A Native Turns Tourist on Trip Into L.A.’s Past

When it comes to L.A., I’m a smug native. I’m used to rejecting that urge to act like a tourist in my own city because I’ve already seen everything worth seeing.

Been there, done that.

But that was before I ran into West Gale, who vividly remembered asking for a picture of Billie Holiday from the famed singer herself at the Dunbar Hotel on Central Avenue. Ditto for Alejandro Garza who said he actually knew Simon Rodia, the creator of the Watts Towers.

And the smiling lady taking a walk on South Norton Street in Leimert Park knew why I kept staring at a certain pink stucco house in the 3800 block. I was trying to visualize the exact spot in a vacant field--long since filled up by houses--where the body of Elizabeth Short was discovered in 1947.

“That house wasn’t built yet, but that’s the place where they found the Black Dahlia lady,” she says. “Cut in half she was.”

Never in my own city have I muttered “I didn’t know that” so many times.

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I went on a three-hour car tour of South-Central because a newly formed nonprofit coalition of community activists and groups has proposed some tours for any of the 7,000 reporters who will be in town to cover the World Cup.

Rather than see them do the predictable mix of gloom and doom stories in paradise, this coalition, called the Tourism Industry Development Council, wants the out-of-town scribes to see and report on the real L.A. “The way to tell the story of Los Angeles is not just to see the glitz of Hollywood and the coolness of the beach,” says Madeline Janis-Aparicio, who is heading up the new council’s efforts. “We want to tell the whole story.”

It’s also a way for community activists like Janis-Aparicio to thumb their noses at the powerful Greater Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau, which they say doesn’t focus much attention on L.A.’s working-class neighborhoods.

So the activists are organizing four half-day tours, on dates to be timed with the soccer competition, for the Eastside, the Pico-Union and Koreatown areas, Hollywood and South-Central.

I wanted to see for myself what the competition might encounter on such a tour. So I decided to play tourist and see if my hometown instincts would survive. I chose South-Central because of the four areas, I probably know the least about it.

I admit I wasn’t feeling that confident about my journey, but I plunged into it as I drove south on Central Avenue.

The Dunbar Hotel was the first stop on the tour’s itinerary. Built in the 1920s as a first-class hotel for blacks, the Dunbar was the center of Central Avenue’s night life for many years.

The Dunbar, now home to low-income seniors, is part of a revitalization effort in the area. But it really came alive for me when I ran into West Gale, a sometime actor who collects African art and lectures about it, at the hotel. He ticked off the names of the famous folks he’s met at the Dunbar and it sounded like an all-star roster of jazz greats. Lena Horne, Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway and Bill (Bojangles) Robinson were guests there.

“A few years ago, I was across the street when I noticed Cab Calloway over here,” he recalled. “He was quite nice and he posed for a picture.”

Gale kept recalling tidbits about Billie Holiday doing this and somebody else doing that. He even showed off photos of a bit part he got in the 1953 film, “Mississippi Gambler,” starring Tyrone Power and Piper Laurie.

I then realized the impact the Dunbar had on Gale and other African American residents in the area. Testimony to the Dunbar’s standing in South-Central was that it was untouched in the civil uprising of 1992. Finally, I confessed to him, “I didn’t know that.”

“Complete strangers are always saying that when they come here,” said Reginald Chapple, the project director of the Dunbar’s economic development corporation. “There are just not enough of them coming around.”

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I could have made the same confession at the Watts Towers. There, area resident Alejandro Garza had several hours’ worth of tales about Simon Rodia and his towers, one of them 99 feet high. “He was a simple man and it made sense to me when he left the towers without much fuss to live in Northern California (in 1954),” Garza recalled.

Ditto for the Watts train station, the William Grant Still Art Center, oilman Edward Doheny’s first mansion in L.A. on West Adams Boulevard and the place where the Black Dahlia murder victim was found.

I’m sorry it took an event like the World Cup to prompt me to explore more of my city. I should have taken this trip through South-Central’s history a long time ago. But I didn’t know.