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Gardena baker Ik Soo Kim used to drive to Koreatown near downtown Los Angeles for the football-size Korean radish and cabbage needed to make kimchi, a spicy vegetable dish that has long been a staple of the Korean diet.
Now, all he has to do is walk across the street to a recently opened shopping center on Rosecrans and Van Ness avenues, where there is a supermarket, a video rental shop, clothing stores and businesses-all catering to the South Bay's growing Korean community.
"I don't have any reason to go to Koreatown these days," Kim said.
There is good reason why Kim and others no longer have to look outside the South Bay for items sought by Korean-Americans.
The Korean population in the South Bay more than doubled from 1980 to 1990, growing to 13,591 according to census figures, and with the increase came an influx of Korean businesses, schools and churches. There is a radio station broadcasting 14 hours of Korean-language programming from Redondo Beach, a one-inch-thick telephone directory exclusively devoted to the area's estimated 2,000 Korean businesses, and a local Korean-language newspaper and magazine that supplement two Korean daily newspapers in Los Angeles.
And as the South Bay's Korean community grows, its leaders are learning from various difficulties experienced by Koreans in Los Angeles, where conflicts between merchants and the African-American community caused rifts between leaders of the two groups. The South Bay Korean Chamber of Commerce is helping Korean-speaking merchants to overcome the language barrier, and Inglewood's Korean store owners have participated in meetings with city officials aimed at preventing the sorts of conflicts that occurred in Los Angeles.
Torrance has the largest concentration of Koreans in the South Bay, with almost 6,000 residents. But it is Gardena, with its established Asian population, middle-class base and more affordable commercial land, that has become the area's business center.
"Nobody can forecast the future, but all the signs are there" for a Koreatown to take shape in Gardena, said Peter Kim, a real estate broker and secretary general of the South Bay Korean Chamber of Commerce. Such a center would be the third major Korean business district in Los Angeles and Orange counties, complementing those in Los Angeles' Koreatown and Garden Grove.
Although...