Why Slauson Avenue matters.
Slauson Avenue is a storied corridor where South Los Angeles's urban character meets early railroad expansion, streetcar-era neighborhoods and an industrial belt that grew alongside some of the city's most consequential twentieth-century manufacturing districts.
Running through South Los Angeles between Baldwin Hills and the communities east of the Los Angeles River, the metropolitan corridor follows an extended east-west line across La Brea Avenue, Crenshaw Boulevard, Western Avenue, Vermont Avenue, Broadway, Central Avenue and Alameda Street before continuing through southeastern Los Angeles County. Western stretches descend from the low hills around View Park and Windsor Hills into a flatter landscape of neighborhood storefronts, detached houses and compact apartment buildings whose street walls tighten around major intersections. Traveling east brings long industrial parcels, rail alignments, warehouses and manufacturing buildings into increasing prominence as the roadway crosses the immense orthogonal grid south of Downtown. The corridor broadens physically around major north-south arterials, with successive commercial nodes breaking the otherwise continuous succession of residential and industrial frontage. The result is a corridor whose changing elevations, extended sightlines, railroad-edge development and alternation between neighborhood commerce and industrial land reveal the enormous geographic breadth of southern Los Angeles.
What defines Slauson Avenue.
Slauson Avenue is best known for developing along a transportation line that helped turn the agricultural outskirts south of Central Los Angeles into a chain of residential and industrial districts. John Wildasin purchased 40 acres near Slauson and Normandie avenues in 1884, operating a farm with dairy cattle, alfalfa, fruit and other crops on land already benefiting from the nearby Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe route. The railroad corridor along Slauson later formed part of Santa Fe's Harbor Subdivision, connecting Central Los Angeles with Redondo Beach before extensions during the 1920s reached Torrance, Wilmington and Long Beach. Industrial parcels accumulated beside that transportation line during the 1920s and 1930s, including planing mills, bakeries, furniture factories, glass production and building-product businesses. By the middle of the 1920s, a distinct manufacturing district had emerged between Slauson Avenue, Western Avenue, Gage Avenue and Wilton Place, with the railroad providing freight access through the center of the district. Passenger transportation simultaneously increased the street's metropolitan reach: Los Angeles Railway and Pacific Electric jointly created the Los Angeles Motor Bus Company in 1923, and the city's first bus route opened on August 18 of that year along Western Avenue with Slauson Avenue as its southern terminus. The avenue occupied a strategic seam between expanding residential districts and a rail-oriented manufacturing belt, with transit, freight and subdivision growth converging along the same east-west line.
The industrial transformation reached exceptional scale east of Main Street after Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company entered the district in 1919. Goodyear purchased hundreds of acres around Central and Gage avenues and constructed a major rubber plant that drew an estimated workforce of 2,500 by 1920. The company reserved a 240-acre tract between Slauson Avenue, Gage Avenue, Avalon Boulevard and Central Avenue for industrial development, promoted adjoining parcels to other manufacturers and supported dedicated railroad tracks serving businesses throughout the district. Sumner Hunt and Silas Burns designed a worker-housing scheme for Goodyear Gardens, with landscape architect Paul Thiene contributing to plans that initially envisioned hundreds of houses; 49 houses were constructed in 1920 before the larger scheme was abandoned. The industrial site had an extraordinary predecessor in Ascot Park, which opened on Slauson Avenue in 1903 and hosted horse, automobile and motorcycle racing involving Barney Oldfield, Wild Bob Burman, Edward Rickenbacker and Louis Chevrolet. Aviation exhibitions, automobile-versus-airplane races and a 24-hour motor race expanded its reputation before the property was sold in 1919 and absorbed into the Goodyear development. The tire plant remained in operation until 1979, leaving surrounding blocks with narrow industrial streets, uniform building fronts and traces of the freight tracks that had once served individual factories. Slauson Avenue had become the northern edge of an industrial landscape whose succession from racetrack to rubber manufacturing captures the speed and scale of southern Los Angeles industrialization.
How Slauson Avenue fits.
Slauson Avenue works as the anchor for a South Los Angeles sequence connecting a pioneering institution devoted to African American art, a carefully designed prewar community center and one of the most distinctive works of self-built architecture in the United States.
Begin at Museum of African American Art, founded in 1976 by artist, art historian, author and educator Dr. Samella Lewis with academic, artistic, business and community leaders committed to expanding public engagement with art by people of African descent. Mary Jane Hewitt, formerly a professor of Africana studies at Occidental College, became instrumental during the institution's early development and served as director during the mid-1980s. The museum occupied spaces on Pico Boulevard and Lincoln Boulevard before consolidating operations during the 1980s at 4005 Crenshaw Boulevard, inside the Streamline Moderne former May Company building that had opened in 1947. Its permanent holdings include 40 works by Palmer C. Hayden, among them the 12-painting John Henry Series, alongside paintings, masks, batiks, carvings and ceremonial objects spanning the African diaspora. Continue to Leimert Park Plaza, the formal center of Walter H. Leimert's 1927 residential development on 231 acres acquired from Clara Baldwin Stocker, daughter of Elias J. Lucky” Baldwin. The larger community departed from the surrounding rectangular grid through curving streets, landscaped medians and pedestrian paths, with model residences involving architects Roland E. Coate, Gordon B. Kaufmann, Carl Jules Weyl and George J. Adams. Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. designed the small formal plaza at the convergence of Degnan, Leimert and Crenshaw boulevards, and Morgan, Walls & Clements designed the nearby theater completed in 1932. The district subsequently became a major center of African American arts and cultural life in Los Angeles, giving its carefully composed prewar commercial center a significance far beyond the development campaign that produced it. Conclude at Watts Towers of Simon Rodia State Historic Park, where Italian immigrant Simon Rodia spent more than three decades constructing an integrated architectural sculpture from steel, wire mesh, mortar, tile, glass, shell, pottery and stone. The west tower, begun in 1921, rises 99.5 feet from foundations only 14 inches deep, and Rodia built the entire complex with simple hand tools before completing his work in 1954. His house burned in 1955, and a prolonged preservation battle ended successfully in 1959 after supporters demonstrated the towers' structural strength. The property entered the National Register in 1977 and received National Historic Landmark status in 1990, recognizing a work whose extraordinary engineering and artistic independence had already become inseparable from the cultural history of Watts. The progression moves from Samella Lewis's creation of an institution centered on African American art through the transformation of a formally planned 1920s community center into a major Black cultural district and culminates in Simon Rodia's decades-long act of individual construction, tracing three distinct ways South Los Angeles became a nationally consequential center of artistic creation and preservation.
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