Historical Sites of 1950 Bronzeville / Little Tokyo and the 2022 LAPD Facilities in Their Place

The purpose of this project is to highlight the history of the currently vacant site where Los Angeles Police Department’s longtime headquarters, the Parker Center, once stood, making sure to also take into account the related LAPD facilities still standing in the vicinity and the makeup of the immediate surroundings as stakeholders and city planners decide what to do with the space the Parker Center formerly occupied.

In the 1940s, during the Japanese Internment period, many Black Americans from the Great Migration found their first lodgings in the Little Tokyo buildings the city’s ethnic Japanese were forced to leave behind, and subsequently, the area developed renown for its Jazz culture and came to be known as Bronzeville. After the end of the war, the neighborhood once again experienced changes, as Little Tokyo’s former residents returned. Then, in the early 1950s, much of the block east of the corner of N. Los Angeles Street and E. 1st Street was razed to make way for the construction of the Parker Center, marking the end of the Bronzeville era by pushing out much of what was left of Little Tokyo’s Black population and their history there.

Now, some 70 years later, the Parker Center, too, has been demolished and the site lies vacant once again. What futures can we imagine for this space? And how might our choices today best serve to acknowledge the wrongs of the past and seek justice for those who were forced out either through internment or demolition? This map makes use of digitally-rendered vector polygons to combine historical data from a 1950 edition of Sanborn fire insurance maps, weaving the history with a remote imagery layer of the present topography, providing useful and necessary context.