Our History

In 1897, The Los Angeles Golf Club established a 9-hole course called the Windmill Links at Pico and Alvarado Street. The organizers moved west in 1899, and the club moved to the corner of Pico and Western. Properties were developed between the 1910s through the 1930s.The golf course remained there until 1910, at which time it moved to Holmby Hills.

Although initially segregated, barriers to the community fell as celebrated and affluent African Americans from professional, judicial, legal, medical, religious, and entertainment fields discovered the area. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) which struck down racial exclusionary covenants, Country Club Park was one of the first affluent neighborhoods in Los Angeles to allow blacks to purchase homes.

Among the music industry icons who once resided in Country Club Park were gospel great Mahalia Jackson, Lou Rawls, Lena Horne, Cindy Birdsong of the Supremes, and Hattie McDaniel, who was also known for her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind.

Religious leader Thomas Kilgore—also an esteemed and influential force in the Civil Rights movement—made Country Club Park his home, as did Civil Rights leader and Tuskegee Airman Celes King. Legal icon Crispus Wright, who endowed his law school at USC with $2 million to establish a scholarship fund, was a neighbor, as was Victor Nickerson, whose family founded the first black-owned insurance company. ​

 

Other Country Club Park notables include restaurateur Alex Perino, celebrated for his Wilshire Boulevard hot spot for Hollywood celebs of the ‘30’s through the ‘50’s, “Memory Professor” Arthur Bornstein, founder of the highly successful school of Memory Training, and Borden Milk Company executive Isaac Milbank.
The Country Club Park Neighborhood Association was founded in 1985 and the neighborhood was approved in 2010 as a Historical Preservation Overlay Zone, and to this day remains a vibrant resource in the community.

Country Club Park Neighbors of Note