An Island of Stability in a City of Impermanence

Los Angeles can be a transient place. Everybody’s moving from someplace to someplace else. Neighbors today, strangers tomorrow, and, hey, it was really nice knowing you.

But this isn’t about that.

This is about Lafayette Square, one neighborhood--and there are others--where people stay, and sometimes their children stay, and sometimes their children’s children stay after that.

To enter “the square,” as the locals call it, is to step into a universe whose civic foundation rests on gentility, neighborliness and stability--qualities that fly in the face of so many Southern California stereotypes.

People walk in Lafayette Square--or, rather, they stroll--and chat with the neighbors of a summer’s evening. And the whole fast-food-eating, music-blaring, horn-honking, trash-talking, strip-mall-covered, neon-spangled world? Where does that fit in?

Outside the gates.

Yes, there are gates at Lafayette Square--there have been since 1989, when residents grew concerned about growing traffic congestion and crime, and obtained city permission to erect tall, locked, wrought-iron gates at all but one of the intersections leading into the eight-block enclave of 236 houses in Mid-City L.A. The gates, which stop cars but not pedestrians, accomplished their goal and increased the sense of apart-ness from the world immediately outside.

Lafayette Square is bounded on three sides by Crenshaw, Venice and Washington boulevards, streets that otherwise epitomize city life in all its gritty, 21st century glory. The neighborhood’s single auto entrance is off Crenshaw, protected only by a traffic light.

Residents, mainly upper-middle-class African Americans, defend the gates as a legitimate way of protecting their children and their homes, and insist that there’s nothing elitist about them, no matter what the outside world thinks.

But what is most striking is the residents’ sheer love of the place.

“This neighborhood is something out of a fairy tale,” said Robert Parham, who moved there 13 months ago. Interestingly, other residents used variations on those very words.

Karen Hudson has lived in Lafayette Square for 40 years. Her grandfather, the renowned architect Paul Williams, built a home for himself in the neighborhood in 1951, and his became the third or fourth black family to live in Lafayette Square.

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Blacks and members of other minorities were barred from the area until the 1940s, when restrictive, whites-only covenants were swept aside as illegal. Before that, it had been a swanky neighborhood for well-to-do whites since its founding in 1912 by banker and real estate developer George Crenshaw, who gave his name to the adjoining boulevard.

Fatty Arbuckle is believed to have lived in one of the neighborhood’s more spectacular homes. Other early residents included W.C. Fields and George Pepperdine, founder of Pepperdine University.

As black families began to move in--bankers and lawyers, architects and business owners, and a few celebrities, including boxer Joe Louis--many whites fled. The Williams family created a stir when it moved in, especially given the bold, contemporary home Paul Williams designed for himself.

Lafayette Square “was a wonderful place to grow up,” Hudson said, sitting in the living room of her grandfather’s home--hers now. Even today, it has a bright, contemporary feel, all curvy lines and light surfaces, a place for cocktail parties and piano jazz.

“It was very much like people say about the old days,” she continued. “If you got in trouble down the street, your mother heard about it before you got home.”

Today, Hudson’s parents live around the corner, in the house where they lived when she was born. Her cousin lives two doors down. Friends, and the parents of friends, are everywhere.

The joke in Lafayette Square is that people don’t die; something in the water keeps them going forever. And in fact, anecdotal evidence suggests that there are an extraordinary number of neighborhood residents in their 80s, 90s and above.

Real estate changes hands at a corresponding pace--although homes tend to be snapped up when they’re available. Real estate agent Rhonda Payne, who lives in the neighborhood, said prices lately have ranged from about $390,000 to $800,000, up substantially from even a couple of years ago, but significantly less than equivalent homes in, say, Hancock Park.

“There’s like a waiting list now for people to get in here,” said Laura Collins, an artist and writer who moved into the neighborhood with her husband, Craig, nine years ago and now--three children later--is looking to move up to a bigger house--not that their 2,000-square-foot Mediterranean Revival home is your typical starter place.

The Collins family was the vanguard of something new in Lafayette Square--the return of white homeowners. Now there are more all the time--perhaps 10% of the neighborhood, along with some Asian American families, according to John Herod, past president of the Lafayette Square Homeowners Assn.

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For the Collinses, living in a predominantly African American neighborhood has been an education--one that Laura Collins treasures. She speaks with awe of seeing civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks--a frequent visitor to friends in the neighborhood--strolling down her street, and of meeting the late Mayor Tom Bradley at a neighbor’s party.

“Sometimes I feel--I say this to Craig all the time--that we’ve gotten more than we deserve,” she said.

The Collinses are part of another trend--a baby boom. Not so many years ago, children were a rarity in the neighborhood. Now, a visitor is struck by the number of children, white and black, playing on front lawns, riding their bikes and scooters down the sidewalk.

Cassandra Malry moved to Lafayette Square as a child, in the late 1950s. Her family was drawn along with a tide of other upper-middle-class African Americans. Malry grew up, moved away, started a family and, about 14 years ago, found herself looking for a new home for herself, her husband and their three young children. They had been living in Baldwin Hills.

One day, Malry took a nostalgic drive through her old neighborhood and spotted a two-story, Colonial revival for sale, with arched Palladian windows and lots of fine, dark woodwork. The house was a wreck--a glorious wreck, with lopsided floors and broken walls.

“We could see beyond all that,” said her husband, Thom Washington, with the dry humor of a man who has paid a few too many contractors’ bills.

Their house today, featured on periodic home tours, is a vision of refined comfort, with its marble fireplace, gleaming wood floors, knotty-pine study, backyard pool.

To be sure, they have their complaints about the neighborhood, mostly having to do with the lack of nice restaurants or shopping in the immediate vicinity. “You might put in your article that Starbucks hasn’t discovered us yet,” Malry said. But that aside, she clearly believes that she has rediscovered the best of all places to live.

“It was a sense of neighborhood, a sense of belonging, a sense of shared values,” Malry said, ticking off the assets that drew her back. “I think, especially when you have children, that means a lot. . . . It’s an investment in soul and heart.”