May 1959: Seven years before Silver Lake's Black Cat Riot and ten before New York's Stonewall riots, a group of drag queens and hustlers clashed with LAPD officers at Cooper Do-nuts (also often referred to as Cooper's Doughnuts or Cooper's Donuts) usually considered to be the first gay uprising in modern history.
Before nearby Broadway arose as Los Angeles's premier theater district (around the 1920s), most of the nickelodeons and theaters were along Main Street -- two blocks east. In the 1930s and '40s, Downtown declined when Jews -- shunned from the downtown protestant establishment, moved their residences, businesses and investments to Hollywood, Midtown, and the Westside. Other "not-quite-whites" moved east and to the Valley when the exclusionary definition of all important "whiteness" grew slightly broader.
In the 1950s, the mainstream view was that Downtown was dead. The reality was rather different. Bunker Hill continued to bustle with life. Thousands of the city's poor continued to sleep on the streets and in residential hotels around Skid Row and the Historic Core. Latinos turned Broadway into a busy shopping street and foreign cinema scene. Gays and other "subversives" found a degree of refuge in "seedy" city center.