When the Watts Happening Cultural Center opened its doors in 1970, it became a hub of artistic activity filled with music, dance, theater, and literature.
Actors Eartha Kitt, Raymond St. Jacques, Roger E. Mosley, William Marshall, and Paula Kelly taught classes. Dancer Marge Champion served on the board of directors and built a dance floor so that kids weren’t practicing on concrete. Author Budd Schulberg created the Watts Writers Workshop that used the Cultural Center for classes. There were courses in modeling, sewing, fencing, set construction, sculpting, art history, and drama. There was a preschool, choir, and rock-and-roll group.
The restrained Modernist building housed the influential Mafundi Institute, which celebrated Black art and artists, and a small café that would later become the Watts Coffee House. Designed by prominent Black architects and civil rights leaders Arthur Silvers and Robert Kennard, it featured on its facade the proudly unrestrained Mafundi mural by artist Elliott Pinkney proclaiming, “Power Unity Love Peace.”
The Mafundi Institute closed in 1975, but the building continued to house important non-profit community services, a credit union, and schools. In the 1990s the Watts Coffee House opened to some fanfare, with memorabilia on its walls celebrating Black artists, musicians, and community members, and serving as the only full-service restaurant in Watts.
But in 2019 the City of LA decided the building was ripe for redevelopment, and in 2020 issued a request for proposals for new uses for the site. Fearing the loss of a precious cultural landmark, the community organized to preserve it, led by Father Amde Hamilton, a member of the Watts Prophets, an influential group of poets and musicians. The neighborhood reached out to Rita Cofield for help.
Cofield grew up just outside of Watts. She had gotten a bachelor’s degree in architecture and planning at Howard University and was acquiring a master’s in heritage conservation at USC.
“They knew my background and what I was studying and that I was part of the community,” Cofield says of the activists who called on her. “I was asked to attend a Neighborhood Council meeting where city council staff said that the building had no historical significance, but I knew that it was identified in SurveyLA.”
SurveyLA, a partnership between Getty and the City of LA to inventory and map L.A.’s historic sites, had identified the building’s cultural and architectural significance in its citywide inventory several years earlier.
From 2010 to 2017, SurveyLA conducted field surveys throughout the entire city—more than 880,000 legal parcels in almost 500 square miles. It identified places of social importance, architecturally significant buildings, historic districts, bridges, parks, gardens, streetscapes, and more.
To make the SurveyLA data easily accessible and useful, in 2015 Getty and the City of LA then created HistoricPlacesLA, a website that allows people to see the historic resources in their community. Type in “Mafundi Institute” in historicplacesLA.org, and you’ll see how the site qualifies as an historic resource.
Cofield’s effort to save the Watts Happening Cultural Center was successful. The combination of an effective nomination, community support, and the SurveyLA data about its significance proved too powerful to ignore. The City of LA declared the site a Historic-Cultural Monument, and the redevelopment proposal has been shelved for now.
But SurveyLA and HistoricPlacesLA also revealed a sobering fact: fewer than 3 percent of LA’s historic sites tell the story of Black life in L.A. In response, the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) and the City of LA Office of Historic Resources recently launched the African American Historic Places Project to identify and preserve landmarks that tell Black stories.
Cofield was asked to help lead the project, and she joined the GCI last March to focus on it. “One of our goals is to nominate 10 historic resources, and also to look for the explicit and implicit bias in preservation practices that could contribute to such inequity,” she says. The project’s current task is to create an advisory committee to help prioritize nominations.
“We need to bring the community into the conversation about its heritage,” she says. “We’re trying to give the community more of a voice in what they deem important, give them strategies to preserve, protect, and highlight what matters to them. Historic preservation is not just about architecture. It’s about stories and neighborhoods. The stories create places that matter.”
