IKNEW IT was coming.
Crenshaw Motors Ford, the last surviving car dealership on the boulevard, closed up shop two weeks ago. I was chagrined by the news, but not surprised. Crenshaw Motors had been on a precipice for the last few years, what with Ford bleeding money and trying to recoup by slashing jobs and closing plants. When the Beverly Hills dealership closed late last year, I figured Crenshaw Motors' days were numbered. Every time I drove by the lot at the corner of 53rd, I breathed a sigh of relief to see it still open, sleek new cars and trucks arrayed beneath the towering blue-and-white neon sign that looked almost hand-lettered, a remnant of the Art Deco age in which it debuted. And I felt fresh anxiety that this glimpse of the Crenshaw corridor's most visible and vulnerable business would be my last.
It's not that I harbor strong sentiments for Ford (although, as a sideways but stubborn expression of patriotism, I until very recently only owned Fords). It's that new-car dealerships have for so long been potent symbols of commerce and possibility in the black community, an affirmation of a middle class on the move in more ways than one.
And for blacks historically used to second- or third-rate treatment at the hands of the retail establishment, the whole service culture of car lots was significant -- shiny floors, up-to-the-minute merchandise, upbeat salespeople catering to every customer whim. My Uncle Edris was a top seller at O'Connor Lincoln-Mercury, one of the boulevard's Big Three dealerships (the other sold Pontiacs and was just south of O'Connor). My uncle was not merely a salesman but a community fixture who was synonymous with the Crenshaw district and its reputation as the place where blacks thrived not just financially, but culturally and politically. The segregation-era ghettoes and mom-and-pop businesses of the Eastside gave way to a new Westside -- Crenshaw -- and the sprawling car lots were flagships of a newfound freedom.
Of course, the Crenshaw scene is not what it was. It hasn't been for years. The once-grand shopping center at Crenshaw and King Boulevard, which officially kicked off Southern California mall culture when it opened in the late 1940s, still has its cruise-ship architecture but has listed into a hodgepodge of stores dominated by the downscale likes of Wal-Mart. The adjacent Santa Barbara Plaza has been on a snail's pace of redevelopment since the civil unrest 15 years ago, an event that seems to have permanently turned the economic tide in Crenshaw from what-do-we-want to take-what-we-can-get.
