If you've heard that something new opened "at the Crenshaw mall" recently, the next question worth asking is which Crenshaw. Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, the enclosed shopping center on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard that's anchored the district since 1947, is currently a construction site. The former Sears building is coming down. What's actually open, drawing lines out the door and hosting three-on-three tournaments, sits a few blocks south on Slauson Avenue, at a different retail address entirely.
Both things are true at once, and they're easy to mix up if you only catch the headlines in passing. One is a finished project you can walk into today. The other is a seven-year plan that broke ground in March and won't deliver its first new buildings until 2029. Untangling which is which tells you more about what's actually changing on this stretch of Crenshaw than either story does on its own.
The Store That's Already Open
The Crenshaw Rec by Foot Locker opened its doors on Saturday, August 22, 2026, at 3222 W Slauson Ave, next to Dorset Village. It's a joint project between Foot Locker, Nike, Jordan Brand, and Converse, built with input from Crenshaw community leaders and, notably, The Marathon Brand, the streetwear label founded by Nipsey Hussle and his brother Samiel Asghedom.
The space is designed to function as more than a shoe store. It includes an open gym, an equipment room, creative workspaces, and a resource center running year-round programming, music academies, run clubs, barber shop cuts. There's a Crenshaw High School x Nike Team Shop collection you won't find at other Foot Locker locations, along with a capsule line from Los Angeles designer Gavin Mathieu of Supervsn Studios. The store also launched something called the Crenshaw Striper Program, a neighborhood hiring initiative tied directly to the location.
Asghedom's statement at launch made the connection to place explicit:
"This location is extremely important because we were raised in this shopping center. The restaurants, the record stores, the supermarkets, everything in the shopping center has played a role in shaping our childhood. Hussle sold mixtapes out of this parking lot."
Opening day included a Community Swap Meet and a 3v3 basketball tournament, open to the public from 10 a.m. until close. None of that happened at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza. It happened at Dorset Village, on Slauson, which is its own commercial strip with its own history in the neighborhood.
What's Actually Happening At The Mall Itself
Three blocks north, at 3650 W Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, the 42-acre Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza is mid-demolition. Ground broke on March 5, 2026, with Mayor Karen Bass, Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, and Councilmember Heather Hutt on site. The first phase tears down the former Sears building, its attached automotive center, and the surrounding parking lot to make way for 92 three-story townhomes along Santa Rosalia Drive, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, and Marlton Avenue. Danielian Associates designed the homes; Border handled the landscape plan. Ten percent of the units are reserved for households earning between 60 and 80 percent of the area median income.
That first phase isn't expected to finish before 2029. The full build-out, still five to seven years out from completion, calls for 961 apartments and condominiums, a 400-room hotel, an office tower, roughly 330,000 square feet of new retail, and close to 150,000 square feet of office space, a nearly 3-million-square-foot project with an estimated price tag around $1 billion. Harridge Development Group is leading it, working under a coordinating umbrella called the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza Partnership, alongside Access Industries, SilverPeak, and Atlas Development Group.
James Brumsfield, whose custom menswear shop has operated inside the mall for more than a quarter century, put it plainly when the dump trucks arrived: there's a change coming here. Whether that change lands the way the plans describe it is still an open question for some longtime residents. A coalition called Downtown Crenshaw, including a group of longtime women residents who call themselves the Grandmamas of Downtown Crenshaw, has pushed for years for community ownership of the site rather than private redevelopment, and made a $110 million offer for the property back in 2021 that didn't go through. Harridge bought the mall that same year for roughly $111 million.
What Hasn't Closed While The Dirt Moves
The demolition is happening in one corner of a much larger property, and most of what makes the mall functional day to day is still running.
- TJ Maxx remains the mall's last traditional department-store anchor, having outlasted Macy's, Sears, and Walmart's earlier tenancies at the site.
- The Cinemark Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza 15 and XD, originally opened in 1995 as the first Magic Johnson Theatres location, is still showing movies.
- A farmers market runs every Saturday on the property, according to the mall's own site.
None of that is scheduled to close as part of phase one. The construction is contained to the former Sears footprint and its parking structure, which is why the food court and the surviving retail corridor have kept their foot traffic even as bulldozers work a few hundred feet away.
Two Clocks On The Same Corridor
The useful way to hold both stories is by their timelines, not their locations. The Crenshaw Rec is finished. It opened, it hired locally through the Striper Program, and it's already hosting programming. If you're asking what's new to walk into this month, that's the answer, and it's on Slauson, not inside the mall.
The Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza redevelopment is the opposite kind of story. Nothing about it is finished, and nothing will be finished soon. The 92 townhomes are the first visible piece of a plan that stretches to the end of the decade, and the retail, hotel, and office components sit even further out. Watching for change at the mall right now means watching demolition, not ribbon cuttings.
A few blocks further north in Leimert Park, a restaurant called Ground Provisions has a city-declared opening date of October 1, 2026, at 4287 Crenshaw Blvd, planning an elevated comfort-food menu alongside a shared commercial kitchen for local food entrepreneurs. It's a separate project on a separate timeline from either the mall or Dorset Village, but it's one more sign that this half-mile of Crenshaw Boulevard is producing new activity in several places at once, not from a single source, and not on a single schedule.
That's the actual shape of change here right now. Not one project transforming the corridor, but several unrelated ones running in parallel, some finished, some barely started, some still being negotiated between the developer and the community that's watched this site change hands for two decades.
Evans Investment Group tracks how corridors like Crenshaw and Baldwin Hills evolve over multi-year redevelopment cycles, the kind of ground-level detail that matters when a mixed-use project like Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza starts reshaping what sits around a multifamily property. If you own or are evaluating an apartment building anywhere near this corridor and want to talk through what a project like this could mean for the block long term, reach out to the team anytime.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
