The century-old Victorian and craftsman homes of the 27th Street Historic District have housed generations of minority communities in LA – including a large population of African Americans during the heyday of Central Avenue

I’m celebrating Black History Month throughout February by visiting sites important to the history of Black Angelenos.

Added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 11, 2009

You ever have that experience where you’re walking down a street, you turn a corner, and all of a sudden you’re in another world? That’s what happens as you enter the 27th Street Historic District in South LA. After the endless rows of nondescript stucco walls and flat-roofed storefronts on Central Avenue, it’s a welcome shock to run into the explosion of clapboard siding and gingerbread ornamentation and balustrades on the 1000 block of 27th Street. 

The eight blocks that make up the 27th Street Historic District are stuffed with dozens of single-family homes and churches in century-old styles. A homeowner can sit on the fancy porch of her Queen Anne Victorian, look across the street at the transitional craftsman owned by a neighbor, right next door to a colonial revival home. Those styles were all the rage between the 1890s and the 1910s, when most of the contributing buildings in this district were built. Not all of them are in great shape these days; there’s plenty of peeling paint and weathered wood on the homes, and the 19th century Crouch Memorial Church building at 27th and Paloma hasn’t yet recovered from the fire that nearly destroyed it in 2013. But the large majority of these buildings are still intact, and still occupied by owners or renters. 

****

The National Register of Historic Places listed the 27th Street Historic District both because of its residential architecture, and because of its connection to the experience of African Americans in Los Angeles in the ‘20s through the ‘50s. During that period, Central Avenue was a cultural and commercial epicenter for Blacks in Los Angeles. Vitally important churches (see Second Baptist Church, visit #69), businesses (see Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Building, visit #70), community centers (e.g. the 28th Street YMCA, considered part of the 27th Street Historic District) and venues like the Lincoln Theater and Dunbar Hotel were all built in the mid to late ‘20s to serve the growing Black community there. 

Many of the African American families who moved to LA in the late 19th and early 20th century would have been attracted by the prospect of owning a home in an area like the 27th Street Historic District. According to the District’s NRHP nomination form, some 40% of Blacks living in LA in 1910 owned their homes – one of the highest rates of Black homeownership in the country. 

At the same time, discrimination was rampant. Federal law prevented cities from zoning along racial lines, but racist white homeowners found creative ways to keep Blacks, Mexicans, Asians and Native Americans out of their neighborhoods. By the 1920s, many white-dominant parts of LA contained covenants that barred homeowners from selling to non-whites. You could lose your real estate brokers’ license in Compton if you sold a house to a minority family. Even the federal government got into the segregation game, when the government-backed Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) created maps that purported to help mortgage lenders determine where to extend credit. Surprise surprise, the whole area around the majority-Black Central Avenue corridor was considered “hazardous” on the HOLC maps, marked in red. Hence the term “redlining.” It wasn’t until the 1948 Supreme Court case Shelley vs. Kraemer that the racial covenants were made illegal, and non-white families began integrating into previously all-white neighborhoods. 

+See an interactive version of the HOLC’s “redlining” map of South LA

While the 27th Street Historic District was added to the NRHP because of its association with African Americans in Los Angeles in the ‘20s-’50s, its history before and after that period tells a fascinating tale. The area was almost exclusively white and working class in the late 1800s, when the District was new. The rapid expansion of the streetcar system meant that Angelenos could live further and further away from the city center, including towards the agricultural fields south of downtown.

Within 25 years, the District had diversified considerably; according to census data, a large number of Russian Jews had moved in by 1920, and lived alongside smaller groups of European immigrants from Italy, Germany, England, Poland, Scotland and the Netherlands. 10 years later, African Americans had become the dominant ethnic group, as they would be through the early ‘50s. These days, the area is 90% Hispanic, with a minority Black population. 

Look at the history of the property at 933 E. 27th Street, and you can get a sense of the huge demographic shifts that Los Angeles was going through as this District was developing. Built in 1908 as a Lutheran church for the local Scandinavian expats, the building became Congregation Ezra Emunah from 1923 to 1950, serving the Russian Jews in the neighborhood. For the next half century it housed Baptist congregations, and in 2000 was converted into multi-family housing. 

Every building has a story. The cool thing about having an old, intact neighborhood like the 27th Street Historic District is that these buildings’ stories collectively tell a much larger story about the communities that lived there and left their mark.

Recommended Reading

+27th Street Historic District NRHP nomination form

+The Great Migration: Creating a New Black Identity in Los Angeles (KCET, 2012)

+A Southern California Dream Deferred: Racial Covenants in Los Angeles (KCET, 2012)

+Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America (interactive maps from the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation)