The northeast Los Angeles neighborhood thrived throughout the prewar period, when many of the landmarks that now define Highland Park — including the Highland Theater and the Highland Park Masonic Temple — were built. In the 1950s, the rise of the suburbs saw the beginning of a period of transition for the neighborhood, with Highland Park becoming an important center of Latino life in Los Angeles. Though a cause for celebration when it opened in 1940, construction of the Arroyo Seco Parkway—America's first freeway—sped up Highland Park's gradual decline. Reduced to "drive-over" country connecting two distinct political powers—Pasadena and Los Angeles—the area struggled to retain its own identity. Channelization of the Arroyo Seco further accelerated the transformation of the area from suburban Eden to an inner-city enclave.
Paradoxically, Highland Park was fading as more and more people arrived to the city. The population of Los Angeles in 1900 was 100,000. By 1930 it was over one million and growing. Many of these new arrivals had come to California looking for a paradise that was advertised to them in newspapers, books and idyllic scenes from motion pictures. African-Americans from the South had come looking for opportunity and fair treatment. The civil war in Mexico drove a large number of immigrants north through the 1910s and 1920s, many settling near downtown to take advantage of available jobs and transportation. During the 1930s the number of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles decreased due to mass deportations carried out by government authorities, all without due process. But Latinos were nonetheless establishing themselves in areas such as Chavez Ravine and neighborhoods east of the Los Angeles River.
As early as the 1920s, the predominantly white residents of Highland Park began looking to other areas of Los Angeles for housing. As new neighborhoods developed and transportation became more available to the west, residents began moving to areas such as the Mid-Wilshire district, which offered both new housing stock (humble and magnificent) and thriving commercial districts. After World War II, this westward drift became a full-on exodus of Anglo middle-class families out of communities like Highland Park and into the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys. This in turn left housing in Highland Park to Mexican-Americans and working-class whites.
Real estate developers and property owners eager to maximize cheap rentals in the area subdivided large Victorian and craftsman homes, or razed them completely in favor of multi-unit housing and commercial strip malls. The once-thriving Figueroa commercial corridor lost much of its prominence as the trolley and foot traffic that had once supported diminished due the opening of the Arroyo Seco Parkway. Traffic now moved up and down the Parkway between Los Angeles and Pasadena at 40mph, with Highland Park reduced to being an off-ramp sign.
During the 1950s and '60s, Mexican-American working-class families continued to increase in numbers while whites moved out to newer, homogenous communities. This white flight occurred not only in Highland Park, but was seen in many of Los Angeles' original and older neighborhoods. As white middle-class families moved to the suburbs, resources moved with them, leaving their old neighborhood in slow decline. After the advent of the freeways, waves of white flight enabled many Latino families to make what they regarded as a step up from East Los Angeles to Highland Park, for example.
Today, Highland Park is one of the epicenters of gentrification in Los Angeles. Not so long ago it was an unassuming, mildly depressed, Latino-majority suburb with a string of mom-and-pop style businesses along its two major thoroughfares — York Boulevard and Figueroa Street. Now, or certainly pre-pandemic, it is a place of spiraling rents, designer Craftsman cottage renovations, bars, restaurants and playfully curated boutiques catering not to anyone’s basic needs but to shopping as recreation. Highland Park is also home to a groundswell of anti-gentrification activism, emboldened by but predating BLM protests. Vandalization of hipster stores and restaurants in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood is nothing new. Being named “The Hottest Neighborhood of 2013” by Redfin might well have been the death knell. Now, gentrification has become synonymous with white supremacy.
Like other fast-changing neighborhoods, Highland Park has not always been able to accommodate the new without displacing the established. As one blogger puts it: "Working-class communities are often built around interdependence on one another, gentrification redesigns the neighborhood around capital. Communal spaces are re-imagined into commercial spaces, homes which were once upheld as places for families are now upheld only by how much they can profit investors. As the demographic forcefully changes from proletarian to rich, brown or black to white, renter to homeowner, the sense of home starts to disappear as bourgeois newcomers seldom acknowledge the previous residents or the culture they’ve already established."