This is part of our “LA Views” series — commentary that provides perspectives on our neighborhoods and the issues facing them.
Artist Kristina Wong moved to Koreatown in 2010 after a breakup, looking for transit access and a central location as she adjusted to life without a car.
All she knew of Koreatown growing up in San Francisco was from television: burning buildings, armed shopkeepers and the traumatic aftermath of the 1992 riots. What she found was an enclave for enclaves of all kinds, a place where immigrant cultures interacted in a way that felt totally new and uniquely American.
Soon she was buying red carpet dresses off the Korean ladies’ front yard fences next door and dancing Zumba with her Central American neighbors in repurposed cash-for-gold businesses. When Wong, a Chinese American, couldn’t understand the menu at a Korean restaurant, the Korean waitress brought the Mexican parking attendant in to help translate.
“It was the most K-town moment we could possibly be having,” said Wong, who went on to serve on the local neighborhood council.
Los Angeles is known as the fragmented metropolis, 52 sprawling suburbs in search of a city, a patchwork culture without a central neighborhood. But Koreatown has always been the place where these disparate identities overlap.
It’s not just the densest neighborhood west of Manhattan and a spiritual home for the Korean American diaspora, but the city’s cultural center, an engine for trends and an island of affordability in central Los Angeles where new immigrants and transplants alike find their first jobs and apartments.
It’s the midpoint between Eastside and Westside friend groups and families; the birthplace of the Korean taco as well as a Thai restaurant franchise beloved by Mexican, Central and South Americans; a Oaxacan cultural enclave and an always-open nightlife district ideal for large groups, the place in Los Angeles where the word “everyone” comes the closest to meaning just that.
Downtown Los Angeles will always be where the courthouse is located and where the Lakers play. But for everyone else, the city’s true downtown has long been Koreatown. How did it get that way?
The neighborhood’s emergence as a city-wide gathering place was mostly an accident.
“Downtown” has always been a contested concept in Los Angeles. The term was coined as a reference to Manhattan, and downtowns across the country became synonymous with what historian Mike Davis described in his book “City of Quartz” as “growth machine development” — investors building dense projects, then lobbying for public infrastructure that increased property values and attracted corporate headquarters.
But Southern California’s car culture broke the traditional growth machine model and stimulated the creation of several downtown areas. And this fragmented geography created an opening that Koreatown filled by accident. As DTLA skyscrapers vied with entertainment industry office complexes in Century City, financial headquarters along the Miracle Mile and the master-planned Universal Citywalk development, Korean entrepreneurs snapped up prime central real estate with relative ease.
There was never a master plan guiding Koreatown’s development, said Kyeyoung Park, a professor of Asian American studies at UCLA. Korean business owners created cultural spaces meant for other Korean immigrants that eventually found a broad audience.
“Korean Americans themselves were often surprised by how diverse the clientele became over time,” Park said.
Koreatown’s founders never modeled themselves after downtown Los Angeles, said Shelly Sang-hee Lee, a history professor at Harvard University and author of a 2022 book about Koreatown.
“They were actually thinking of Chinatown and Little Tokyo,” Lee said; urban ethnic enclaves that were attracting foot traffic, celebrity attention and renewed development dollars.
Early entrepreneurs like grocer Hi Duk Lee and real estate agent Sonia Suk sought to create a Korean enclave economy on Olympic Boulevard. Suk, who had previously attempted to construct a Korean ethnic neighborhood in San Francisco in the 1950s, hand-lettered Korean language signs herself and passed them out to small business owners, Lee said.
Shifts in currency controls in the 1970s sent Asian capital surging into California real estate, small businesses and banks. By the 1990s, properties on Wilshire Boulevard once owned by major American corporations like Texaco and IBM were Korean-owned, Park said.
But there was always a contradiction in the attempt to brand the area as Korean, Lee said. The neighborhood has always been a multicultural immigrant district and never majority Korean. Many of Koreatown’s problems today — affordability, a lack of parking and public green space — are “the result of a pattern of development that never prioritized livability” for Korean Americans or anyone else, Lee said.
“[Koreatown’s founders] were capitalists with a desire to promote Korean Americans as a group, less focused on livability and affordability,” Lee said.
And today, the neighborhood’s public identity as a Korean neighborhood tends to obscure the fact that it’s also home to significant Bangladeshi, Oaxacan and Central American diasporas. Dominique Purdy, aka Koreatown Oddity, a Black rapper signed to indie rap label Stones Throw, rapped about these tensions vividly in a 2020 album.
“The place where I’m from, it ain’t all kimchi / The place where I’m found wasn’t always called Koreatown / And from back then til now the percentage is mostly Brown.”
The contradictions that created Koreatown are now the conditions that threaten its existence.
The density that once created affordability now attracts luxury developers hostile to homelessness. The transit access that brought Wong has driven rents to levels the artist would have never been able to afford on her own. Broken sidewalks, poor lighting and infrastructure deficits make the neighborhood one of the most dangerous places in the state for pedestrians, according to a 2021 UC Berkeley report.
The neighborhood’s popularity as a 24-hour restaurant and nightlife district often comes at the cost of workers’ rights. The diversity that creates unique local culture also makes it hard to agree on what the neighborhood’s future should be.
This tension between ideals and reality is overt at Open Market LA, a cafe, winery and bodega opened in 2021 as an ode to community corner stores. Creators Ralph Hsiao and Andrew Marco were huge fans of LA’s food scene and imagined the business as a vessel for their culinary ambitions. But to create a neighborhood spot, they first had to understand what the neighborhood needed.
They launched with a huge, ever-changing menu of salads and sandwiches that they had to pare down to the three or four that people ordered regularly. And to find consistent customers, they’ve pursued collaborations and cross promotions with Koreatown Run Club and a new generation of social media-fluent Koreatown entrepreneurs.
“The value of a neighborhood is how it affects you every day, no matter how large or small,” Marco said. “It’s a constant communication between you and the community.”
For the cafe, they partnered with Brian Lee, whose family development corporation Jamison has been criticized by community advocates for gentrifying Koreatown and, most recently, blocking the proposal to turn the land in front of Radio Korea into a city park.
Lee acknowledges gentrification as a concern and says he’s anxious about the neighborhood’s future too, citing the recent, troubling closures of Koreatown institutions like Dong Il Jang, Jun Won, OB Bear and Here’s Looking At You.
What he likes about Koreatown is that it’s the place where you can see “the rich guy and the poor guy at the next table enjoying the same thing.” He hopes to keep it that way.
“Building that stewardship of culture is in our hands now,” said Lee. “We’re the ones who need to choose what we want Koreatown to look like.”
But economic diversity requires affordable housing, and rents at Opus, Jamison’s newest luxury residential development, start at $3,164 for a studio.
Immigration raids and a new era of violent deportations represent existential threats to Koreatown’s immigrant cultures.
Salvador, who’s being identified by his first name out of concern about retaliation from immigration authorities, watches it all from his fruit cart off Wilshire Boulevard. Six days a week, from 2 to 6 p.m. for the last decade, he has built a 4.9 Yelp-starred business one box of cut fruit at a time. He summed up what he’s learned in a sentence.
“Money is very important, but people are more important than anything else,” Salvador said.
He counts high-rise bankers, lawyers, police and local gangbangers among his friends and clientele. As we speak, a parking enforcement officer pulls up and daps him up through the window. Will any of those customers protect him if Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents decide to take him one day? Salvador hopes so, but it’s not in his nature to rely on others.
When he first got here, he slept in his car for 18 months, learning the fruit business himself because no one wanted to teach their competition; how to make a little show of stuffing the box full and closing the lid; fishing the fruit from a bucket of icy water that catches the sunlight; giving people free samples as they wait.
“If I have to go back to Mexico, that’s fine. Because I’m going to make it anyways,” Salvador said.
One neighbor who tried to stand up for vendors like Salvador? Wong, the artist who moved to the neighborhood in 2010. When Trump was first elected in 2016 and unleashed a wave of anti-immigrant policies, Wong decided she needed to do more to enact the changes she wanted to see in society.
So in 2020, Wong ran for neighborhood council, standing in front of the rec center and waving people down to ask for their support. She won a seat with just 72 votes, including the one she cast for herself.
She was both inspired and disillusioned by her time on the council. All the time spent in meetings felt like a “playpen” created by the city to make locals feel like they had a voice, even though their recommendations were easily ignored.
Wong threw her efforts behind a proposal to issue a joint demand by each neighborhood council to abolish ICE.
She convened a group of undocumented friends and immigrant activists to testify at a public hearing. The accounts were so moving that some members of the council shared, for the first time, that they too were undocumented.
“People I never heard from came, saying, just look at this beautiful neighborhood. It’s all built by immigrants,“ Wong said.
When the council voted to endorse the resolution to abolish ICE, the room erupted into cheers, screaming, crying and hugs.
It was another purely Koreatown moment, one that its founders never could have envisioned. But, “as it turns out, the neighborhood council cannot stop a federal agency,” Wong said.
Koreatown became the city’s true downtown because nobody planned it that way. But as rents keep rising and ICE sightings have become routine, it won’t stay that way without a plan. And the question is whether the people who helped turned an enclave for enclaves into the city’s most vibrant neighborhood will have any say in what it becomes.
