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The Phillips Music Company was a music store in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, that operated from 1935 to 1989.[1] It was situated at 2455 Brooklyn Avenue. The store was run by musician William "Bill" Phillips[2], who was born in 1910 as William Isaacs. It was a store of many parts:[3] it sold records, sheet music, an assortment of instruments, radios, televisions, electronic appliances, phonographs, and at one point in time even sporting goods. The store brought music to a community populated with Japanese, Mexican, and Jewish Americans. The store introduced its own soundtrack to a world not yet familiar with multiculturalism. This introduction allowed the outside community to create their own music, introducing a homogeneous world to multiculturalism over the airwaves.[promotion?][citation needed]
The Remembrance
editIn 1936, Bill Phillips opened the Phillips Music Company storefront[4] in Boyle Heights on Brooklyn Avenue in a spot that is now part of Cesar Chavez Avenue.[5] The store became the local hangout for the outside community, of many cultural backgrounds. Aside from household appliances, the store carried a wide array of instruments and records in Latin jazz, classical rock, Cuban mambo, and Yiddish swing.[6]
Boyle Heights was the poster neighborhood of democracy, because of its diversity lasting from the 1930s through the 1940s.[6][5] The community children who were Japanese, Jewish, and Spanish would go to the store for hours and create music together in one of the small recording booths that were available in the store, test instruments, listen to music and just hangout. It was a Jewish-Mexican-Japanese musical utopia.[6][promotion?]
Bill Phillips wanted to help the community of Boyle Heights through the resource that was the Phillips Music Company. He would often give free lessons and donate instruments to local school music programs. Bands like Los Lobos were some of the children who were able to foster their talents in the Phillips Music Store. The store was able to help foster a unique sound that rang of a Japanese, Mexican, and Jewish harmony.[promotion?]
At the close of World War II, the Jewish communities and stores started moving out of Boyle Heights and into other Los Angeles neighborhoods, but the Phillips Music Store remained until it closed in 1989.[6]
The commemoration of the Philips Music Store continues into the present. On a midsummer's night in August 2011, a performance titled "A night at the Phillips Music Company" was held at Bunker Hill's California Plaza to pay homage to Boyle Heights multicultural legacy.[7]
The performances included bands like Little Willie G., Ollin, Ruben Guevera, Eastside Luvers, Hiroshima, La Santa Cecilia, and Ceci Bastida, demonstrating the multicultural permeance the Phillips Music Store created.[7]
Demographic change
editThe Phillips Music Company was located in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, an area known for its diversity, including Jews, Latinos, (mainly Chicanos), Yugoslav (Serbian and Croatian) immigrants, Portuguese people, and Japanese Americans living in the neighborhood from 1920 through the 1960s.[8]
By 1940, the Boyle Heights population consisted of about 35,000 Jewish Americans, 15,000 Mexican Americans, and 5,000 Japanese Americans.[3]
As of 2011, the diverse population of Boyle Heights is a community where 95% of the population is Latino and Hispanic.[9]
Following the demographic shift from a diverse heterogeneous community to a community boasting of racial homogeneity, the Phillips Music Company closed its doors in 1989.
The hub of multiculturalism it fostered, through the invention of music by a diverse community, can be heard in the music of the present in local bands like Los Lobos, Thee Midniters, and Ollin.[10] This sound of multiculturalism the Phillips Music Company fostered continues to exist despite the store's closure.[11]
References
edit- ^ Tobar, Hector (December 9, 2011). "Boyle Heights, Melting Pot; For Bruce Phillips, Whose Father Ran a Music Shop, it Wasn't White Flight that Tore Apart the Neighborhood Where he Grew Up. it was Economics". Los Angeles Times. ProQuest 909867131.
- ^ Phillips, Bruce (November 8, 2024). "Bill Phillips, owner of Phillips Music Company, Boyle Heights, California". California Revealed. Retrieved November 8, 2024.[dead link] Alt URL
- ^ a b Zuckerman, Bruce (2012). Beyond Alliances: The Jewish Role in Reshaping the Racial Landscape of Southern California. Vol. 9. Purdue University Press. pp. 33–39. ISBN 9781557536235.
- ^ "A look back at the Boyle Heights melting pot". Los Angeles Times. December 9, 2011. Retrieved October 5, 2019.
- ^ a b Totten, Sanden (August 23, 2011). "The Phillips Music Store, where Jewish and Mexican music mixed". 89.3 KPCC: The Voice of Southern California. Retrieved October 5, 2019.
- ^ a b c d Johnson, Reed (August 2011). "A Morsel of Boyle Heights History". Los Angeles Times. ProQuest 885453219.
- ^ a b Brook, Vincent (2013). "A Cultural History of Los Angeles". Land of Smoke and Mirrors. Rutgers University Press. p. 240. ISBN 9780813554563. JSTOR j.ctt5hjck3.
- ^ Kalin, Betsy (December 5, 2017). "East LA Interchange: A Documentary Exploration of Boyle Heights". Kalfou. 4 (2). doi:10.15367/kf.v4i2.167. ProQuest 2017375628.
- ^ "Boyle Heights". Mapping L.A. Retrieved October 4, 2019.
- ^ Blanton, Carlos Kevin (March 8, 2016). A Promising Problem: The New Chicana/o History. University of Texas Press. ISBN 9781477310120.
- ^ Phillips, Bruce A. (July 2014). "From the Ends of the West: My Jewish Demographic Narrative". Contemporary Jewry. 34 (2): 125–146. doi:10.1007/s12397-014-9123-0. JSTOR 43547319. S2CID 144405488. ProQuest 1655731308.