This is an introductory page for one of my jekyll or wordpress powered pages I’ll be blogging about the city of Wilmington, California. I’m going to do some soft launch pages on my technical posts until I can get a good lift of my site (and maybe portal) through the duration of the summer.

Welcome to Wilmington, California. Neighboring visitors like myself used to avoid Wilmington since its inception of violence and pollution gripped the Los Angeles neighborhood at the latter three decades of the 20th Century. Wilmington was rich with a glorious past as the harbor gateway to the Pacific that transformed into an ugly and violent industrial hinterland.

I occasionally stayed at my relatives’ house at the Hawaiian Avenue Housing Projects by the waterfront. I think it was 1985 or 86 when I was a kid. That part of wilmington was a honeypot of violence. The Waterfront Crips defended their turf against a bunch of surrounding gangs in the South Bay. When Scottsdale and Tortilla Flats from neighboring Carson came over, somebody would be dead on arrival. Staying with my aunt at the projects, she’d tell me some comfortable lie of gunshots as lit firecrackers. It’s the best she can do to shield the violent apparition surrounding me, but being 6 years old in Wilmington on a summer afternoon, that would be believeable if a cholo pointing his gun away from the living window was the equivalent of on-screen entertainment. At 7 o’clock, Her family prays to God for protection every night; that holy cloak somehow worked before she moved out three years later.

For two decades Wilmington was one of the most violent neighborhoods of Los Angeles rivaling that of Highland Park, Echo Park, Boyle Heights, Leimert Park, and South Central LA. That’s just the listing of comprables in Los Angeles’ proper borders without including the City of Compton and Lynwood. 1992 was the apex of LA Homicides approaching close to 2,600 killings in the year of the LA riots. Bundle the anarchic environment of Los Angeles with a crippling recession and a slew of earthquakes, those with the money left the city and the poor was left behind to endure the garbagescape. My friends and family moved out of Wilmington for their safety and sanity. Wilmington was treated like a diseased bastard child by it’s parent city of Los Angeles and the surrounding neighbors of the South Bay.

I came back to see what happened to Wilmington in 2015. Wilmington looks clean. The familliar stores and street corners are still the same. There’s more mural art in buildings than grafiti scribing territorial dominance of a number of Wilmington’s gang culture of the past. The old Hawaiian Avenue Projects is torn down and re-built with a cluster of nice and modern-style town homes and condominiums for low-income families adjacent to the newly built waterfront park. Wilmington doesn’t look like a total shithole it once was, but surrounded by the ports of Los Angeles and Oil Refineries from Carson, the air is still stifiling to breathe on hot and humid days.

I’m dedicating this website to write about my experiences in Wilmington. There’s things to explore here given my perspective of the town from it’s northern neighbor from the city of Carson. It’s been almost 20 years since I went to a Banning High football game since they played against their hated rival and my alma-mater of the north, Carson High Colts. Two decades flew by, a lot has changed in my life. The city of Carson is transforming into a “destination city”, really it’s just being gentrified as I write. With exception of the Waterfront Park and the re-built Hawaiian Avenue Projects, Wilmington hasn’t changed.

This is my twice weekly stories about the working-class city untouched by a wave of Gentrification sweeping the Los Angeles cityscape.

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