On a recent trip to the Inglewood Park Cemetery to visit my best friend Mike, I noticed that his tombstone was dirty.
I hadn’t come in a while, and apparently no one else had either. As I cleaned up, I surveyed the area around me. At 17, Mike was the youngest interred there by far. Most people buried nearby had at least reached their 40s by the time they died. Many, I realized as I looked at the dates, had been dead now longer than they were alive, their stories tracing back to different points in Inglewood’s past.
Beyond the cemetery, I was confronted by the rapidly gentrifying present of this place that raised Mike and me. Just across the street, where the old Daniel Freeman Hospital once stood, developers erected fancy condos way too expensive for the average Inglewood resident to afford. The skyline is now filled with new landmarks: SoFi Stadium, opened in 2020; the Forum, renamed in 2022, and now painted red, not the blue of my childhood; the Intuit Dome, the most recent addition, opened in 2024…