Welcome to Inglewood — Leave Your Aspirations Behind

Photos by Robert Hale

Every day, if the weather cooperates and my exercise conscientiousness holds, I go for a walk. I get in my car and drive about a mile north of my house, park on a sleepy side street off Manchester Boulevard and begin an elliptical, four-mile-plus loop around the once-fabulous Great Western Forum in Inglewood.

The walk is an hour long, steadily though not extremely uphill, and has virtually no cross streets to encumber thought or concentration. I also have the company of many other people on this walk; we nod in passing, exchange brief hellos or, if we are plugged into something electronic, vigorously wave to each other in silence. I realized, after about a year of this, that besides trying to shed 15 pounds with the least amount of sweat, I was also making a kind of daily pilgrimage to one of the touchstone buildings of my childhood. I grew up in L.A. near Century Boulevard and Van Ness Avenue, just east of the Inglewood border, and for everybody in the vicinity, not only was the Forum the home of the beloved Lakers, its vast parking lot was a concrete open field that invited us to race go-carts, ride bikes, roller-skate, skateboard, operate toy cars and airplanes by remote, launch kites in a sky clear of telephone lines and — finally — learn to drive.

The Forum was the beckoning plain and eternal point of exploration that we imagined kids in less urban places — the Valley, Orange County — had in abundance. It was also something else: the lake or swimming hole or fishing pond that our parents, not long out of the poor but warmly recalled South or Midwest, talked about as the refuge they took from hard times or from hard-eyed white folks when they were young, a place to go that always felt comfortable and possible and never turned them away. This was what the Forum was to us in the early ’70s, a hallowed ground that was both exceptional and humble, public but somehow secret, limitless in the opportunities it gave us to be the standard-issue kids we needed to be, with our kites and planes and presumptions of inheriting the good, post-South life our parents had laid down for us. Things were on the up-and-up. The Forum was the best reflection of Inglewood itself. Inglewood was a small city without great wealth, but in our eyes, it glittered; with its sports palace and spirit of civic accommodation, we knew its fortunes would only increase.

Tale of two cities: The abandoned Imperial Theater on Imperial Highway (top) tells one story, while the perfectly maintained homes and yards on 82nd and Victoria tell another.

Besides the Forum, Inglewood had Market Street, which my friends and I would visit by bus most Saturdays. Market was the sort of old-fashioned main drag that marked many a city in Southern California, set them apart from amorphous Los Angeles and the even more bewildering, oceanic sprawl of L.A. County. Market was a few minutes west of the Forum and had that same casual magic, and everything we needed in the span of three blocks — two movie theaters, two department stores, drugstore, record shop, knickknack shop, bookstore, several boutiques, snack shop, shoe stores, head shop, jewelry and gift stores. If you had no money to begin with or went broke before the end of the day, you could simply wander; contemplate buying something on layaway or sneak into another showing of a 50-cent double feature. There were options.

As it happened, Inglewood was mostly a black city that had rapidly become so after 1965, when the Watts Riots convinced many whites who had for decades dominated metropolitan L.A. west of Main Street that their time was up, or that they could no longer live in the ethnic isolation they’d designed for themselves and taken for granted. Inglewood was about the last white town to fall, mostly because it’s as far west and south as you can go before hitting Westchester, Playa del Rey, El Segundo — coastal havens that were, and still are, pretty homogeneous.

I was aware of none of this growing up; to me, Inglewood was simply a place for family, and I assumed it would stay like that. There was no reason for me to think otherwise. When my family took the suburban plunge in 1976 and moved 35 miles, from 98th Street to West Covina, in 1976, we stuck it out in a strange land for less than a year before moving back to the place we always considered home — Inglewood, our suburb of choice all along. We had friends and family who peeled off over the years to Downey, Cerritos, Arleta, even Woodland Hills, Orange County, and then, sometime later, Diamond Bar, Moreno Valley and Riverside. We nodded congratulations but tacitly declined to visit; they would simply have to visit us. Inglewood was the center of gravity, the still-evolving frontier of good things and significant change not merely for our family but for the whole black community, and in the biggest sense for every wishful thinker in L.A. determined to flesh out a dream of easier living, because fleshing out any dream seemed so possible here. In Inglewood, that was going nicely because blacks lived here in great numbers, not in the usual cordoned-off inner city or redlined enclave, but in a real town a few miles from the Pacific, the great, golden omega of the Western frontier. We had almost made it.