Anxious in Leimert Park

IT’S SPRING, AND in the fertile but fallow heart of black Los Angeles, redevelopment plans are blooming -- again. I say “again” with equal parts hope and trepidation.

Since the civil unrest in 1992, this bloom has been a seasonal occurrence in South L.A. and Crenshaw, involving much discussion, debate, goal setting and idea gathering. In the end, however, it all yields very little fruit. And almost nothing has happened in Leimert Park Village, the tiny but significant enclave just east of Crenshaw Boulevard near 43rd Street that features black- and African-themed shops, studios and eateries. These establishments have long been considered the cultural center of black L.A. and its best hope for institutionalizing a vital black presence that, since the fiery epiphanies of 1992, has steadily been on the wane.

The good news is that the latest redevelopment effort focuses on Leimert Park Village, which is in the district of Councilman Bernard C. Parks. The bad news is that the latest redevelopment effort focuses on Leimert Park Village.

Leimert, you see, is not simply one of many underachieving business districts scattered across the South L.A. landscape like points of non-interest, places that after years of almost nothing would be grateful for a new chain pharmacy or grocery warehouse. Leimert is different. It is a crossroads in the truest sense, a border zone where the sensibilities of the black middle class, working class, artist/dreamer class and politically active class converge daily, notably on weekends during one of Leimert Park’s many regular festivals. It is a symbol of pride and resistance, a shining model of self-creation and celebration in difficult times.

But it also means too much. Whenever the city talks about change in Leimert, people get anxious. They want change, but of a specific kind. They want to improve but also preserve, spruce up but also retain the grass-roots character and cultural imperatives that make the village what it is.

Development anxiety is hardly uncommon in suburban-minded L.A., where neighborhoods are often more sacrosanct than businesses. But Leimert’s anxiety runs deeper and wider than most. It speaks not just to the endangered status of Leimert but to the troubled history of black people and development. Black communities everywhere are used to being excluded rather than included; they are frequently redlined, ghettoized, underfunded or gentrified and priced out of the market.

In L.A., we want the niceties of the Grove but more often get the uninspired basics of a strip mall anchored by AutoZone. We want progress but have learned to expect deception and disappointment, not just from developers but from black elected officials who can be the biggest impediments of all, albeit with smiles on their faces and sober promises of community betterment embellishing every public remark. Yes, Magic Johnson got a new movie multiplex built at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza back in 1996. But the job of rebuilding the vast Santa Barbara Plaza shopping center across the street from the mall, the job Johnson coveted most, is still undone. It has been undone for more than 20 years.

But the forces of real change may finally be afoot. According to Parks’ office, the L.A. real estate boom has led to intense developer interest in Leimert and the Crenshaw area in general. Parks is impatient with the snail’s pace of progress in Leimert and is looking to fast-track redevelopment. His instincts are admirable. But Parks’ penchant for authoritarianism and frequent disdain for community input is a problem.

This penchant showed itself early, in 2003, when Parks wanted to approve a liquor license for a South L.A. market in an area overpopulated with liquor stores; the store also happened to be the same place where Korean grocer Soon Ja Du shot black teenager Latasha Harlins in 1991, an event that helped set the stage for the riots a year later. Last year, Parks pushed through the development of a county social services building on Vermont, this time over the objections of middle-class residents who had nursed a fantasy of having some decent retail shops and a couple of sit-down restaurants in the area.

That stretch of Vermont is the most vivid reminder of what happened in the aftermath of the not-guilty verdicts for the officers in the Rodney King beating case on that now-faraway spring day 14 years ago. But imagination and idealism in black communities, modest though they can be, persist.

That persistence will always hold true to the belief that development must be more than streetlights and sidewalks, bricks and mortar.