Inglewood Enclave Throws a Party

On their sea-breezy hilltop in an often bad-mouthed city, the residents of Inglewood’s Morningside Park, young, old and very old, gathered Saturday to celebrate their neighborhood.

Rows of banquet tables covered with alternating blue and gold tablecloths were set beneath the tall ficus trees on 78th Street near West Boulevard. Over each, a white umbrella wobbled and balloons of blue and gold strained on their strings. A deejay played James Brown as caterers and residents readied chafing trays of Caribbean-style foods in a large, open kitchen tent and Caribbean dancers prepared to entertain.

The occasion was the neighborhood block club’s annual party, an affair that drew about 400 locals who ate, talked, laughed and generally tightened the bonds that keep Morningside Park friendly, safe and influential in city affairs.

“You don’t get elected if you don’t carry ‘the Hill,’ ” said block club President James Burt, employing an old-timer’s term for the highest neighborhood in the city.

Morningside Park comprises 22 blocks of handsome one-story houses and pampered yards.

“It’s a diamond in the rough,” said Kenneth Brown, a tall Jet Propulsion Laboratory physicist who moved his young family into the neighborhood five years ago.

Brown, 37, was manning a JPL children’s science tent, which featured a one-third-scale replica of NASA’s Mars exploration rovers, along with microscopes that children were encouraged to use to examine neighborhood rocks -- just as Spirit and Opportunity do on Mars. “We just try to make connections for the kids,” he said, “to demystify what we do at NASA.”

A lot of his co-workers, he said, are surprised to learn where he makes his home.

“I’m a physicist, but when people think of a physicist they don’t think of guy who’s 6-feet-7 and lives in Inglewood,” he said.

Pocketed between Inglewood Park Cemetery and Crenshaw Boulevard, north of Manchester Boulevard, Morningside Park has been somewhat insulated from the rougher parts of Inglewood.

“This place is self-contained,” said real estate broker Mark Levi, 42, who moved to the area from Leimert Park five years ago and is active in the neighborhood’s Around the Block Club. “There aren’t that many ways to get into this neighborhood. And within the neighborhood, except for a few apartments that face Crenshaw, it’s all single-family homes. Plus that, we’ve got a lot of law enforcement officers who live in our neighborhood -- four houses on one block, for example. My next-door neighbor is a cop.”

Brown said he and his wife, a psychologist for the Inglewood Unified School District, have no compunction about taking their two young sons on frequent neighborhood walks.

“Living here has really been fun,” he said. “I almost wish I could tell you some horror stories, but I can’t. By now we know somebody on just about every street. I mean, you drive down the street and people wave to you. Plus that, I can get on my bike and be at the ocean in 15 minutes.”

Once in the neighborhood, residents tend to stay; at the block party, 103-year-old Philip Watts was honored by a city proclamation. Not exactly a happy hunting ground for a real estate man, Levi said: “There are very few home sales. You might see one or two pop up from time to time, but that’s it.”

When Van Holloway bought his house in 1967, he was among the first black residents of Morningside Park. Even then, he said, the neighborhood had a distinctly friendly tone.

“I didn’t have any problems,” he said, “and I had a white wife too, and I thought some people might have trouble with that.”

Now, Morningside Park has a hefty majority of blacks, although a number of whites, many of them retired, still live in the neighborhood. Typically, long-time black residents worked in well-paid, unionized blue-collar jobs. Burt, for example, was an electrician and union official before retiring. Holloway operated heavy equipment and was a member of the Operating Engineers Union.

Recent years have brought an influx of young black professionals, such as Brown and Levi, and their families. It’s been a welcome development to the old-timers, guaranteeing another generation of stability and affluence for the neighborhood.

With the rising values of Southland houses over the last decade, prices in Morningside Park have tracked with the neighborhood’s high spirits.

Levi estimated the average value of a home in the area has topped $600,000. Brown said that the home he bought for $250,000 five years ago has more than tripled in value.

Holloway can top that. He paid $38,000 for his place almost four decades ago. “The last estimate I got was eight-fifty,” he said.