Why Imperial Highway matters.
Imperial Highway is a storied corridor where South Los Angeles's working-class character meets Depression-era regional ambition, wartime expansion and an east-west transportation spine conceived to carry Southern California commerce from the desert to the Pacific.
Running through South Los Angeles between Inglewood and Watts, the eastbound corridor follows the city's southern edge from the aviation landscape near Aviation Boulevard across Crenshaw Boulevard, Western Avenue, Vermont Avenue, the Harbor Freeway, Main Street, Central Avenue and Wilmington Avenue before continuing into the Lower Los Angeles River basin. West of Western Avenue, the roadway crosses a broad, low plain where airport-related properties, warehouses, detached houses and long commercial parcels create an expansive streetscape beneath the approaches to Los Angeles International Airport. Approaching the Harbor Freeway, closely spaced residential blocks and neighborhood businesses increasingly define the corridor, with the elevated Century Freeway immediately south creating a powerful parallel edge through communities divided by successive generations of transportation infrastructure. East of Central Avenue, the roadway passes along the southern edge of Watts and the northern boundary of Willowbrook, where public housing, neighborhood institutions and rail infrastructure compress against a route that continues almost perfectly east toward Lynwood. The result is a corridor whose immense length, rectilinear alignment and succession of aviation, residential and transportation landscapes preserve the metropolitan scale of a highway conceived to connect Los Angeles with regions hundreds of miles beyond the city.
What defines Imperial Highway.
Imperial Highway is best known for beginning as part of an audacious plan to create a paved commercial route between the Pacific coast and the agricultural Imperial Valley. Southern California boosters had pursued versions of the idea before World War I, but the Imperial Highway Association formed in 1929 with civic leaders from Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties pushing for a coordinated roadway across multiple jurisdictions. Imperial County agriculture supplied the economic premise: trucks carrying produce needed a faster connection with the enormous Los Angeles market and coastal distribution points. The association promoted a 220-mile route between El Centro and El Segundo, and portions of 114th Street and 116th Street inside Los Angeles received the Imperial Highway name during 1930 and 1931. An official route adopted in January 1931 crossed Los Angeles and Orange counties before turning through the Santa Ana Canyon, Lake Elsinore, Temecula and the mountains toward the desert. Promoters called it the Cannon Ball Road and adopted the slogan “wide for safety, straight for speed,” advocating a 100-foot right-of-way, gentle curves and roadway improvements suited to heavy truck movement. Los Angeles County's section opened during the early 1930s as work proceeded incrementally across the much longer route. A new Los Angeles River bridge completed in 1951 removed a major interruption after its predecessor collapsed in 1948. The final paving near the San Diego-Imperial county boundary arrived in 1961, more than three decades after the association began its campaign, completing a regional highway project whose surviving Los Angeles section still carries the Imperial name.
The corridor entered a second transportation era when California pursued a freeway across the same east-west band during the postwar decades. Planning for the Century Freeway began during the 1950s, and by 1965 the state envisioned a new freeway extending from the airport area toward Norwalk along a path closely paralleling Imperial. Property acquisition during the following decade removed hundreds of houses across communities south of Los Angeles, producing a cleared transportation corridor that remained unfinished as opposition and litigation stalled construction. A 1972 federal lawsuit brought by community organizations challenged the project on housing, environmental and transportation grounds, and a 1979 consent decree imposed an extensive package of replacement housing, employment provisions and design changes before work proceeded. Construction ultimately produced Interstate 105 across 17.3 miles between El Segundo and Norwalk, with the freeway opening on October 14, 1993. A rail line built into its median became the Metro Green Line in 1995, placing rapid transit inside the same transportation band. Willowbrook/Rosa Parks station created a transfer with the north-South Blue Line at Wilmington Avenue, making the Imperial corridor part of a regional rail junction as well as a highway axis. The juxtaposed roadway, freeway and rail line compress more than six decades of Southern California transportation planning into a narrow strip across the southern edge of Los Angeles.
How Imperial Highway fits.
Imperial Highway works as the anchor for an outing connecting the surviving first building at Los Angeles International Airport, a Depression-era school shaped by new earthquake standards and a multigenerational Black family business embedded in Watts since the eve of World War II.
Begin at Hangar One, completed in June 1929 at 5701 West Imperial Highway when the surrounding airfield was still known as Mines Field. Gable & Wyant designed the Spanish Colonial Revival structure as the first permanent building at the nascent airport, using towers, arched openings and ornamental architectural treatment to give an industrial aviation facility unusual civic presence. Curtiss-Wright Flying Service used the building as a hangar and civilian flight school within a planned $2 million development campaign, and the immense interior accommodated 18 aircraft of its era. Hangar One survived after commercial airlines transferred to the airport in 1946 and the field evolved into Los Angeles International Airport. A 1990 rehabilitation preceded its 1992 listing in the National Register of Historic Places, leaving the building as the sole surviving structure from the original Mines Field complex. Continue to Gompers Middle School, where four principal buildings completed in 1937 form a Mediterranean Revival campus immediately north of Imperial Highway between Main and San Pedro streets. The school belonged to a ten-campus Los Angeles construction campaign undertaken that year after the 1933 Long Beach earthquake exposed structural weaknesses across older educational buildings. Reinforced concrete and structural steel addressed the new seismic requirements, yet the architecture retained clay-tile roofs, stucco walls, symmetrical massing and elaborate entrance surrounds associated with the Mediterranean Revival tradition. The administration building, two classroom buildings and auditorium were organized around a central courtyard, producing a coherent campus whose architectural fabric survives substantially intact. Its Samuel Gompers name commemorates the labor leader who founded the American Federation of Labor in 1886. Conclude at Hawkins House of Burgers, whose family history at Imperial Highway and Slater Street began in 1939 when James Henry Hawkins arrived from Arkansas and established a neighborhood business. Hawkins and his family purchased the property and constructed the two-story building that housed an early malt shop and grocery market. The family enterprise survived the upheaval surrounding Watts in 1965, with Cynthia Hawkins later explaining that her grandmother's practice of feeding neighbors had created deep community ties. Cynthia added the burger operation in 1982 and continued the business with her daughters Dawn and Danielle Gibson, carrying the property into a third generation. More than eight decades after the Hawkins family arrived, the modest building remains one of the corridor's enduring Black-owned businesses. The progression moves from Gable & Wyant's pioneering aviation building through a school constructed in response to new seismic demands and culminates in the Hawkins family's multigenerational enterprise, connecting flight, public education and community commerce across Imperial Highway.
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