Pacific Boulevard - History

History

A New York Times article observed that Pacific Boulevard was once, "the apotheosis of the postwar California dream, an all-white working-class Beverly Hills with swank department stores, auto dealerships and first-run cinemas." To its residents, it was an idyllic spot: "Pacific Boulevard in Huntington Park was truly magical for me, with Christmas decorations stretched across the wide boulevard, decorated store windows and the Christmas parade on Pacific."

The stretch of Pacific Boulevard in downtown Huntington Park was a major commercial district serving the city's largely working-class residents, as well as those of neighboring cities such as Bell, Cudahy, and South Gate. However, the thoroughfare was located three miles (5 km) from any freeway, and it was ill served by that feature in the freeway-oriented pulse of the region; by 1968, more than sixty of its storefronts were vacant. During the 1980s, the strip appeared to be derelict with vacancy rates up to 50 percent in its commercial spaces. But a wave of "nearly 100 percent Latino immigrants ... transformed Huntington Park's main commercial thoroughfare from what was one of the most blighted districts in central Los Angeles into one of the most profitable and heavily trafficked in the region." After its resurgence, Pacific Boulevard "competes with downtown’s Broadway and Beverly Hills' Rodeo Drive for the region’s highest sales volume per square foot." And it has become "an important site not only economically but socially and culturally as well."