Week 2: Centralia Street and Durkheim

As promised last week, this weeks post focuses upon an area that is fairly close to where I grew up. To this day I still spend quite a bit of time in this area and it has been interesting to watch the character of a couple of the intersections here change over the years.

            Located at the intersection of Pioneer Blvd and Centralia Street in Lakewood, the businesses on two of the four corners here haven’t changed very much over the last twenty years. The car wash on the southwest corner, owned and operated by an immigrant Armenian family, looks exactly the same as it has since it opened in the early 1990’s.

            Across the street on the northwest corner a few things have changed since I was a child, but the feel of this shopping center remains the same. The donut shop, Laundromat, carniceria, and liquor store have all been there since before I was born. The only real change here is that a pet shop used to stand where the beauty salon and gift shop now are.

            Now on the other side of the street is where things start to get interesting. This image here is the northeast corner of the intersection. This part of Los Angeles County was mostly farming until the late 50’s into the early 60’s. As a result of this legacy, there are several drive through dairies in this area that still operate to this day. What makes this one unique however is that it has been operated by a Korean family since the late 80’s.

            The southeast corner, pictured above, is where the most dramatic change has occurred. This shopping center was notable for its pizza parlor, Ciro’s Pizza, up until it closed in 2003. Beginning in the mid nineties, several Korean businesses began to move into this shopping center. Currently, there are three Korean restaurants at this shopping center, one of which is an all you can eat Korean barbecue occupying the former site of Ciro’s Pizza. One particularly peculiar business here is a Korean recording studio. It occupies the site where a very popular Korean PC bang (internet café) used to be before it was shut down by the city for being a public nuisance.

            This intersection is complemented by another intersection about a mile and a half east, which has gone through a similar transition over the last 5 years.

            This is the southeast corner of Norwalk Boulevard and Centralia Street. This Korean restaurant, Pine Tree, was formerly a very popular Mexican restaurant named La Casa Margarita. Nearby is another Korean barbecue, which used to be a run of the mill burger joint.

            Across the street on the northeast corner is a Tae Kwon Do gym. Interestingly, this shopping center has several businesses catering to the local Muslim community, including two halal restaurants and a halal butcher.

            This church is located between these two intersections. Several different ethnic communities use this building for their worship services. This sign hasn’t been updated in years, but it is my understanding that in addition to the advertised English, Spanish and Korean services, Tagalog worship services have recently begun here.  

            Over the last week and a half I have been thinking a lot about the work of Emile Durkheim and what he had to say about the division of labor, and mechanical versus organic solidarity. Though often thought of in purely economic terms, Durkheim argued that the division of labor transcended materialism and was a response “to enable us to live in the new conditions of existence created for us.” (Durkheim 1893) Also, Durkheim was very concerned with how societies and communities remain cohesive. He developed a differentiation between communities that were largely homogenous, and societies that showed more pluralistic tendencies. Homogenous societies were described as having mechanical solidarity, whereas the more pluralistic ones were descriptive of organic solidarity.

            Walking through this neighborhood I very much got the sense that this is an area where there is a very high level of organic solidarity between the people. I think the signs at the church are perhaps the best visual representations of this that I could find. The idea that four different cultural groups are able to share the same sacred space is pretty remarkable, especially when one considers how different they are from each other. One could also argue that the division of labor in the “Durkheimian” sense is also in play here at this institution as each group has their own set of ecclesiastic leaders.  These different congregations do not really compete with each other for parishioners, and their existence and utilization of this one spot is largely due to logistics. As such, the compromise appears to be borne out of a need for each group to be able to come together separately, not out of some larger materialistic motive.

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Emile Durkheim: “The Causes [of the Division of Labor]” from The Division of Labor in Society (1893)