September 25, 2009 by Scott Gold, Los Angeles Times

There are 7,000 miles of roads in Los Angeles. Few have shouldered more than South Central Avenue. It was a streetcar line, cleared 122 years ago to shuttle commuters to the first suburb of South Los Angeles. It housed some of the nation's first middle-class African American families, and its clubs and hotels were the laboratories where West Coast jazz was born. "The Avenue" was a place of promise, of strolls in your Sunday best -- "something very elegant," said City Councilwoman Jan Perry.

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