Central Avenue, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Central Avenue in Los Angeles, California.

Central Avenue is a storied corridor where Historic South-Central's cultural character meets the commercial spine of Black Los Angeles, the rise of West Coast jazz and successive migrations that reshaped the city across the twentieth century.

Running through Historic South-Central between Downtown and Florence, the long urban corridor follows a north-south line from the Civic Center across the Arts District, Washington Boulevard, Adams Boulevard, Jefferson Boulevard, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Vernon Avenue and Slauson Avenue before continuing toward Watts. North of Washington Boulevard, warehouses and larger commercial buildings accompany the route through terrain adjoining Downtown's eastern industrial districts. Farther south, narrow storefront parcels, churches, small apartment buildings and detached houses create a tighter scale across the blocks extending through Historic South-Central. Long uninterrupted sightlines reinforce the street's unusual linearity as successive east-west boulevards divide neighborhoods developed during different phases of Los Angeles expansion. The result is a corridor whose sustained north-south geometry connects Downtown with South Los Angeles through one of the city's most consequential concentrations of twentieth-century cultural history.

What you should know about Central Avenue.

Central Avenue is best known for becoming the social, commercial and cultural center of Black Los Angeles during the first half of the twentieth century, when segregation concentrated residents and institutions along a relatively narrow section of South Los Angeles. African Americans arriving during the opening decades of the century encountered restrictive housing covenants that excluded Black households from extensive portions of the city, concentrating settlement in an area bounded broadly by Washington Boulevard, Main Street, Slauson Avenue and Alameda Street. Los Angeles counted 15,579 Black residents by 1920, and Central Avenue had developed into the principal concentration of Black businesses, newspapers, professional offices, churches and social organizations. The Los Angeles Railway reinforced that growth through streetcar service along Central between 1920 and 1963, giving residents direct transportation through the expanding district. John J. Neimore's newspaper the Eagle had begun publication in 1895, and Charlotta Bass assumed control after his death in 1912, later developing the California Eagle into the largest Black newspaper in the West. Bass used its pages against restrictive covenants, employment discrimination and racial exclusion in the motion-picture industry, and the publication reached 180,000 readers by 1924. World War II accelerated migration from the South as defense employment drew thousands of Black workers to Los Angeles, intensifying settlement around an avenue already functioning as the community's institutional center. Racial housing barriers began losing legal force during the late 1940s, opening additional sections of Los Angeles to Black homeownership and gradually dispersing the population westward. Central Avenue's prominence grew from the convergence of forced residential concentration, entrepreneurial institution building, mass migration and streetcar transportation, producing a civic and commercial center whose importance extended far beyond the blocks surrounding it.

Music developed another history along the corridor through the musicians, clubs and labor organizations that made Central Avenue the principal center of West Coast jazz before the 1950s. Black musicians arriving in Los Angeles encountered a segregated professional structure in which American Federation of Musicians Local 767 represented Black players and Local 47 represented white players. Central Avenue supplied a dense circuit of clubs where swing, bebop and emerging modern jazz circulated among local performers and nationally prominent musicians passing through the city. World War II intensified that scene as defense-industry migration expanded audiences and musicians arrived from across the country, placing Los Angeles inside a broader movement of Black cultural exchange between western and southern cities. Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie brought bebop to Los Angeles in December 1945, exposing local audiences and musicians to a style already reshaping jazz on the East Coast. Norman Granz had begun Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts at Philharmonic Auditorium in 1944 and later insisted upon integrated performers and audiences as the touring series expanded nationally. Local 767 and Local 47 merged in 1953, removing a major institutional division within the city's professional music industry. Simultaneously, Black middle-class households were moving westward as housing restrictions weakened, and clubs followed audiences toward Western Avenue and Crenshaw Boulevard. Central Avenue's jazz ascendancy receded during the 1950s, yet the musicians who emerged from Los Angeles subsequently helped shape cool jazz, free jazz and other experimental directions across the region.

How to fold Central Avenue into your trip.

Central Avenue works as the anchor for an outing connecting Paul R. Williams's architecture for Black civic life, a purpose-built performance hall created for African American audiences and the hotel that became one of the most important gathering places in Black Los Angeles.

Begin at 28th Street YMCA, completed in 1926 as one of architect Paul R. Williams's earliest major commissions and one of two surviving Los Angeles club buildings founded by and for African Americans. The four-story Spanish Colonial Revival building emerged from a community fundraising campaign for a modern facility serving Black men and boys excluded from many recreational institutions elsewhere in the city. Julius Rosenwald's philanthropic fund contributed to construction, and entrepreneurs Aaron and Annie Malone supplied the final $25,000 needed for the project. Williams incorporated sculpted likenesses of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington into the facade, and the building contained 52 residential rooms alongside a gymnasium and swimming pool at a time when municipal pools remained segregated. A 2012 rehabilitation converted the property into 49 studio apartments and preserved major portions of Williams's original building, earning a Los Angeles Conservancy Preservation Award the following year. Continue to Lincoln Theatre, opened in 1927 as a 2,100-seat house designed specifically for Los Angeles's African American community. Architect John Paxton Perrine created an elaborate Moorish Revival facade with ceramic tile, arched openings, onion-shaped capitals and slender spires, paired with an auditorium equipped for both motion pictures and live performance. Its scale made the Lincoln the largest theater built along Central Avenue, and appearances by leading Black performers earned it the sobriquet “West Coast Apollo.” The building later entered a succession of religious uses after Bishop Samuel Crouch acquired it in 1961 for his congregation, followed during the 1970s by use as a mosque. Los Angeles designated the surviving theater a Historic-Cultural Monument in 2003. Conclude at Dunbar Hotel, built by dentist John A. Somerville as the Hotel Somerville and opened on June 23, 1928. Somerville and his wife Vada Watson Somerville were the first Black man and woman to graduate from USC's dental school, and their home had previously hosted the founding of the Los Angeles NAACP chapter. The 115-room hotel supplied first-class lodging for Black travelers excluded from major white-owned hotels and hosted the NAACP's nineteenth annual convention days after opening, bringing W. E. B. Du Bois and delegates to the first national convention the organization held in Los Angeles. Financial pressure forced Somerville to sell after the onset of the Depression, and subsequent owners renamed the property for poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Bessie Smith, Langston Hughes and Joe Louis numbered among the musicians, writers and public figures associated with the hotel during its peak decades. A later rehabilitation restored the atrium and hundreds of architectural features as the Dunbar became the centerpiece of an 83-unit residential development, with 41 apartments inside the original hotel. The progression moves from Williams's purpose-built institution for Black civic and recreational life through a theater created for audiences excluded elsewhere and culminates at the Somervilles' hotel, connecting architecture, performance and hospitality through institutions built by a community confronting segregation along Central Avenue.

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