Well-Earned Attention for Leimert Park

Outside Looking In is an occasional column on how Central Los Angeles and its issues are portrayed by news media outside the area.

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Three weeks after City Times profiled the Leimert Park neighborhood (“Art and Soul,” Nov. 14), the New York Times on Dec. 6 took its own look, describing the area as “a homespun cultural center in the making.” It added:

“Despite an ailing local economy and the riots of April 1992, which also struck this close-knit community, Leimert Park has become a haven for black musicians, artists, artisans and entrepreneurs of African-American culture and tastes. Still a long way from tourists’ must-see lists, it has developed over the last five years into an Afrocentric enclave, much like Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

“Leimert Park has ‘excellent potential’ to become a nationally recognized center of Pan-African culture, arts and entertainment, said Charles E. Loggins, professor of urban and regional planning at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona . . . But there are also stress lines beneath the successful surface. Some merchants believe the area is growing too fast for its own fragile good.”