When a strip mall becomes a symbol: At Nipsey Hussle’s Marathon Clothing, thousands pay last respects in procession

Nipsey Hussle’s black Jaguar is still sitting outside his The Marathon Clothing store.

As mourning fans payed final respects during a funeral procession that snaked through South-Central L.A. Thursday, the dozen-spot strip mall parking lot where the rapper and entrepreneur was gunned down last Sunday turned into a towering symbol of how much he meant to the surrounding community.

A crowd of at least 5,000 people stood along Slauson Avenue at Crenshaw in the afternoon hours just to get a glimpse of the silver hearse carrying Hussle’s body. Fans threw flowers and yelled ‘We love you Nipsey’ as the car draped in flowers portraying an Eritrean flag, the East African country where his father immigrated from, inched past.

A crowd of hundreds of fans had been around since the early morning, both mourning a lost icon with prayers and candles while celebrating with booze and music. Many were from the neighborhood, people who have met Hussle and watched his ascent. Others came from as far as New York, Philadelphia and Las Vegas.

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The procession was making its way through various landmarks where Hussle lived and worked after leaving a three-hour Staples Center memorial service towards a Crenshaw funeral home.

While waiting for the hearst to arrive at one point, the growing crowd frantically dispersed after sounds of mylar balloons popping on an electrical line were mistaken for gunshots. Minor injuries were incurred.

A similar scenario had taken place at the same site during a vigil held soon after Hussle’s death, which later turned out to be actual gunfire injuring two people.

For Hussle’s fans, there is a certain tragic irony to this spot where Hussle rose from selling CDs out of the trunk of his car as a young musician to owning the place and opening businesses in the strip mall parking lot. Councilmember Marqueese Harris-Dawson said Tuesday he hopes to rename the intersesction Nipsey Hussle Square.

Hussle could have easily left the rough neighborhood of his childhood once his career took off, say listeners who have followed his music for years, but instead he stuck around and became a generous and thoughtful pillar of the Crenshaw community. Then he was shot and killed in that very same parking lot.

“It went from him and his brother selling shirts, police harassing them, and then to owning the whole thing. It’s kinda eery how everything came in full circle here. It hurts, and I don’t think we’ll ever get over it,” said Ashley Carter, 21, who grew up in the neighborhood.

Jay Johnson, who acted as one of the leading organizers of the parking lot memorial since the early morning, said that he considered this parking lot to Nipsey Hussle “the same as the staircase to where John Lennon was killed.”

Hussle, born Ermias Joseph Asghedom, grew up in South L.A. in the 1990s and made no secret of his early life as a member of the Rollin’ 60s Crips gang clique. Bandanas, balloons and candles the color blue were a common sight outside The Marathon Store.

The rapper and father of two had never have had a breakout hit, but he had recently released his first official studio album Victory Lap with management from Jay-Z’s Roc Nation on Atlantic Records, earning him a Grammy nomination. In February he was featured on a GQ spread with his actress fiancee Lauren Hilton.

After his career took off, Hussle was known to donate to local schools, give jobs to residents in this neighborhood struggling to get by, and get involved in projects like the Destination Crenshaw arts project. He had recently opened a co-working space called Vector 90 in the Crenshaw district aiming to get more underrepresented communities in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields.

This legacy of reinvestment in his community was demonstrated in that strip mall and its surrounding businesses. Ashley Martin of the family-owned Woody’s Bar-B-Q said that Hussle was often around, always ordering the sliced beef, mac and cheese and hot wings over the phone using his given name ‘Ermias.’

“It’s trauma here. You see stuff like what happened to Nip, but it rarely hits this close to home,” she said. “For it to happen to someone who did so much good to the community is just so hard, and that’s why you see all these people here. But when all the hype is gone and none of this is out here, will it continue?”

Zimam Alemenew is a longtime fan of Hussle from New York, who connected to the rapper’s east African roots as an Ethiopian American. She organized his NYC vigil. She said his death at this store “is probably the most heartbreaking thing.”

While some former gang members would leave South L.A. for their own safety and buy a house in Calabasas, he chose the opposite. “He didn’t see being here as a risk, he saw it as a way to blossom his neighborhood.”