known to sit in on weekend jam sessions. Regulars compare what happens there to the chemistry of New York’s 52nd Street in the days of writer James Baldwin and singer Billie Holiday.

“I guess the music makes it that way,” owner Richard Fulton said in a raspy voice, smoking a cigarette. “The music makes everything settle out.”

Created in 1927 and once restricted to whites, Leimert Park was known for its Sunset Field Golf Course and many airstrips. Howard Hughes learned to fly here. It was designed by the same people who planned New York’s Central Park.

The neighborhood is today predominantly African-American, a cross-section of doctors, attorneys, musicians and actors. “We have everything from winos to the elite,” one store clerk said.

Although Leimert Park boldly defies the urban decay that has infected so much else in Los Angeles, it is anything but pristine. Bars cover the windows in some of the neatly kept apartment houses. A woman in the serene village square begs for bus money and chews on the remnants of someone’s discarded barbecue.

But the neighborhood seems to stay in touch with the troubles around it without falling prey to them. (The Step 1 Bookstore specializes in literature for recovering alcoholics and drug addicts.) It has found a way to market its culture without sterile commercialism. (The shops are stocked with hats, vests and jewelry made by residents.)

Everyone in Leimert Park’s charming commercial village, where every shop is owned and operated by African-Americans, seems to have another story to tell. Fulton was a “homeless tramp” before he founded his coffeehouse. Shopkeeper Eugene Chatman doubles as a mental health nurse. Bradford also is an artist. Record shop owner Kamau Daaood is a poet.

“Leimert Park,” Chatman said, “is where your dreams are possible.”

Festival officials and merchants hope the Los Angeles Festival will help the rest of the world discover the community.

“We want to let people know Leimert Park is here,” said Terrie Rouse, a festival coordinator. “It’s different, it’s new, it’s changing.”

The festival’s aim is to encourage people from all over Southern California to venture away from familiar haunts and soak up one of the many cultures that make Los Angeles so diverse.