Growing Up in LA When the Streets Were Changing for Real
People online act like LA froze in the 90s — like everyone born after ’94 was still ducking drive-bys before first period and living in a never-ending Boyz N The Hood cutscene. But if you were actually growing up here in the mid-to-late 2000s, you know that’s not the truth.
The energy didn’t disappear — it just shifted.
Less theatrical.
More human.
Still heavy, but in that quiet, everyday way the internet never sees.
When I was at Fremont from ’06 to ’10, living with my aunt on 74th and San Pedro, I saw the real shape of the neighborhood — not the caricature people online think they “research.” My aunt lived right across from that little 73GC-associated apartment cluster, but it wasn’t some sprawling, militant fortress. It was like 10–15 dudes who grew up together, hung out, blasted music, tagged the building sometimes…regular neighborhood presence. Real, but not mythical.
My walk to school wasn’t some action movie either — but it wasn’t innocent. Me and my homie Pete walked down San Pedro every morning. We got pressed more than a few times by dudes from the Mad Swan Bloods — 77th and 79th cliques — checking us for tatts, banging their street names on us even though they knew we weren’t gangbangers. Sometimes they’d try to recruit. Sometimes they were just doing too much. And there were the ugly run-ins with F13 members too.
But you know who never pressed us once?
73GC.
Not once.
People online swear they were some massive terror cell, but anyone from the area knows they were the smallest presence out of the gangs around Florence.
Because that era — the mid-2000s — was this strange aftershock period. The 80s crack wave and 90s retaliation cycles had scorched everything already. My generation inherited the smoke, not the fire. Gang life was still around, but it wasn’t at its fever pitch. It wasn’t cinematic. It was more like background radiation — present, shaping things, but woven into regular life.
And the identity piece?
It wasn’t Hollywood.
It wasn’t body counts.
It wasn’t a YouTube summary.
It was cultural. Familial. Geographic. The kind of thing you understood because you lived it, not because it was explained to you.
And then came the 2009 injunction.
People online treat that injunction like an album rollout. Like being named in there makes your set “legendary.” But anyone who lived through it knows there was nothing glamorous about that time.
It was fear.
It was curfews.
It was harassment.
It was parents stressing.
It was kids who couldn’t even stand outside without catching heat.
It wasn’t a badge of honor — it was the city labeling entire neighborhoods a nuisance.
And the wildest part?
The internet can’t even get the basics right.
The injunction wasn’t built around 73GC.
The main targets were Mad Swan Bloods and Florencia 13 — the big, established sets with numbers and deep history in the area. Everyone who lived in the Florence neighborhood knows that. That’s not “my opinion”; that’s what the community experienced.
73GC was listed, sure — but as a small, local set:
7-Trey Hustlers / Gangster Crips
(aka 7-Trey Hustlers, 73 Hustlers, 7-Trey Gangsters, 7-Trey Gangsta)
That’s it.
No legendary aliases.
No mythical “deadly movin gangster crips.”
No westside super-set.
Just the names people already knew, tied to a small hood that was present but never the neighborhood’s center of gravity.
And that brings me to the biggest internet rewrite of all:
the imaginary “Westside 73 Gangster Crips.”
If you actually lived in LA — walked these blocks, had family on both sides of the 110, knew who was where and why — you know that westside version never existed. Not in documentation. Not in history. Not in street reality. Maybe someone typed it once online, but it never materialized in the city itself.
So when an online-only group like WSDMGC73 pops up in 2025 trying to cosplay as some resurrected “legendary westside faction,” it’s disrespectful on a different level. Not because anyone’s defending gangs — but because they’re rewriting memories that don’t belong to them. They’re remixing trauma and neighborhood history into content.
Growing up in South LA then wasn’t lore.
It wasn’t an aesthetic.
It wasn’t a vibe for someone else’s rebrand.
It was kids walking to school hoping today wasn’t the day someone stopped them.
It was hearing older cousins talk about how bad the 90s really were.
It was knowing which blocks were tense and which ones were cool without ever needing a map.
It was families trying to raise kids while the city was still healing from decades of chaos.
So yeah — when people fabricate factions, glorify injunctions, or claim histories they never lived?
It hits different.
Because for the ones who were actually outside back then?
It’s not fanfiction.
It’s not content.
It’s not a blank page waiting to be rewritten.
It’s our childhood.
Our neighborhood.
Our lived reality.
And it’s not theirs to remix.