Stories Along Western, Inside the Making of “Legacies of Western Ave.”

This last month, KSP has been highlighting 6 businesses from Western Ave for our latest project, Legacies of Western Ave. or LOWA in short. 

In this project, we interviewed six Korean-American business owners about the history and changing landscape of owning and operating their small businesses on Western Avenue since the 1980s. This project builds on our K-Town Atlas, which is a collection of Digital story maps documenting the history, culture, and people of LA’s Koreatown and neighboring communities. 

Check out Legacies of Western Avenue here! 

In this episode, we want to give you all an inside look and speak with our KSP team who took part in making this project happen. The guests include our director Katherine Kim, project-interviewers Jonah lee and Jane Lee, and social media coordinator Janice Yun. We spoke about what Western Ave means to them, their experiences meeting the business owners, and the project’s impact online and with the store owners interviewed. 

Throughout the episode we will present snippets from our LOWA interviews. The interviews are all in Korean, but their translations are here: Legacies of Western Ave. Snippet Translations. 

 If you would like to know more about Legacies of Western, check out our website at koreatownstorytellingprogram.org. We will also like to thank every person who made this project possible. 

Credits

K-Town Atlas Project Director

Katherine Yungmee Kim

KYCC Project Lead

Shawn Kuk

KDI Project Lead

Jerome Chou

KDI Design Coordinator 

Ross Hansen

KDI Graphic Designer

Rachel Kim

K-Town Atlas ArcGIS Consultant

Miles Kim Parr

LOWA Writer, History of Western Avenue 

Cristina Teves

LOWA Interviewers

Jonah Lee, Jane Lee

LOWA Photographer

Emanuel Hahn

LOWA Videographer

Priscilla Lee

K-Town Atlas Project Coordinator

Dilan Askew

K-Town Atlas Audio Producer

Tony Morales

K-Town Atlas Social Media Coordinator

Janice Yun

LOWA Editors

Dilan Askew, Jonah Lee, Monica Negrete

LOWA Korean Proofreaders

Jonah Lee, Sehwa Yoon

LOWA Spanish Proofreaders

Monica Negrete, Ana Sofia Rodriguez

KSP High School Interns

Lazar Johnson, Melany Robles, Jun Suh