The Long Goodbye. The Decline of L.A.'s Central Avenue

Part 2 of the story of how Central Avenue went from being the thriving hub of Los Angeles's Black community to decline in the decades after the Second World War.

Sep 05, 2024

The Second World War years were good years on Central Avenue. Defense industry jobs - good-paying jobs — drew a massive influx of workers and people looking for work to Los Angeles. Soldiers and sailors en route to the Pacific flooded in too, and on weekends they were out looking for a good time before shipping out. Money was flowing and L.A. was booming, even this working class Black enclave in a still very segregated city. During the war, an estimated 100,000 Black people would move to Los Angeles and most of them settled along the Central Avenue corridor.

On The Avenue, as it was known, bars, restaurants, nightclubs and jazz joints were packed. For the first time, the musicians playing at clubs included women, and not just vocalists.

“Oh, it was really happening during the war. L.A. was a boomtown,” bassist David Bryant remembered a half century later. “L.A. was jumping twenty-four hours a day.”

"The clubs were grooving because money was popping. People had plenty of money," Cecil "Big Jay" McNeely said.

Club Plantation during the 1940s. Photo credit: Walter L. Gordon, Jr./William C. Beverly, Jr. collection, UCLA Library Special Collections

After the war ended in 1945, the good times kept rolling. But, almost imperceptibly at first, things were changing. The crowds of patrons at the nightclubs began to thin out. There was a reason. With the war over, defense contractors started winding down and that meant they needed fewer workers. The effects soon rippled through the entire local economy.

“When the war was over and they started letting all the people go at shipyards and the aircraft factories and all of the government-sponsored jobs, the first ones that let go were the Black dudes,” said saxophonist Marshal Royal in the oral history, Central Avenue Sounds. “It hit the Avenue hard. It did. It tore them up. Tore them up.”

As the post-war economy slowed, some of the clubs couldn't didn't survive. Soon, more closed. The ripple was becoming a tide.

The popular Club Alabam. Photo credit: Los Angeles Public Library

In 1947, a Black man named Frank Drye, a decorated veteran of both world wars, moved to Los Angeles from Alabama and bought a home in the affluent all-white Country Club Park neighborhood.

His across-the-street neighbor, a Presbyterian minister, enlisted eight other local residents to sue the Drye family and two other Black families that had bought homes in the area for violating the racial covenant proscribing Black people from owning and inhabiting a house with such a deed, then common practice in Los Angeles.

The case went before a local judge named Stanley Mosk, who ruled in favor of Drye and the other two Black families.

“There is no allegation, no suggestion that any of these defendants would not be law-abiding neighbors and citizens of the community. The only objection to them is their color and race,” he wrote. “We read in columns in the press about un-American activities. This court feels there is no more reprehensible un-American activity than to attempt to deprive people of their home on the basis of a master race theory."

Mosk, who was Jewish, added pointedly, "Our country just fought against the Nazi race superiority doctrines.”

The following year, the United States Supreme Court struck down racial covenants nationally. The dual rulings had an almost Immediate impact in Los Angeles. After being largely stuck in the Central Avenue corridor for 50 years, many Black people rushed to move to neighborhoods where they had been prevented from living.

“After the war, it was almost as if there’s this exhilaration of ‘We’ve got more money than we know what to do with, and we can’t buy houses in any other area.’ And then, three or four years later [snaps fingers] ‘Yes, we can. Let me at it,” reeds player Jack Kelson said.

People with the means to move left. Those without the means were left behind. South Central, as the vicinity had come to be known, was becoming emptier and poorer.

LAPD arrest a suspect, 1965.Photo credit: bethnoe

In 1950, the Los Angeles Police Department had a new police chief. His name was William Parker, a veteran of the force, a sanctimonious moralizer and a racist. The LAPD had been notoriously corrupt and, as elsewhere, the Central Avenue clubs paid off cops to leave them alone. Parker set out to clean up the department. But he took a dim view of the racially-mixed nightlife on Central Avenue. Police officers began harassing people. Black people were subject to random stops and searches, threats and beatings. Some were arrested on flimsy grounds or none at all. White people were warned to stay in their own neighborhoods.

"What closed down Central Avenue in the Fifties was the powers that be and the police, because of the mixing," Bryant said. "They didn't like that mixing, so they rousted people. Stopping you and patting you down. Going in the clubs and messing with people. They did that for a long time. And that's how they closed it up. People got tired of that shit and stopped going over there."

In his 1990 book, City of Quartz, Mike Davis wrote, "Under Parker - a puritanical crusader against 'race mixing' - nightclubs and juke joints were raided and shuttered."

More clubs shut down, even the fabled Club Alabam. The once glorious Avenue and the whole neighborhood were in steep decline now. Heroin swept through the neighborhood like an epidemic. Crime increased. The local economy faltered. Unemployment soared.

In 1953, the Black musicians union, Local 767, and the white musicians union, Local 47, merged. Until then, even the musicians unions had been racially segregated. The merger opened up new opportunities for Black musicians outside of the Black clubs and even in the movies and television. They were no longer restricted to playing in the dwindling number of Central Avenue venues.

“By that time, about '51, '52, Central Avenue was closing down," said Horace Tapscott, a jazz pianist and composer, in Central Avenue Sounds. "It was on its way. As a matter of fact, it didn't have but a few more feet to go before it was over."

By 1960, it was over.

Watts riots, 1965. Photo Credit: bethnoe

The Watts riots of 1965 were a watershed event. For years, tensions between Black Angelenos and police had been high. When a Black man was arrested by a Highway Patrol officer, Watts, just south of South Central, erupted and the entire area was wracked by arson, looting and destruction that lasted six days. Six hundred local shops and stores were damaged or destroyed. In 1970, the once elegant Dunbar Hotel closed. After years of neglect and sinking into disrepair, it was converted to housing for low-income seniors in the 1980s.

"By the 1980s - except for the dwindling number of people who participated in the Central Avenue scene, and a handful of scholars and black music enthusiasts - Central Avenue was just a downtown Los Angeles exit off the Santa Monica Freeway, a route few had any reason to take," wrote Steve Isoardi, in the preface to Central Avenue Sounds.

In the Nineties, crack came sweeping through South Central, destroying lives and worsening crime. Violent street gangs proliferated. In 1996, the last music club on the avenue closed.

On my recent drive down Central, I saw what remains. A sterile, hollowed out commercial street of little interest. The little houses off Central that must have once been charming are mostly shabby. Many of them have fences of tall metal bars erected as protection. The neighborhood is no longer majority Black. It’s mostly Latino. There is barely a trace of glittering, glamourous Central Avenue. It’s as buried as surely as Pompeii.

Central Avenue today

Clora Bryant was a female trumpeter, one of the first women musicians to play in the Central Avenue clubs. When her family moved to L.A. from Texas in 1945, she transferred from Prairie View A&M University to UCLA. She got her jazz education playing in the clubs on weekends.

"It became more than a street," she said many years later. "It was a spirit. It was your goal. It was my life, really. That's where I found out who Clora was and what Clora wanted to be. It was everything."

Clora Bryant (left). Photo credit: LA Times. Art Farmer (right). Photo credit: vernon.hyde

The great trumpeter Art Farmer, who started playing at the local jazz clubs as a teenager when he was still attending L.A.’s Jefferson High School, reflected on Central Avenue just a few years before his death in 1999.

"When you go there now, I feel like I'm stepping into a graveyard," Farmer said. "It's very emotional to see something that played such a large part in your life, and now there's nothing left there. Nothing would give you the impression that this had ever been anything other than what it is right now. And you have to stop and ask yourself, well, was it all an illusion? Is it all an illusion?"

It wasn't an illusion. Once upon a time, many years ago, it was real.