The slick-AF video below is a collaboration between Etan Does LA and my fellow LA history nut, The South LA Recap

Added to the National Register of Historic Places March 15, 1974

No doubt, the Watts Towers deserve all the attention that they get. But just up the street, there’s another local landmark that’s just as vital to the history of Watts, if not more so. I’m talking about the Watts Station, a humble railway depot that witnessed the very beginnings of the neighborhood, and played a crucial role in its growth.

The Early Years

The Watts Station hosted freight trains and local passengers, waiting to catch the Pacific Electric red cars that used to run everywhere in Los Angeles. This station was a major rail junction – you could take a red car north to downtown, all the way west to Redondo and El Segundo, south to Long Beach or San Pedro, or southeast to Santa Ana. 

Completed in 1904, the Watts Station signified Watts’s transition from largely undeveloped farmland to an incorporated city. The arrival of the red cars meant that Angelenos could live far away from their jobs in downtown LA, and you can see that as a major selling point in real estate ads from 1904, advertising lots that were “15 minutes from center of town” or a “step off the Long Beach car line.” 

Pacific Electric was also one of the biggest employers of early Watts residents. In his book East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio, Ricardo Romo explains how hundreds of Mexican traqueros (track layers) lived in railway box cars around Watts, before Pacific Electric moved them into temporary housing, owned by Pacific Electric. They could stay in this “Latin Camp” with their families until they could afford houses of their own. 

The Watts Station was the first important building on Watts’s Main Street, now known as 103rd Street. Right around it, there was a general store, a hardware store, grocery stores, a pool hall, a small post office. By the time Watts incorporated in 1907, the area right around the Station had become the commercial center of a small but growing city.

The Turning Point

Pacific Electric discontinued the Watts Local Line in 1959, and the rest of the red cars were gone by 1961 (Imagine what an impact that would have on lower-income folks who couldn’t afford cars and relied on public transportation to get around). After the red cars left, the Watts Station stood vacant.

On the night of August 11, 1965, an incident of police brutality against a Black man named Marquette Frye erupted into six days of violent conflict between law enforcement and civilians in Watts. When it was all over, the Watts Rebellion (aka the Watts Riots) had left 34 people dead, hundreds of businesses destroyed and $40 million in property damage. So many businesses were set on fire on 103rd Street between Compton and Wilmington avenues that it earned the nickname “charcoal alley.” 

The Watts Station is said to be one of the few structures on 103rd that endured the Rebellion unscathed. There’s no clear evidence about whether it was intentionally spared or not, but the fact that it survived made it a de facto “symbol of continuity, hope and renewal,” as the LA Times put it in 1989. 

After the Rebellion, the United States government set aside over $4.6 million to spur redevelopment of Watts, and the LA City Planning department collaborated with a Watts citizen advisory committee to call for more retail and professional establishments in the neighborhood. 

One proposal called for turning the Watts Station into a community exhibit and information center. That never came to pass, but occasionally a small business would move in for a couple years. One local resident told me that there was a dry cleaners operating out of it for a while. 

Redevelopment 

In the ‘80s, the Community Redevelopment Agency committed $700,000 to restore the Watts Station. It reopened in 1989 as a branch office of the LADWP, with plans for a little Watts history museum with memorabilia from the red car days inside – though the museum apparently never opened. 

The following year, the LA County MTA opened a Metro Blue Line platform right next to the station, along the same route that the Pacific Electric used to take. Just this year the DWP relocated its customer service center from the Watts Station to the Martin Luther King Jr. Shopping center, just across the street. 

So where does this leave the little train station that could? It’s unclear. Right now, it’s locked up, being used for storage for – what? Old DWP detritus? There’s a spacious plaza just east of the Watts Station that’s used for regular food giveaways for the community, but both times I visited the gates were locked, the faux Egyptian obelisk (faux-belisk?) at its corner just out of reach. And so the Watts Station, which in its best years was a place where people waited to be taken away, is now waiting for someone to assign it a new purpose.

In the meantime, well over a century after it opened, the Watts Station is still the first thing that travelers see as they step down off the Blue Line, and begin to explore Watts.

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I’m indebted to Eric Craig of The South LA Recap for his collaboration on this post and the video up top. The South LA Recap explores the vast history, neighborhoods and people in the region. Watch it on YouTube now: youtube.com/TheSouthLARecap 

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Sources & Recommended Reading:

+Watts Station’s NRHP nomination form 

+November 2: This Date in Los Angeles Transportation History (Metro Primary Resources)

+WATTS: Railroad Made Town a Hub for Job Seekers (LA Times, 1994 via CSU Dominguez Hills Department of Archives and Special Collections)

+Watts New? : Reopening of Historic Red Car Station as Museum and DWP Office Seen as Symbol of Hope, Renewal (LA Times, 1989)

+Vintage Pacific Electric Railway map (via CSU Northridge)

+East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio (Ricardo Romo, 1983)