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The Phillips Music Company
The Phillips Music Company situated at 2455 Brooklyn Avenue in Boyle Heights, opened in 1935 and closed in 1989. The store run by musician William “Bill” Phillips was born in 1910 as William Isaacs. It was a store of many parts, it sold records, sheet music, an assortment of instruments, radios, televisions, electronic appliances, phonographs, and even sporting goods at one point in time. Apart from commerce, the store brought music to a community populated with Japanese, Mexican, and Jewish Americans. The store introduced its own soundtrack to a world not yet familiar with multiculturalism. This introduction allowed outside the community to create their own music, introducing a homogeneous world to multiculturalism over the air waves.

History
In 1936 Bill Phillips opened the Phillips Music Company storefront in Boyle Heights on Brooklyn Avenue in a spot that is now part of Cesar Chavez Avenue. The store quickly became the local hangout for the youth of Boyle Heights which was comprised of many cultural backgrounds. Aside from household appliances the store carried a wide array of instruments and records including Latin Jazz, Classic Rock, Cuban Mambo, and Yiddish Swing.

Boyle Heights was the poster neighborhood for democracy because of its diversity lasting from the 1930s through the 1940s. Children who were Japanese, Jewish, and Spanish would go to the store for hours and together create music in one of the small recording booths that were available in the store, test instruments, listen to music and even just hangout. It was Jewish-Mexican-Japanese musical utopia.

Bill Phillips wanted to help the community of Boyle Heights, he would often give free lessons and donate instruments to local school music programs. Future members of bands like Los Lobos were some of the children who were able to foster their talents in the Phillips Music Store. The store was able to help foster a unique sound that was birthed from the melting pot of culture brewing with the children creating music derived from all of their own cultural backgrounds.

While the rest of the Jewish communities and stores started moving away from Boyle Heights after World War II, the Phillips Music Store stayed there until it closed in 1989.

Demographic Change
The Phillips Music Company was located in Boyle Heights, an area known for its diversity including Jews, Latinos, Yugoslav (Serbian and Croatian) immigrants, Portuguese, and Japanese Americans living in the neighborhood from the 1920s through the 1960s.

By 1940, the Boyle Heights population compromised of about 35,000 Jewish Americans, 15000 Mexican Americans, and 5000 Japanese Americans.

As of 2011, the diverse population of Boyle Heights is a community where 95% of the population is Latino and Hispanic.

Following the demographic shift a diverse heterogeneous community to a community that boasting homogeneity, the Phillips Music Company closed it’s doors in 1989.

The hub of multiculturalism it fostered, through the invention of music by a diverse community, can be heard in the music of the present in local bands like Los Lobos, Thee Midniters, and Ollin, the sound of multiculturalism the Phillips Music Company fostered continues to exist despite the stores end.

The diversity that once was the oldest East Los Angeles neighborhood is no longer, but the diverse sound is present over the airwaves.