We are deeply grateful to Jason Smith, the artist who created the mural on the north wall of Rio Meat Market on
We are also grateful to David Groseth, whose generosity made this project possible.
History of N. Fair Oaks, the "Black Main Street" of Pasadena
Fair Oaks Avenue in Pasadena, California, is a major north–south corridor connecting the communities of Altadena, Pasadena, and South Pasadena, running 7.9 miles in length, and dating back to 1874. Since the 1930s, N. Fair Oaks Avenue has been the heart of the African American community that at one time comprised 20% of the population of Pasadena. It has since declined by over 50% for reasons this report will attempt to explain.
Going back to the 1930s and 1940s, northwest Pasadena was a thriving Black community, with beautiful homes and flourishing businesses, despite racial segregation:
Before World War II, northwest Pasadena was seen as a place of possibility for Black residents. Amid an otherwise hostile suburban Los Angeles, these parts of Pasadena were some of the few neighborhoods of color outside of Los Angeles’ core. Northwest Pasadena was a thriving Black neighborhood and commercial district. It boasted “some of the city’s highest concentration of classic Victorian and craftsman style architecture, [which were] within walking distance of local stores, the downtown business district and the city’s Civic Center,” according to one resident…By 1960, northwest Pasadena was significantly more diverse than Los Angeles — 80% of residents there were people of color, compared to just 19% residents of color in the county and 20% in the City of Pasadena overall. [1]
MHCH commissioned Brandon Lamar to do a video of long-time NW Pasadena residents reminiscing about the “glory days” of this community in the 1950s-1960s.
“Ir was a hub of activity,” recalls Pastor John Stewart, community leader and pastor of New Guiding Light Missionary Baptist Church, “There were so many businesses, people interacting, bartering, trading. So much going on! Washington to Vill was the hub of our life. On the northeast corner of Washington and Fair Oaks was Bill’s Fried Chicken and on the other corner was Russell’s barber shop. All Black enterprises! They could employ colored folks. There was the Green Buck Restaurant down by where Parson’s is now. All that was the Black community. You saw Black doctors, Black dentists, Black pediatricians. Everything was Black here in the Black community. Pintoresca Park and the Library was a center for Black youth. The Boys & Girls Club was always a mainstay of the neighborhood. There was a bike shop and chocolate factory. For those who didn’t have transportation, everything you needed was right there. Boys Market was here. The Urban Leaue did a lot of job training.”
“The major change was Coop Village when they changed all those single family homes,” said Deacon Westmorland, “Residents co-owned the businesses. When the city took that away and turned it into straight-out project, everything went down the tubes.”
“The community really began to change in the late seventies and early eighties,” said Pastor Stewart. “There was the influx of drugs and crack cocaine. A lot of the children of homeowners sold the homes. It became a cycle and you saw displacement. Then the rents started rising, and people left. If there was someone with a vision and a desire to see it what it once was, it would be a thriving neighborhood.” [2]
Each year the Black History parade marches down N. Fair Oaks Abr, celebrating the past and current achievements of Pasadena’s African American community. These includes such notables as:
· Mack Robinson and Jackie Robinson, famed athletes.
· Octavia Butler (1947-2006), science fiction writer.
· Loretta Thompson-Glickman (1945-2001), first Black mayor of Pasadena,
· Dr. Edna L. Griffin (1905-1992), Pasadena’s first African American woman physician, whose office was located at 891 North Fair Oaks Ave.
· And many more (
Most of the Black legacy of this street has been destroyed because of “urban renewal,” freeway construction and other factors we will discuss. The last remnants of these “glory days” can be seen on N. Fair Oaks between Washington and Woodbury: ten Black churches and 18 businesses. As this report will show, efforts are underway to revitalize this once thriving neighborhood with a vision to “beautify but not gentrify,” the motto of the N. Fair Oaks Empowerment Initiative.
Causes of the Decline of NW Pasadena
What caused the decline of Northwest Pasadena’s African American community? We will look at the following five factors:
1) Urban Renewal and The Pepper Project
2) Construction of the 710 and 210 Freeways
3) Gentrification, Soaring Housing Costs and Unintended consequences of the Civil Rights Act and Other Federal policies
Urban Renewal and The Pepper Project
Once a thriving community, years of divestment dramatically changed the NW corner of Pasadena due to harmful Federal policies: red lining (which discouraged banks from investing in racially mixed neighborhoods), racially restrictive covenants, the 1949 Federal Housing Act (which funded “Urban Renewal,” aka “Negro Removal), predatory banking, eminent domain, and more that will be discussed later.
Along with “slum clearance,” Urban Renewal provided loans with those with 10% down for new construction, but Northwest Pasadena consisted of older homes in need of repair. The funds went instead to whites with the means to move to La Canada, using cars they could afford and driving on federally subsidized roads. This served to further segregate NW Pasadena, especially when La Canada began their own high school that was 100% white. Their bus drove past Muir High School, which consisted of almost 100% Black and brown students. This led to Pasadena becoming the only city west of the Mississippi to be subject to a Federal lawsuit to desegregate their schools! Nonetheless, Pasadena’s schools are just as segregated as ever.
Urban renewal also destroyed a flourishing neighborhood of Black homeowners in NW Pasadena. As Deacon Westmorland pointed out, “Coop Village” consisted of Black homeowners who were supporting Black businesses, but this changed in the 1960s when Pasadena decided to tear down Coop Village and replace it with housing for low-income residents. Brian Biery describes how neighbors fought in vain to stop this project:
The first ‘urban renewal’ effort in Pasadena was originally called the ‘Pepper Street Redevelopment Project’ and is now known as Kings Villages. In order to build support for the project, the City of Pasadena designated the area as being blighted, it wasn’t. Alma Stokes, one of the Black professionals who was hired to assist families with their relocation efforts, remembers the neighborhood as a thriving community. It was filled with homeowners, local businesses, shops, a pharmacy, a library, a park and numerous other neighborhood resources. “The area really wasn’t blighted,” remembers Ms. Stokes. “It wasn’t. It was just Black removal.”
From the date the Pepper Street project was proposed in 1958 there was considerable resistance to the idea on the part of residents. As a result, community members led by Emmett Mickel of First AME Church Pasadena, organized and fought the ‘Pepper Project’ for ten years. Their efforts were ultimately blocked by the City, and the housing complex was constructed in 1968. Part of the original intent of the Pasadena Redevelopment Agency was to reduce the number of Black families in that part of Pasadena. Interestingly, however, there were no white buyers for the $18,500 townhomes. The units sat empty for months which caused the PRA and the City to subsequently reclassify them as low-income housing.
As with similar ‘urban renewal’ projects across the country, the Pepper Project did not fulfill the promise of urban redevelopment, which was to improve the quality of housing, rebuild infrastructure and rid cities of urban decay. The resulting impacts were instead to close local businesses along Fair Oaks Ave., displace residents, and turn homeowners into renters; which ultimately contributed to a significant decrease in family wealth in communities of color.
In addition, it destroyed the connective tissue of the neighborhood: homes with front porches and lawns where families could connect and kids could play. And, in this particular case, it transformed a healthy neighborhood into one ridden with crime…..
By the time ground was broken for the project in 1968, 299 families had been displaced, 91% of them families of color. After a year of serving as a ‘relocation specialist’ for the PRV, Alma Stokes resigned from her job and returned to teaching at Washington School. It was an extremely taxing and frustrating task to find housing for families who had lost their homes. “I left that job because I couldn’t stand working there anymore watching Black removal,” said Ms. Stokes of her experience recently.[3]
King’s Village consists of 313 units. These were poorly maintained by the city and became known for gangs and crime. King’s Village was renovated by Pastor Jean Burch who managed the project well and recently sold it to the Rose Affordable Housing Preservation Fund.[4] Many Black residents still grieve the loss of these home, however and want to see more Black homeownership in Pasadena since that helps to create generational wealth and stability.
Construction of the 210 and 710 Freeways
“Take me to a strange city where I’ve never been before and point out the areas in which Negroes live, and I will lay you some neat odds that I can point out the route of the city’s next freeway. There’s nothing magic about it. I don’t know whether it is a required subject in engineering schools or not, but I do know that one of the cardinal articles of faith among highway engineers is that the areas of Negro residence offer the best, the most feasible, and the most economical routes for highway construction.” –Lawyer and journalist Loren Miller,who represented the family in the 1944 anti-covenant California Supreme Court case, summarized freeway siting in the Los Angeles region.[5]
The 1956 Highway Act, which released federal funding for highways across the US, has sliced through African American neighborhoods and thriving Black business districts across the US, and that was also true of NW Pasadena with the 210 freeway.
The construction of the 210 Freeway and the 710 “stub” had devastating effects on Pasadena’s African American community:
In the 1950s and ‘60s, planners and other local officials built upon decades of disinvestment, redlining, and urban renewal projects to push a new route of the Foothill Freeway/Interstate 210 through the northwest neighborhoods of Pasadena, resulting in the displacement of nearly 3,000 predominantly Black residents. An alternate route — running largely through uninhabited parkland along the eastern edge of the Arroyo Seco valley by the Rose Bowl stadium parking lot — was rejected.
Even two decades after construction, the freeway depressed home values in the adjacent neighborhoods relative to changes in home values across the city.
Thousands of homes and businesses were demolished to clear the path for the Foothill Freeway. Property owners were reimbursed according to “fair market values”; however, property
values were considerably depressed due to historical redlining. And displaced residents of color struggled to find housing in the rest of Pasadena due to continued segregation.
Already lower, home values adjacent to the freeway grew less than home values across the city for years. Over the next two decades after construction, the number of housing units dropped not just from demolition for the freeway, but also in adjacent areas, due to its negative secondary effects.
Another damaging blow to Pasadena’s African community was the construction of the 710 Stub. White communities like South Pasadena rigorously and successfully opposed the 710 extension, but the Black residents of Pasadena lack their political clout and thousands lost their homes:
On November 18, 1964, the California Highway Commission determined the routing for the final five (5) miles of the SR 7 freeway – now known as the SR 710 – through the communities of El Sereno, South Pasadena, and Pasadena to complete the adoption of the Long Beach Freeway.
While the freeway never materialized in El Sereno and South Pasadena, the SR 710 northern interchange was constructed in the City of Pasadena in the early 1970s, resulting in the Northern Stub. The construction of this stub displaced thousands of residents [mostly people of color] and divided a residential community from an active central business district.[6]
This “Northern Stub” has been relinquished to Pasadena by Caltrans and residents are calling for reparations to compensate the residents who lost their homes. This map shows the area that was demolished to build the 710 Stub. Efforts are under way to rectify the injustice caused by freeway constructions, with residents calling for reparation and other compensation to the African American community.[7]
Gentrification, Soaring Housing Costs and Unintended consequences of the Civil Rights Act and other Federal policies.
May Federal policies made it difficult for Blacks to prosper in Pasadena as well as nation-wide, so they found ways to change laws or overcome the system. Due to “red lining” by banks, Blacks were prevented from obtaining home loans, so they opened their own bank to obtain mortgages, called Family Thrift, today called One United, which was on N. Lake and Washington.
Once the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, allowing Blacks to live outside of Northwest Pasadena, many of those with means moved to other parts of the city or to places like Altadena and South Pasadena. This unintended consequence of a just law opened way for gentrification in the NW, where homes were still affordable. Housing prices started to rise and today are unaffordable to most people of color.
As a result, over 50% of African Americans in Pasadena have been displaced. They have either been priced out or have cashed out due to increased property values. Black churches have become commuter churches. One African American church has 8 members left.
Work of Making Housing & Community Happen and The North Fair Oaks Empowerment Initiative
The N. Fair Oaks Ave community has been deeply wounded by these unjust policies. To help prevent further displacement and reweave a once thriving community, Dr. Jill Shook, a community organizer, received the support of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance (IMA) to begin a listening campaign in 2015, resulting in 150 surveys within a five-block area on N. Fair Oaks. Simple questions were asked like, how long have you been in the area? What are your dreams and concerns for the community? Do you want to help bring about change? Most of the 10 churches, 18 businesses in this five block stretch participated, as did a number of the residents. The results were telling.
Some felt it was a waste of time to imagine an improved community because they felt the city would never agree to make any changes. “We needed to resurrect hope,” said Dr. Shook.
In 2015, the IMA voted to allow Dr. Shook to plan the employment fair that year, with and by the community. She chose the area that was being surveyed to host a fair. The planning team decided to close down Tremont Street with booths representing all the local businesses, churches, resources, and employment opportunities, as well as featuring the skills, assets and gifts within the community. There were folkloric dancers, a bounce house, and even local barbers who provided free haircuts once people applied for a job. Job applicants also received free dress shirts (thanks to Councilmember Tyron Hampton). Elected officials such Judy Chu, our Congressional representative (shown below), and former mayor Terry Tornek showed up and spoke. This community that had been neglected felt important and "seen."
Over 500 members of the community in this N Fair Oaks corridor, from Washington Blvd to Woodbury, attended this NW Jobfest. Hope for change began to emerge. The community met to unveil the results of the survey. The biggest concern was the street, not feeling safe due to the traffic, cars speeding by, the lack of lighting and good sidewalks. Others were concerned with economic development, wanting coffee and ice cream shops, and thriving businesses.
Since then, the N. Fair Oaks Empowerment Initiative has continued its work of listening to and organizing the community, as Dr. Shook explains:
•In January, 2017, we walked our corridor with Council member Hampton and other city staff who shared information to assist us in our efforts to move forward. The Transportation Advisory Committee voiced unwavering support. We wrote to the Pasadena City Council and attended multiple Council meetings to present our letters with 87 signatures of people within our N Fair Oaks corridor.
•In March, 201, we enjoyed the Damascus Road Church Mission Team that came from Tucson, AZ during spring break for a week. They painted over graffiti, played with kids, spent time with elderly disabled neighbors in two N Fair Oaks nursing homes, and to roll up their selves to clean up on the street. Estella at Rio Meat Market’s opened her doors.
The N. Fair Oaks Empowerment Initiative partnered with the Complete Streets Coalition to create focus groups that visually imagined what they wanted, and they identified 15 specific items they hoped the city could address. Today, seven of these requests have been placed in the city’s budget to be completed, including signage, more trees and sidewalk repairs. In 2017, the Pasadena City Council unanimously voted to put a $268,000 traffic signal to help slow traffic and bring safety. Seeing this signal in place has resurrected more hope.
On April 24, 2018, over 60 people took part in MHCH’s prayer vigil for affordable housing and racial justice at the New Hope Baptist Church. Many religious and community leaders took part, including state senator Portantino, Pasadena city council member John Kennedy and many others. They read scripture, prayed, and shared personal stories. Jill Shook composed a powerful liturgy of confession of past and present racial injustices and a commitment to righting them. It was inspiring to see Black and white folks coming together to support congregations that want to have affordable housing built on their property, but cannot do so because of restrictive zoning laws.[8]
In 2021, the N. Fair Oaks Empowerment Initiative worked with the city to conduct a survey of 1,000 homes in the neighborhood, with help from the Youth Ambassadors and other volunteers.
The results of this survey showed that the people of this community are seeking economic renewal through beautifying the street. They want the city to slow down traffic to feel safe, with a new complete street redesign, with a center turn lane and traffic traveling in one lane each way, with green pedestrian-friendly walkability, small pocket parks at intersections offering more green shade, trees, perennial flowers, benches, bike racks, speed monitors and more.
Pasadena Department of Transportation (DOT) on December 21. About three weeks later DOT informed MHCH that it was seeking a grant of $5 million to complete the requested street projects to beautify N. Fair Oaks. It didn’t receive this grant but has since applied for several other grants.