Canterbury Knolls is a South LA neighborhood bordered by Manchester Square, Morningside Circle and Vermont Knolls to the south, Hyde Park to the west, Chesterfield Square to the north, Vermont Square to the northeast, and Vermont-Slauson to the east.
For the estimated two dozen or so semi-regular readers of this blog, the way this works is clear.
Then I go there — often with my trusty sidekick, Shimbles. Then I attempt to explore the connections the area has to movies and music to keep it Amoeblog-relevant. And so, faced with more than two votes for Canterbury Knolls, Shimbles and I set out at the crack of noon to see what we could see in the fabled neighborhood. Preliminary internet research had proved mostly fruitless. Aside from a flame war between some internet gangstas on a 50 Cent message board and some girl’s Livejournal, I could find few firsthand acknowledgements of the neighborhood.
I couldn’t find any musicians associated with the neighborhood, nor any actors. Although the neighborhood shares initials with Citizen Kane, the only film I could find that was shot in the neighborhood the brutal, senseless beating of Reginald Denny at the hands of Damian Williams, Henry Watson, Antoine Miller, Gary Williams, Anthony Brown and Lance Parker during the LA Riots of ’92, filmed at the intersection of Florence and Normandie. There’s not much along that patch of Florence aside from Gabe Motors, which was packed with restored and waiting-to-be-restored vochos. I’m sure that there are aspiring and possibly practicing musicians, actors or filmmakers in the neighborhood, so if you live in Canterbury Knolls and have a connection to the entertainment business, make yourself heard.
The northern portion of the neighborhood, along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad, is much more industrialized and mostly comprised of large, aging warehouses. Many of the businesses around Slauson, which forms the northern edge of the neighborhood, are furniture manufacturers. In fact, it was either in or near Canterbury Knolls that I procured one of my couches.
The largest of the warehouses is the awesome, sprawling Slauson Super Mall – an enormous, 177,129 square foot swap meet where one can get their nails done, get one’s shine on, buy rainbow-colored everything, eat pupusas and Icees, and pick up a memorial tee of a recently passed black celebrity. Last time I came here I saw one for 60 Minutes‘ Ed Bradley. Not surprisingly, Michael Jackson is the favored subject for airbrush artists of the moment. It was shown in the video for Tupac’s “To Live and Die in LA.”
To vote for any communities you’d like to see covered in California Fool’s Gold, name them in the comments. If you’d like a bit of inspiration, there are primers for:
- Imperial County
- Kern County
- Los Angeles County
- Angeles Forest
- the Antelope Valley
- the Channel Islands
- Downtown
- the Eastside
- the Harbor
- Hollywood
- Mideast Los Angeles
- Midtown
- Northeast Los Angeles
- Northwest Los Angeles
- the Pomona Valley
- the San Fernando Valley
- the San Gabriel Valley
- the Santa Monica Mountains
- the South Bay
- South Los Angeles’s Eastside
- South Los Angeles’s Westside
- Southeast Los Angeles
- the Verdugos
- the Westside
- Orange County
- Riverside County
- San Bernardino County
- San Diego County
- San Luis Obispo County
- Santa Barbara County
- Ventura County
Eric Brightwell 
The home from Boyz n tha Hood is in Canterbury Knolls – 5900 block between Slauson and Hyde Park Blvd, a lot of the movie was filmed there. It’s a quiet neighborhood surrounded by some roughness. But, everyone is amazing and friendly and watches out for each other. I love living here.
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I included a bit about the Boyz n tha Hood in my piece about Chesterfield Square since it’s on the other side of the tracks. It’s good to hear that your experience there has been mostly positive. Both areas have a lot of charm.
‘From 1 October to 28 November, 1990 a film crew shot Boyz N the Hood in Chesterfield Square. The exterior of the Furious Styles character’s home is he home at 5918 Cimarron Street. Brandi’s house is 5906 Cimarron Street and the Baker home is at 5911 Cimarron. It was directed by John Singleton who at 23 was the youngest person ever nominated for a Best Director Oscar. Although it was preceded by 1988’s Colors, Boyz N the Hood and Menace II Society came to be seen as the quintessential examples of the “Hood film.”’
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