A 1930s theater tower faces a block of storefronts around a small park that has hosted the city's Black arts scene for decades.
What Leimert Park looks like
Leimert Park's center is one block, facing a row of storefronts on Degnan Boulevard and 43rd Street, with a theater tower rising over the corner. Walter H. Leimert began the subdivision in 1928. The Olmsted Brothers, sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, drew up its plan. That plan is why the block is a planned civic space rather than an ordinary intersection. The city designated it Historic Leimert Park Village in 2018.
The theater opened as the Leimert Theatre in 1932 and ran as a movie house until 1968. Jehovah's Witnesses bought it in 1977 and renamed it the Watchtower. Actress Marla Gibbs bought the theater in 1990 and renamed it the . She lost it to foreclosure in 1997, and the city took it over. A restoration that began in 2011 reopened the theater this August.
Degnan Boulevard is where the neighborhood's Black arts scene grew up around that corner. Billy Higgins and Kamau Daaood opened the World Stage as a jazz and poetry workshop in 1989. is a media arts center that filmmaker Ben Caldwell founded five years earlier. It has hosted Project Blowed's Thursday night hip hop open mic since 1994, often called the longest running one in the world. Eso Won Books sat on the same block from 1988 until it closed in 2022, the year after Publishers Weekly named it Bookstore of the Year.
The park itself has hosted a drum circle and other gatherings since the 1980s. The K Line's Leimert Park and Martin Luther King Jr. stations opened nearby in 2022, the neighborhood's first stop on the Metro system.
Films shot in Leimert Park
Leimert Park usually plays itself on screen. In 2021, a flashback scene for Apple TV+'s Truth Be Told turned into 1985 Oakland instead.
Insecure, 2018
The HBO series' episode "Fresh-Like" has Issa meet Nathan at a taco stand. They walk through Leimert Park and pass Eso Won Books on Degnan Boulevard.
Leimert Park, 2021
Creator and director Mel Jones has said that almost every building used in the BET+ series was a real, Black owned business in the neighborhood. Some scenes drew on local history, including Ava DuVernay's own history performing as a rapper in Leimert Park and Kendrick Lamar visiting to hear local artists.
Truth Be Told, 2021
The production built a bus stop, a record store and a repair shop in . The set was meant to be a 1985 Oakland street, where two characters reunite 35 years later, for the second season of the Apple TV+ series. The shoot was disrupted by protests over the park's closure to the neighborhood's homeless population during the pandemic, and the production moved to Pasadena.
What Leimert Park can double for
Leimert Park can stand in for 1985 Oakland in Truth Be Told.
