On Crenshaw Boulevard, Young People Still Jam the Streets. They See It as a Rite of Passage, Neighbors Call It a Nuisance

On late Sunday afternoons, the traffic along Crenshaw Boulevard slows to a crawl, signaling the start of a dramatic transformation.

That’s when the Sunday churchgoers and shoppers grow scarce along the famed strip and throngs of raucous young people hit the street--cruising and blasting their stereos with no particular place to go.

As neighbors cringe, more than 1,000 cruisers roll in from miles around to parade up and down and see and be seen on the boulevard they have nicknamed the ‘Shaw. Despite tickets, barricades and neighborhood outrage, the cars keep coming.

“It’s a show, it’s free entertainment,” said William Barnes, 20, watching a lowrider bounce to a screeching stop. “You ride a little. You park a little, you socialize, make friends and meet girls. It’s simple.”

As on Hollywood, Whittier and even Van Nuys boulevards, cruising on Crenshaw has been a preoccupation of youth for decades. But in recent years, the phenomenon has reached new heights, spurred in part by the neighborhood’s burgeoning economy and the explosion of movies and rap videos featuring Crenshaw as the center of black life in Los Angeles.

However, older adults who live and work around the bustling boulevard are not interested in having their neighborhood serve as a mecca at midnight. They want to drive the cruisers out of Crenshaw.

“It can get a little frightening when you have that many young people coming together,” said Tony Nicholas, president of United Homeowners Assn. “‘Most of them are good kids, but then there have been some problems with gangs.”

Efforts to control the cruisers have had limited success.

At first, police estimated that they could have the problem licked in about a month. Parking tickets were handed out, and some 18 police officers and a dozen parking attendants were brought in to shut down a 3 1/2-mile stretch of Crenshaw Boulevard on Sunday nights from 7:30 p.m. to midnight--peak cruising hours.

However, two years later, the cruisers show no signs of quitting. And some say the problem has intensified, as cruisers, facing barricades on Crenshaw, have detoured to side streets in nearby Leimert Park, Windsor Hills and View Park--upscale urban enclaves where residents take pride in being off the beaten track.

Capt. Roger Fox, who heads the LAPD’s South Traffic Division, said the cruisers are “determined to outlast the police” in what has become a cat-and-mouse game through the increasingly clogged Crenshaw community.

Ida Yarbrough, an accountant who lives several blocks off Crenshaw, can detect the change. Her house shakes as a procession of cars, motors roaring, music blaring, passes down her street. Sometimes they congregate on the block before deciding where to head off into the night, leaving litter scattered on her lawn.

“We need an alternative playground for young adults,” she said with a sigh of frustration.

“I have a client who lives in Irvine with her two daughters,” Yarbrough said. “She said her children come to Crenshaw to socialize because they don’t have an opportunity to mingle where they are. I told her, ‘You’re part of our problem.’ ”

McDonald’s restaurant owner Brian Clark estimates that he loses $1,500 to $2,000 every Sunday night the boulevard is closed.

“Our business dies whenever they put up the barricades,” he said.

Earlier this year, Clark devised a way to recoup his lost earnings. He gave permission for a local car club to congregate in the McDonald’s parking lot if they agreed to keep their noise down and clean up before they left. The arrangement worked for a while, but Clark decided to cancel it after a 35-year-old man was killed in a drive-by shooting not far from the restaurant.

“Businesses lose and certainly the people who live in the area face hardships,” said City Councilman Nate Holden, one of three City Council members whose districts include portions of the closed boulevard from Jefferson Boulevard to Florence Avenue. Holden said the solution may be found in closing more streets and passing ordinances with stiffer penalties for cruising.

Not all agree that harsher penalties will dampen the desires of those who congregate.

“This is Southern California and cruising is part of the culture,” said Angela James, a Crenshaw-area resident and assistant professor of sociology at USC. “It’s natural for young people to flirt with each other. It’s what the older folks did when they were young.”

On one recent night, Big Punchie, a 26-year-old lowrider, watched with disgust as a group of younger men came armed with water pistols to squirt women driving by who refused to give them the time of day.

“That’s how we get in trouble,” he muttered under his breath. “All those young trendy dudes spraying water in girls’ cars. They must be bored, they don’t have anything else to do.”

Observing the spectacle was Yoshanda Jackson, 19, from Compton. “I just came here to look at the guys and see the cars,” she said. “It’s a game. I’m not actually looking for anyone in particular. I just want to meet people and see how many [phone] numbers I can get. I throw out the numbers because my boyfriend would kill me if he knew.”

All eyes turned to the roadway where cruiser Anthony Webb, 34, was about to put his freshly waxed, 1963 red Chevy Impala through a series of maneuvers for an adoring audience. At the flip of a switch, the 14 batteries in his car trunk shot power to the hydraulic pumps and the vehicle jumped in the air. It lifted one of its wheels off the pavement. And then something went wrong, something snapped. Webb knew instantly what was wrong. He had broken a drive shaft.

“This is definitely not cool,” Webb said with disgust, hopping in a tow truck for the ride back to South-Central. His day, which began at Venice Beach, was now ending.

It was after 1 a.m. when veteran cruiser Chris Kaver, 21, showed up at Leimert Park looking to continue the fun. Most of the crowds had disappeared. The police were gone, the barricades were down. But for many the night was still young.

This is nothing, Kaver snapped. “I’ll never forget the morning [of the] Northridge earthquake. It happened about 4:30 a.m. just after I got in from a night on Crenshaw Boulevard.”

He said he turned around and went back out.