Cleveland’s “Millionaire’s Row” Still Glitters With the Gilded Age’s Unanticipated Legacy

City Founders Expected an Outpost of New England, What They Created Was a Paragon of Immigrant Civic Engagement

The Republicans are convening in Cleveland, and the Cleveland Cavaliers have won the NBA championship after a half-century long drought for Cleveland sports teams, putting intense focus on the city’s past and present. And so I, as a historian, keep getting asked to describe the “essence” of the city in which I live and which I have studied for a number of years.

Most inquiries ask what makes Cleveland special. Too often, the responses that are given to the media are civic booster-speak. Once the fifth-largest city in the nation, …

By John J. Grabowski | July 18, 2016

South L.A. Is a Story of Both Segregation and Desegregation

Homeownership in the Area Has Been Gaining Since the 1990s, Even as Prosperous Residents Move Out

By Eugene Turner and James P. Allen | July 7, 2016

The first big change in South Los Angeles over the last half-century has been the shift of concentrated black communities westward into newer and better housing. The second big change …

Martin Luther King Jr. as Folk Art

Street Portraits Across L.A. Show How Different Neighborhoods Interpret the Civil Rights Leader in Their Own Image

By Camilo José Vergara | January 15, 2016

I did not set out to document murals of Martin Luther King Jr. in American cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Detroit. I just happened to find …

Gentrification Isn’t About Hipsters

Angelenos Worried About Their Changing Neighborhoods Are Better Off Going to City Planning Meetings than Complaining About Well-to-Do Newcomers

by Jia-Rui Cook | June 17, 2015

The term gentrification can be a catch-all word to characterize the arrival of hipsters, widely available wi-fi, and whites moving into neighborhoods of color. But at a “Thinking L.A.” event …

Is My Gentrifying L.A. Hood Getting Worse or Better?

A Resident on the Frontline of Urban Change Weighs the Pros and Cons

by Melanie Gonzalez | June 15, 2015

If you want to know what it’s like on the front lines of gentrification, you only have to look at the corner of Avoca Street and Yosemite Drive in Eagle …

As L.A. Gentrifies, Who Gets Left Behind?

With New Development and Organic Markets on the Rise, Many Working-Class Neighborhoods Are Transforming—Maybe for the Worse

June 12, 2015

When a British sociologist coined the term “gentrification” in 1963, she wrote that it happens when “working class quarters have been invaded by the middle class … until all or …

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