Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Helps L.A. Come Together to Preserve Historic Spaces

On a sunny Saturday in L.A.’s historic St. Elmo Village, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the City of Los Angeles, and Getty mapped out a future for preserving an oft-overlooked sector of the city’s history by listening to the people who live here.

Watts native and associate project specialist at the Getty Conservation Institute, Rita Cofield, kicked off the event with a proposition to attendees: tell us your stories and memories of significant African American places, and we’ll use that to consider what to preserve. “The city and Getty understand,” she said, “in order to tell a fuller American story, you have to tap into a community’s ability to tell their own story.”

The event, in part, was held to announce the selection of four initial Historic-Cultural Monument nominations that will go before the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission later this year. It was also an effort to reach out to community members and leaders to help African American Historic Places, Los Angeles—a project begun by Getty and the City of Los Angeles’s Office of Historic Resources (OHR) in 2021—discover which sites to nominate next by asking those present to share their stories about places in Los Angeles that held cultural and historical significance for them.

Event headliner, legendary basketball player, social activist, and award-winning writer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar shared his stories on stage.

A Los Angeles transplant, he fell in love with Los Angeles shortly after he arrived at UCLA, “just about a week after the Watts riots were over,” remembered Abdul-Jabbar. An evening out to see John Coltrane with friends “changed it all for me, cause I realized that all the people here were definitely in tune with and appreciative of their culture.”

He followed with stories of the Dunbar Hotel (location of the first West Coast meeting of the NAACP), Dolphin’s of Hollywood’s role in putting rock and roll on the map, and his acquaintanceship with Lou Adler and Sam Cooke—“They were friends, and they’ve still got a club on Sunset. You probably been there: The Roxy,” joked Abdul-Jabbar.

Others shared their stories with interviewers at listening stations, a project spearheaded in part by Getty intern Lauren O’Brien. “Historically, historic preservation is not as inclusive to community folks, or those who aren’t trained professionals,” said O’Brien. “That’s not really inclusive, and it doesn’t really honor all of the different repositories of knowledge that there are, especially of African American history where a lot of this is oral tradition or ephemeral or intangible.”

Everyone is invited to fill out an online survey to share their stories of spaces historically and culturally significant to the African-American experience in Los Angeles as part of an ongoing effort designed to change the way Getty and the City of L.A. collect histories.

Everyone’s passion for the project was evident. “We’re asking each of you not to leave here today, we’re going to keep you on site until you’ve told us at least one place that matters to you,” joked Ken Bernstein Principal City Planner at City of Los Angeles, who spearheaded SurveyLA in partnership with Getty to create a comprehensive database of art-historic resources in the city.

“We’re very grateful that Getty is continuing this partnership with the city to expand the work that we began more than a decade ago to enhance equity and inclusion and historic preservation,” said Bernstein. “Despite all this important work we’ve begun, we still know that we have a long way to go.”

You can share your stories at this link, and keep track of the project here.