Home to the largest middle and upper middle-class African American community in Los Angeles, Baldwin Hills ties together one of the most important strongholds of black culture in town, forming the residential nexus of the Crenshaw area.
Baldwin Hills has gone through many permutations over the decades, and has been the site of some of the most significant events in the city’s recent history, having since the 1930s hosted an Olympics, a who’s who of black Hollywood and one of the city’s most amazing natural disasters.
Long a destination of doctors (hence the early moniker “Pill Hill”), large numbers of African Americans began arriving in Baldwin Hills in the early 1960s. However, unlike the working class who settled in communities like Watts and Compton, Baldwin Hills drew a disproportionate number of black musicians and actors, many of whom were frozen out of affluent westside neighborhoods.
Thus, “the Black Beverly Hills” was born, with celebs including Ray Charles, Ike and Tina Turner, Loretta Devine, Nancy Wilson, James Cleveland and former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley settling into the lovely hillside homes. Other communities like Leimert Park and Country Club Park were also havens for black entertainers during this time, but none took on quite the same mystique as Baldwin Hills.
Baldwin Hills history is dominated by two major historical events which helped shape the future of the city of Los Angeles. The first event came in 1932, when Los Angeles hosted the Summer Olympics for the first time. The Olympics were a dying tradition during that era, in the midst of the Great Depression, and Los Angeles landed the games by default (no one else wanted to host them). Several countries could not even afford to send their teams to the games, despite the minimal costs involved.
Rather than host a second-rate event, Los Angeles dove headfirst into the games and helped revitalize them, a feat the city would repeat when it hosted the 1984 games. Baldwin Hills became the home of the first ever Olympic Village built to house male athletes. The Village was spread over hundreds of acres in the hills, though virtually none of it remains today.
The end of segregation meant many of the black celebrities that once called the neighborhood home moved into the more traditional enclaves of the rich and famous, such as Brentwood and Beverly Hills. However, rather than fall into disrepair, most of Baldwin Hills retained an affluent air thanks to the influx of the new black middle class.
The Black Beverly Hills might be a thing of the past, but that hasn’t stopped some television shows from going out of their way to perpetuate the “spoiled rich people dipped in chocolate” cliche. Pity, since the reality of Baldwin Hills today is so much more interesting, with the area’s many business professionals, doctors, lawyers and artists maintaining their hillside abodes in much the same pristine condition as when they were first constructed, and fostering a sense of community that would be admirable to most neighborhoods in Los Angeles.