Turn the corner onto West Tichenor Street from Wilmington Avenue, no more than a mile from the 91 Freeway in Compton, and here is what you see: the back end of an Arabian horse trotting up the street.
Here is what you hear: roosters crowing, chickens clucking.
Across the street from the well-tended and carefully rehabilitated home of Danny and Arron Afflalo lives Eddie Stovall.
In Stovall's driveway is a horse trailer, in his backyard three horses. "Red Cloud, Cheyenne and Lightning," he says. "There are cows living in this neighborhood. Goats and llamas ..."
This is the neighborhood where Arron Afflalo, a UCLA All-American basketball player, spent much of the last eight years. He may have learned the game on Compton playgrounds, but he did strength exercises while dodging farm animals on Tichenor Street with his best friend Michael Pagan.
"We'd be doing squats up and down the road and horses would chase us," Pagan says. "I'd sleep over and the roosters would wake us up. In Compton.
"I'd look at Arron and say, 'Can you believe this?' "
From the time he was 13, this is where Afflalo spent many days and nights.
"It has a lot of space," he says. "It's called Richland Farms ... and I know my dad loves the place."
There are no sidewalks, with the area designed as an agricultural haven where city-dwellers could have space. Homes are on large lots, some of about an acre.
Afflalo's father, Danny, moved to Richland Farms in 1999 after he and his wife, Yvette Merritt, had separated. Arron has always moved effortlessly around Compton and Carson, happy in homes with his mother, Gwen Washington, with Danny and Yvette, with brothers and sisters.
When Danny stumbled upon a small "For Sale" sign on Tichenor Street eight years ago, he had no idea that the little corner was, as he said, "Country in the city."
Pagan remembers the first day he and Arron checked out the new neighborhood.
"It was crazy," Pagan recalls. "You heard all the chickens. It was weird, but Arron's dad liked it. Compton has the violence and the rough sections, but here we were, people raising their horses, they had their little farms. I said to Arron, 'This is not in the projects. It can't be. Hear those roosters crowing?' "
Afflalo didn't take to riding horses or milking cows, but he appreciated the work his father put into their home and three others that his father now rents out.
