Symbol of Hope Along "Charcoal Alley"
In August 1965, the Watts Riots resulted in the destruction of buildings up and down 103rd Street—the main commercial thoroughfare in Watts. Watts Station was situated in the center of the one-mile (1.6 km) stretch of 103rd Street between Compton and Wilmington Avenue that came to be known as "Charcoal Alley" due to the widespread destruction. One observer recalled: "Both sides of 103rd Street were ablaze now. The thoroughfare was a sea of flames that emitted heat so unbearable that I believed my skin was being seared off." Another account of the riots along "Charcoal Alley" states: "On the third day of the Watts Riots, 103rd St. was burned to the ground." In the middle of the rubble and widespread destruction along "Charcoal Alley", the Los Angeles Times reported that "the train station was the only structure that remained intact when stores along 103rd Street burned during the Watts riots." The survival of the old wood-framed Watts Station, whether an intentional omission or a mere coincidence, resulted in the station becoming "a symbol of continuity, hope and renewal" for the Watts community.
Read more about this topic: Watts Station
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“The symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year’s hay with the fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground.... So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year’s hay with the fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground.... So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.”
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“For lack of wood the fire goes out, and where there is no whisperer, quarreling ceases. As charcoal is to hot embers and wood to fire, so is a quarrelsome person for kindling strife.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Proverbs 26:20-21.
“In the mind there is a thin alley called death
and I move through it as
through water.”
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