A vital community center and gathering place for Black Angelenos, and a major early building by legendary architect Paul Revere Williams

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 March 17, 2009

Back when I was a kid, I used to take swimming lessons at the Pasadena YMCA. I would pull on my swim trunks, jump in the pool, and after an hour I’d towel off and go hone. It was as mundane an experience as you can imagine, the kind of thing that YMCAs have offered forever. But in the late ‘20s, swimming at public pools was an experience that Black kids in Los Angeles were barred from having, 6 out of 7 days a week. Beginning in 1926, LA’s playground commission segregated its pools and rec centers. That kind of institutionalized racism was one of many reasons that the opening of the 28th Street YMCA in 1926 was a big deal.

The 28th Street Y was built at the dawn of an auspicious time for the Black community in LA. While discrimination elsewhere in LA was rampant, the Central Avenue corridor was becoming a vibrant cultural and commercial hub for Black Angelenos, and a large percentage of the city’s Black population lived close by. Many of them settled in the 27th Street Historic District (see visit #71), of which the YMCA is a part. 

At the time of its construction, the 28th Street Y was one of just two YMCAs in LA built by and for African-Americans (the first “Colored Y” was on 9th Street). It was a place for recreation, with a big gym and, yes, a pool. But it was also a forum for advancement and community-building. Its two community rooms hosted political meetings and social gatherings, and 52 dormitories were open to Black men looking for a place to stay during their travels. You only have to look at the relief sculptures of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington on the top corners of the building to recognize that social justice is literally the cornerstone of this YMCA chapter’s mission. 

This Y’s funding was a real “it takes a village” story. Local residents and business leaders contributed most of the $200,000 required; Aaron and Annie Malone, the founders of the cosmetology line Poro Products and Poro College in St. Louis, kicked in $25,000. According to an informational stanchion placed outside the YMCA by the Angels Walk LA project, the Black community in LA raised more to fund their local YMCA than did Blacks in any other city.

The stately, Spanish colonial revival building itself is also significant as one of the early important works of architect Paul Revere Williams, the first Black man to earn an architecture license west of the Mississippi, and the first to become a member and Fellow of the AIA. In a career lasting more than half a century, Williams designed more than 2000 buildings: private mansions and public housing projects, churches and naval bases, funeral homes and courthouses, restaurants and department stores, hospitals, hotels and airports. Williams can lay claim, as much as any other single architect, to defining how Los Angeles looked in the mid-20th century. 

Williams has been on my mind a lot this Black History Month. February 18 was his birthday, and to commemorate the occasion I watched the revealing PBS documentary Hollywood’s Architect: The Paul R. Williams Story. The film focused mostly on his homes for Hollywood’s entertainment elite (e.g. Frank Sinatra, Lon Chaney, Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz, Danny Thomas), and only briefly addressed his major impact on the built world of the Black community in LA. 

Within just a few years of Williams opening his practice, he had already designed the Second Baptist Church (see visit #69) and the 28th Street YMCA, both near Central Avenue; he would later design the Angelus Funeral Home and the second headquarters of the Golden State Life Insurance Company, two of the most significant Black-owned businesses in LA. 

In 1928, Paul Revere Williams was hired to expand another YMCA building, in Hollywood. The fact that Williams was himself a YMCA “cadet” at the 9th Street location, much earlier in his life, makes his history with the Y organization even more poignant. 

Recommended Reading

+28th Street YMCA’s NRHP nomination form

+YMCA, 28th Street, Los Angeles (paulrwilliamsproject.org)

+Angels Walk LA: Central Avenue (self-guided historic trail)

+Betty Hill’s ‘bath house’ battle (KCET, 2019)

+28th Street Apartments (LA Conservancy)