A team of history-minded teenagers set out Saturday to change common perceptions of South Vermont Avenue, once a key economic artery for South Los Angeles.
The 20 students from area high schools led a walking tour of the wide boulevard, singling out landmarks and telling stories about local history.
Their goal was to highlight the economic history of their neighborhood, long buffeted by social changes, a declining job base and the 1992 riots that left some storefronts in ruins.
Still, the stories they told did not end there.
Students said they wanted to illustrate how some small businesses were thriving despite economic pressures and the neighborhood's reputation as abjectly poor and riddled with drugs, gangs and crime.
"The media shows what it wants to show. People say that people are dying here every day," said Ivan Lopez, 16, a student who told about the history of the Nativity Catholic Church and School, a longtime community center.
Other stops included one of the area's new supermarkets, the American Barber College, a popular barbecue restaurant that has survived nearly five decades of change, and a shopping plaza that once housed a Sears store and has rebounded with new businesses.
The tour was part of a local history project organized and sponsored by the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, a private, nonprofit archive on Vermont that specializes in local labor, political and social history.
Forty students from 10 local high schools spent nearly four months researching local landmarks, combing through old records and interviewing residents. They received high school and college credit through Los Angeles Trade Tech College.
Several students said they enjoyed the project because their school history textbooks contained scant information about their neighborhood. If Los Angeles was mentioned at all, they said, it was cast as the home of Hollywood.
The students led two tours along Vermont Avenue, from 61st Street north to 53rd Street, accompanied by about two dozen residents, relatives and other students.
They strolled past shabby liquor stores, check-cashing services and weedy vacant lots behind rusted fences. But they pointed out promising businesses, such as the Gigante supermarket that opened in 2003, part of a chain based in Mexico. They said it was welcomed in the area, which has few supermarkets, and created 200 jobs.
