The mythical Sankofa bird has its origins in the folklore of Ghana’s Akan tribe. With its head facing backward and its feet firmly planted forward, the bird symbolizes the Akan people’s ethos in looking ahead to the future—it can’t be done, they believe, without wisdom gained from the past.
That marriage of past and future makes the Sankofa bird an apt namesake for a Los Angeles park projected to debut in early 2024 (although the official open date is a moving target). Drawing on the rich African American history of the city’s Crenshaw neighborhood, where it will be located, Sankofa Park is the first major component of Destination Crenshaw, a $100 million public-private initiative that aims to revitalize a 1.3-mile corridor of Crenshaw Boulevard. Envisioned by City Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson and designed with extensive engagement from a community advisory council, the ambitious project was first announced in November 2017.
“We’ve often used the term ‘community engagement.’ This has really been community participation, co-creation, everything,” says Zena Howard, FAIA, a principal at global design firm Perkins&Will who was heavily involved in the design of Sankofa Park. Landscape architecture is being provided by Studio-MLA, based in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The park will also feature cutting-edge augmented reality storytelling by Washington, D.C., firm Gallagher & Associates and is the largest commissioning project ever undertaken for Black artists.
Destination Crenshaw aims to support Black-owned businesses, hire local workers, resist the erasure of Black culture, and design a one-of-a-kind urban corridor in a locale that has been a mecca for Black culture in the city. “[During] one workshop, we asked participants to bring something,” Howard says. “It didn’t have to be related to architecture or design at all. Just bring something meaningful and stand up and speak to why it’s meaningful. Some people brought in photographs; other people brought in [images of] created spaces that inspired them.”
“People brought in all types of things,” she continues. “One woman brought a Sankofa bird, and she held it up, and she talked about what it meant to her personally, and to her family—this notion of being grounded in the past as a way to move forward. That inspired the whole design of Sankofa Park.”
History Runs Deep in Crenshaw
During and after World War II, African American families seeking work in the automobile, rubber, and steel industries migrated to LA from Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and other southern states. The Black population in the city leaped from 63,700 in 1940 to 763,000 in 1970, according to City of Los Angeles census data, and Crenshaw became a place where Black business flourished. Referred to as “Black LA’s Main Street,” Crenshaw hosted parades, community gatherings, and teenagers who cruised the boulevard, showing off their cars. By the 1990s and early 2000s, however, years of disinvestment in resources and infrastructure by the city and state had taken their toll. “It is a boulevard of both aspiration and disappointments,” said LA author and activist Nina Revoyr of Crenshaw in a 2019 interview with Curbed LA.
In 2008, the Los Angeles Metro announced construction of an 8.5-mile Crenshaw/LAX light rail line, deeply polarizing residents along Crenshaw Boulevard. Many of them were concerned about gentrification, as well as the fact that a portion of the line would be built at grade, Councilmember Harris-Dawson told Curbed LA in 2019. “Folks were very, very upset,” he said. “Folks were like, ‘this is the African American community’s major street.’ In no other major street in Southern California does Metro build rail at grade.” Residents were concerned that the rail line’s construction would disrupt the streetscape, splitting it in two and resulting in less walkability.
Destination Crenshaw was born from a desire expressed by Crenshaw community and civic leaders to build an open-air “people’s museum” to call out the contributions of African Americans who built the region and present Crenshaw’s best features to those who may be passing through due to the rail line. Sankofa Park will feature permanent, site-specific installations of sculptures by internationally renowned artists Charles Dickson, Maren Hassinger, Artis Lane, and Kehinde Wiley.
Apart from the Sankofa bird, another symbol that inspired architects working on the design of the park was African Giant Star Grass. This grass, used as bedding on ships that transported enslaved people across the Middle Passage, followed the African diaspora all over the world and has shown great resiliency in inhospitable conditions. A design motif based on the plant’s horizontal rootstalks, or rhizomes, connects the project’s architecture, landscape, and interpretive design.
“West of the Mississippi, this is the largest intact African American community that’s been there for generations and generations,” Howard says. “It’s right there in South Los Angeles. How did this community get out there and thrive? The Giant Star Grass is native to the savannah of Africa’s west coast, but it thrived in this country. Metaphorically, it’s something that shouldn’t be there, but it is.”
"Unapologetically Black"
Gabrielle Bullock, FAIA, says that she has never worked on a project quite like Sankofa Park.
“They called the project, from the beginning, ‘unapologetically Black.’ As a Black architect, I can honestly say it was the first time I’ve had a client that was that specific,” she says, laughing. “This is a project about telling the stories of this community, not architects imposing stories or design on them that was unrelated to their experience.”
Sankofa Park is what Bullock calls the “northern anchor” of the Destination Crenshaw development, and it’s the largest of what will eventually grow to be five “pocket parks” along the 1.3-mile route. Each park will have a theme according to its size—“pass,” “gather,” or “linger.”
Bullock explains the extremely intentional choices behind the concrete and weathered steel used throughout the design of the park.
“It was important that the park look organic; new and old at the same time,” she says. “Now steel, as you know, will rust. This could not rust. This could never look dirty. It could never look old; it could never look less-than. This community is used to not being invested in and having secondhand stuff; shoddy stuff.” The steel is weathered for a four-month period before installation, ensuring that once it’s installed, its appearance won’t change.
According to Jason Foster, president and chief operating officer of Destination Crenshaw, the development of the community advisory council was organic, but also strategic. Community members like prominent Black art collector Joy Simmons and urban gardening proponent Ron Finley, known as the “Gangsta Gardener,” were eager to get involved and lend their expertise to the project. The rapper, philanthropist, and civic leader Nipsey Hussle was another early community partner before his death in 2019.
“You want to pull in people that have their own audience, have their own followings, but also have their own voice,” Foster says of prominent community members who helped with fundraising and boosted the project. “We had to really set the trajectory right.”
A New Aesthetic
The LA Metro’s Crenshaw-to-LAX K line is nearly complete, with just one section from the city’s Westchester neighborhood to the airport that has yet to be finished. Foster says that when the metro line was first announced in 2008, the 43 Black businesses facing the street were concerned that eight years of construction might eliminate their parking, their front door access, the trees along the street, and more.
“The ability to be hopeful about what’s coming was necessary,” he says. “Because without that, people feel like, ‘This change is not happening quick enough. It’s not happening for us.’ That’s what displaces people first before they move physically: It’s the mental resignation.”
“This project gave people an opportunity to hope and be aspirational about what’s coming next,” he continues. “‘How are we showing Crenshaw off to the people that will be taking this train?’ That’s where the name came from: It came from Nipsey Hussle saying, ‘Crenshaw is the destination.’”
Foster says that with the design of Sankofa Park and Destination Crenshaw as a whole, the goal is to build an entire economy around new visitors and new opportunities that is in line with the project’s unifying principle of “Growing Where You’re Planted”—calling back to the resilience of the African Giant Star Grass and the grounded optimism of the Sankofa bird.
“I’ve never worked on a project that brought so many aspects of our culture to the [work],” Howard says.
