South Central Los Angeles
South Central Los Angeles is a region in the city of Los Angeles, California and its surrounding suburbs. Its boundaries are generally considered to be the Santa Monica Freeway on the north, the Los Angeles River or the Long Beach Freeway on the east, and the San Diego Freeway on the west and south. It may have acquired its name simply because it lies south of downtown Los Angeles, or because S. Central Avenue runs right through it (if one considers the Los Angeles River to be the eastern boundary).
South Central continues to suffer from high levels of unemployment and crime. Illegal drugs, and gangs that control their distribution (most notably the Crips and the Bloods) abound in the region. There is also a severe graffiti problem, and workers for local anti-graffiti agencies have been repeatedly attacked and sometimes murdered.
It was one of the settings for the 1992 civil unrest in Los Angeles. A number of movies have been made about it, often by people who grew up in the area, including South Central, Boyz N the Hood and Friday. A segment of Bowling for Columbine was filmed there. In 2003, Los Angeles officials formally changed the area's name from South Central to "South Los Angeles," which they hope will remove some of the stigma associated with the area.
South Central contains some of the oldest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, featuring many spectacular examples of Victorian and Craftsman architecture in the West Adams district. It is the historical heart of the black community in Southern California, as it was one of the few areas of Los Angeles not designated as whites-only. South Central played host to one of the first jazz scenes in the western US, with trombonist Kid Ory a notable resident. As in many other American cities, freeways built in the 1950s served to isolate the region's black population from neighboring white-dominated neighborhoods: prior to the 1992 riots, the area's population was predominantly African-American. In the aftermath of the violence, much of the black population moved to the Inland Empire area far to the east of Los Angeles and was replaced by an influx of Latinos, particularly in the northern neighborhoods of the region.
People from South Central:
Landmarks in South Central:
See also: Watts, Compton
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