page_title: Historic West Adams
section_title: Population changes
hierarchical_section_title: Historic West Adams / History / Population changes
context_page_description: Historic West Adams is a residential and commercial region along the route of the Rosa Parks Freeway, paralleling the east-west Adams Boulevard in Los Angeles, California. With variously described boundaries, the area was an exclusive residential district In the late 19th and early 20th centuries for many wealthy and influential people. It underwent a period of deterioration, but many of its stately old buildings have been and are being rehabilitated and preserved.
context_section_description: The development of the West Side, Beverly Hills and Hollywood, beginning in the 1910s, siphoned away much of West Adams' upper-class white population; upper-class blacks began to move in around this time, although the district was off limits to all but the very wealthiest African-Americans. One symbol of the area's emergence as a center of black wealth at this time is the 1949 headquarters of the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company, a late-period Moderne structure at Adams and Western designed by renowned black architect Paul Williams. It housed what was once one of the nation's largest black-owned insurers (currently, along with an adjacent new building, it is now a campus for a large non-profit). West Adams' transformation into an affluent black area was sped by the Supreme Court's 1948 invalidation of segregationist covenants on property ownership. Many of the Historic West Adams neighborhoods are experiencing a renaissance of sorts with their stunning houses being restored to their previous elegance.
  On December 6, 1945, Superior Court Judge Thurmond Clarke dismissed the suit of eight white property owners who tried to force fifty African-American occupants (250 residents) from an area bounded by La Salle Avenue, Washington Boulevard, Western Avenue and Adams Boulevard, contending that the defendants had violated property restrictions against blacks agreed on by white property owners eight years previously. The defendants, who included actress Hattie McDaniels and singer Ethel Waters, replied that the original subdivision restrictions had expired and that more than half of the area was then owned by black people. Clark decided that no testimony would be taken in the case, and he wrote that "it is time that members of the Negro race are accorded, without reservations and evasions, the full rights guaranteed to them" under the Federal Constitution.
  In 1985 the neighborhoods were becoming changed by a "wave of younger couples and families", and by the next year, Historic West Adams had become "a predominantly black middle-class area with growing Latino and Korean segments, plus a mix of Hungarians, Poles, Japanese, USC students and an increasing young professional and gay population". In that year, though, tensions erupted between some of the newcomers and the older, more settled black residents. It got so bad that a petition was presented against plans by the West Adams Heritage Association to close off 20th Street for its annual Historic Homes and Street Faire, which drew upwards of a thousand visitors to the neighborhood. After a heated public hearing, the city's Board of Public Works denied a permit for the festivity.
  Mirroring changes seen throughout Los Angeles, the district's Latino population has been growing. The area's architecture and proximity to USC have brought some upper-middle-class whites as well. Many African-American gays have moved into the neighborhood, and it has become the center of black gay life in Los Angeles, even earning the nickname of "the black West Hollywood" or "the black Silver Lake" In June 1994, though, heavy damage was done to the home of one gay couple, Bob Bowerman and Penn Barrosse, who had lived in the neighborhood for a decade and spent a million dollars fixing up their 21-room, three-story house. Bowerman said he considered intrusion by culprits who spray-painted their home to be a hate crime.
caption: Architect
  Paul Williams
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