A small park with a fountain and iron entrance arch faces a block of storefronts under a Spanish Colonial Revival theater tower.
What Leimert Park looks like
Leimert Park's commercial core is one block. , with a fountain behind a wrought iron entrance arch, faces a row of storefronts on Degnan Boulevard and 43rd Street. A 115 foot steel framed tower rises at the corner, its Spanish Colonial Revival face spelling out VISION down the front in vertical letters.
The storefronts below run single story, stucco fronts under fabric awnings, their signs hand lettered over doors that open straight onto the sidewalk. Several storefront walls carry murals of jazz musicians and civil rights figures. A block over on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, two story Spanish style apartment buildings carry red tile roofs and arched doorways. Transfiguration Catholic Church rises among them with a stucco bell tower beside its tiled sanctuary roof.
Palm trees line Leimert Boulevard, rising well above the rooftops on either side. Glass canopied stairways lead down to the K Line's Leimert Park and Martin Luther King Jr. stations, both underground, a block from the park. Metro Rapid buses stop where Vernon Avenue meets Crenshaw Boulevard, a chain link park fence running along the sidewalk under an apartment tower.
Degnan Boulevard is home to a jazz and poetry workshop space and a media arts center with its door often propped open. A shuttered storefront near the corner still has a bookstore's red lettering in the window.
Shot in Leimert Park
Leimert Park mostly plays itself on screen. Collateral used the jazz club at 4333 Leimert Boulevard in 2004, where the hitman meets his second target. White Men Can't Jump staged its climactic tournament in the Village in 2023, and a 2021 flashback for Apple TV+'s Truth Be Told turned Leimert Plaza Park 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
On location throughout the Village
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
Played a 1985 Oakland street, Oakland, California, 1985
The production built a bus stop, a record store and a repair shop in Leimert Plaza Park, dressed as a 1985 Oakland street for the second season of the Apple TV+ series. A protest by the Africa Town Coalition disrupted the shoot, and the production moved to Pasadena the next day.
What Leimert Park can double for
Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, Georgia
Auburn Avenue's two and three story brick storefronts went up in the same commercial era as a self sufficient, Black owned business district. Barbershops, insurance offices and restaurants once lined the sidewalk in storefronts close to this scale. Auburn Avenue's buildings run a story taller and the street is wider, with a rail line and modern towers behind the block, so a tight storefront frame holds the comparison better than a wide shot. Try searching brick storefronts district now.
Church Park anchors the east end of Beale Street, and the Streamline Moderne New Daisy Theatre stands several blocks away on the same street. Each piece on its own, a small city park and a 1930s theater front, is close to Leimert Park's scale, though the two do not sit across from each other the way they do at Leimert Plaza Park. The park and the theater cannot be framed together in one shot the way they can in Leimert Park, since they are several blocks apart on Beale Street. Shoot the park entrance and the theater front as separate setups. Try searching Streamline Moderne theater now.
