By Erin Aubrey Kaplan for Capital and Main
Originally published Oct. 13, 2026
It’s just the latest project to fall short in the Crenshaw neighborhood of Los Angeles. But this time the stakes are especially high.
Jackie Ryan admits she never really got the premise of Destination Crenshaw, the much-heralded outdoor art project being constructed around the path of a light-rail line running down Crenshaw Boulevard.
“I picture people looking out the window, whizzing by all the art,” said Ryan, the owner of the now-closed Zambezi Bazaar, an African-themed shop and cultural center in Leimert Park Village that operated for more than 20 years. “Destination Crenshaw promises a lot with that title, but it really doesn’t have us in mind.”
Ryan, 89, is a veteran of Crenshaw development wars that have been going on for over 30 years. For many years following the civil unrest in 1992, Black Los Angeles clamored for real change in neighborhoods that had been decimated by fire and decades of underinvestment that touched everything — schools, businesses, infrastructure.
The clamor was greatest in Crenshaw, the wealthiest Black area west of the Mississippi that encompassed picturesque neighborhoods like Leimert Park, View Park and Baldwin Hills. Crenshaw wielded the most political power and held the most possibility for redevelopment and change. But the economic makeover never came, and change wound up more piecemeal than comprehensive. The timeline of progress, such as it was, was open-ended.
People might finally be running out of patience. At a community meeting in Crenshaw in August dubbed “Keep the Promise,” residents, business owners and other stakeholders gathered to demand answers about the snail’s pace of progress on Destination Crenshaw, the marquee art and community space project that, when it broke ground in 2021, promised comprehensive change for a stretch of Crenshaw Boulevard once anchored by a car dealership and other large businesses but now dotted with small or aging storefronts that see little foot traffic.
But years later, the beautification and community revitalization that was supposed to debut in 2024 is nowhere near completion. And eternal hopefulness that change is in the future has yielded to tough, skeptical questions about right now.
Among the complaints voiced at the meeting were that construction work along Crenshaw Boulevard has obstructed businesses, damaged adjacent buildings, restricted access of vehicles into neighborhoods and attracted graffiti. District 8 Councilperson Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who spearheads the Destination Crenshaw project that combines both public and private funds and is managed by a nonprofit, quickly pledged more action, which so far has meant removing fencing and other obstructions. The completion date has been pushed back to 2028.
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Destination Crenshaw was supposed to be different from ambitious but more mundane projects that never came to fruition, like Nordstrom Rack or Ikea. The late rapper and entrepreneur Nipsey Hussle coined the term “Destination Crenshaw” 10 years ago to describe a revitalized, fully realized Black community that harnessed art — the hallmark of Leimert Park — and commerce.
That idea evolved into a $100 million (since increased to $150 million) outdoor museum, park and cultural space project built around a 1.3 mile stretch of Crenshaw Boulevard that became a transit corridor when the Metro K Line opened in 2022. The street-level light rail line was itself controversial because it divided the iconic boulevard, and the Crenshaw area, from itself.
Goals of Destination Crenshaw were to unify the corridor and to reposition transit, historically a force of displacement in Black communities, as a boon — to do what Jason Foster, president and CEO of the nonprofit, calls “reparative development.” Unlike on surrounding freeways, people could get off the train and experience the visual wonders of Destination Crenshaw, whose roster of 100 contributing artists, many of them LA-based, includes notable figures like official Obama portraitist Kehinde Wiley.
Yet even if the project wrapped up next week, it wouldn’t resolve the bigger existential tensions underlying “Keep the Promise” that have been forming since 1992 but have accelerated in the last 10 years. Black people in LA and beyond are no longer just contending with anemic progress, but with erasure, an apocalyptic-sounding word that describes the convergence of many crises, including a declining Black population and the all-out assault on diversity and civil rights.
And these days, the threat is coming from as high up as the Oval Office, as the second Trump administration continues to try to bury and whitewash Black history and send the message that projects that support Black communities are not a priority and could actually be illegal. The uphill climb Black people have always faced has gotten dramatically steeper, especially in California, a state President Donald Trump loathes and is continually seeking to undermine.
While those threats have grown exponentially in recent years, they have also built on a decades-long trend. Well before Trump there have been steady demographic shifts, creeping gentrification and soaring housing prices that threatened to dramatically reconfigure Black LA and diminish its history of fighting for a place in a city that, perhaps more than any American metropolis, promised a place for everyone.
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That backdrop makes the stakes for Destination Crenshaw’s success very high, because it not only has to be finished — no small feat at this point — it ideally should counter Black erasure by shoring up Black permanence, a state of rootedness and visibility that is the opposite of erasure. Yet some people feel Destination Crenshaw has never been about permanence. An outdoor museum, impressive though it might be, is by definition a spectacle that’s less about ensuring Crenshaw’s future than about memorializing its past.
A lifelong proponent of Black art, Ryan nonetheless said that what Crenshaw really needs to ensure permanence is the fusion of cultural and economic growth that has made other neighborhoods like Koreatown into dynamic ethnic destinations that are also prosperous. But she acknowledged that the investment that seeds prosperity has not materialized in Leimert, what many locals call Africa Town.
“Go down Western Avenue [in Koreatown] and you see businesses packing the street,” Ryan said almost wistfully. “Black people have never had money supporting us like in the Korean community, that kind of access. Historically we’ve just been left out of it.”
Damien Goodmon, an activist and co-founder of the Crenshaw Subway Coalition that fought for the Crenshaw Boulevard portion of the K Line to be built underground, dismissed Destination Crenshaw as a form of “artwashing.”
“Could you imagine another underserved corridor in America where the lack of response to real problems like gentrification is a $125 million outdoor art project?” he said. “All that land could have been bought and put into public trust. In Chicago or Detroit or elsewhere they wouldn’t put up with it. In LA it’s just a way to look like we’re doing something.”
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Erasure anxiety is not just about a dearth of transformative projects. It should be noted that it’s also about the long-running Black-to-brown demographic shift in South LA that routinely fuels tensions. They erupted recently after 5K Barrio, a Latino running group, relocated its September event from Leimert Park to Elysian Park near downtown after Crenshaw residents objected to the group declaring it would “take over the streets of Leimert Park.” Black residents’ anger over what they saw as aggression and disrespect flared up online, drawing pleas from Mayor Karen Bass for more racial cooperation and cooler heads.
But ultimately, much of the simmering anxiety is not over what has happened — be it gentrification, demographic change or Trump — but what hasn’t. After the 1992 unrest, a lot of attention was on retail: Former Lakers star Magic Johnson made headlines when he opened a Sony movie theater complex at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza mall in 1995.
That multiplex is still around (it’s now a Cinemark), but the mall has lost its Sears, Macy’s and all but one of its anchor tenants, and, like most retail, is struggling mightily. The old open-air Santa Barbara shopping center across the street generated much discussion and proposals, including one from Johnson, but it stood fallow for 25 years before a Kaiser Permanente complex opened there in 2017.
Michael Anderson, an architect and developer who’s proposed several economic development plans in the Crenshaw District, said elected officials have repeatedly missed — or ignored — opportunities to make meaningful improvements, in part because there are so few precedents for them. Not that he sees that as an excuse.
“Black folks just don’t know economic development, they know hope,” said Anderson. “Crenshaw still doesn’t have new sidewalks, alleys, all that basic stuff that makes a place livable. It’s still Black, but because it isn’t modernizing it’s a dying Black space like all Black spaces, like Central Avenue. It’s gone.”
Others aren’t quite that pessimistic, including many of the “Keep the Promise” critics. Hope is indeed ingrained in many Black people’s outlook, economically and otherwise, sometimes without much evidence to justify it. But sometimes there is.
“On the plus side, Vision Theater finally opened after being dark for more than 30 years,” said Ryan of Zambezi Bazaar, referring to the city-owned Art Deco theater in the middle of Leimert Park that had been undergoing renovations for decades.
Once owned by television star Marla Gibbs, it’s now operated by WACO Theater Center, an arts organization co-founded by Tina Knowles, mother of pop icon Beyoncé and a Black arts advocate in her own right. While the reopening certainly took far too long, it’s also true that, given the woes of Destination Crenshaw, the timing couldn’t be better.
“I’m still skeptical about Destination Crenshaw,” said Ryan. “But let’s see what happens.”
