That area around Santa Barbara Blvd and Crenshaw Blvd is Lemeirt Park. My family lived there until the late 1950’s. It was a great neighborhood until the ethnic makeup changed. Now Lemeirt Park is the “cultural center of Afrocentricity.” It as though the people who built that area never existed.
If not for the Koreans and their shops the area would be even worse.
Same thing happened to my folks’ neighborhood, in Syracuse :( My cousin drove down Midland Ave a few years ago, and she was too traumatized to describe it with more than “Trust me, it’s bad”. On a side note, whenever someone questions the need for The Second Amendment, I like to roll the Youtube video of the Korean merchants on their rooftop, well armed, and unmolested, while the neighborhood is burning, during the Rodney King riots.
I used to live in North University Park, not too far away from Santa Barbara Ave. and Leimert Park. There were no Korean shopkeepers in Leimert Park in those days, so the area may have actually improved.
Back in the 1940's, many USC professors lived in Leimert Park.