Prairie Avenue may carry the crowds now. Market Street carries memory.
Downtown Inglewood’s Market Street is valuable to Be Inglewood because it tells a story the stadium district cannot. City planning policy specifically identifies Market Street between Regent Street and Hillcrest Avenue as an area where historic fabric and sense of place should be maintained. That makes it more than a convenient road through downtown. It is part of how the city understands its own historic core.
The street also works as a walking-scale counterpoint to the region’s giant venues. SoFi Stadium, Intuit Dome and Kia Forum are built around tens of thousands of people arriving for an event. Market Street is experienced storefront by storefront.
Start the food story with Woody’s Bar-B-Que. The family business dates to 1975, and Rodney Phillips says he opened its Inglewood location in 1995. Current local coverage still treats the Inglewood shop as one of the city’s essential barbecue stops. That makes Woody’s a natural anchor for an Inglewood barbecue crawl.
The downtown food picture is not frozen in one era. The Toast & Jam—previously known as the Rusty Pot Cafe—serves breakfast and lunch in the historic downtown corridor, while Martin’s Cocina y Cantina contributes a newer restaurant and sports-watching presence. The combination is exactly what makes a functioning main street more interesting than a museum piece.
MARKET STREET. INGLEWOOD.
The city between the landmarks.
The historical architecture deserves its own photo series. The former Fox Theatre at 115 N. Market Street appears repeatedly in city planning and historic-resource documents, and the City has treated the building as an important historic resource in planning work. That makes “The Fox Theatre and Market Street” a logical future standalone article after this cornerstone page is live.
The larger point is that downtown should not be framed as “what to do if you have extra time before SoFi.” It predates SoFi and deserves to be covered in its own right. Our Inglewood history guide puts Market Street inside the longer city timeline.
For photographers, this is one of the highest-value Be Inglewood assignments. Shoot street signs, facades, old architectural details, restaurant exteriors, pedestrians and the visual transition from older downtown blocks toward the modern entertainment district. Original images can become a reusable archive for dozens of future stories rather than forcing the brand to depend on licensed newspaper photography.
For visitors, pair Market Street with Randy’s on Manchester, the Historical Society’s Centinela Adobe complex or an event in the stadium district. The broader Inglewood visitor guide links those places together.
And for the brand, Market Street should remain what your existing card copy already suggests: not a backdrop to somebody else’s Los Angeles story, but the main street the city kept.
Sources: official venue calendars, the City of Inglewood, the Los Angeles Times and LA28 materials as of September 13, 2026. Dates change; confirm with the venue before you go.
