Which Park are Y’all Playin’ Basketball?

Which Park are Y’all Playin’ Basketball: South Central Parks With Outdoor Basketball Courts

Who doesn’t know Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day”? Even now it remains one of hip-hop’s greatest and most beloved tunes. You’d be hard pressed to find someone that doesn’t enjoy Cube rapping about California livin’ over the Isley Brothers. Personally I have too many to count. Jamming to it after winning a football game in high school, or closing the deal with a woman-lady after a night clubbing. Ending a party by playing it as the last song of a set. My favorite has to be during Basic Training where the Drill Sergeants casually went back and forth with the lyrics as if they were having a conversation, trying to see which Private was going to be the first to flinch or laugh.

This was a perfect song to build a map from. My approach isn’t the first analytical stab at deconstructing the song; there was a viral Tumblr post that estimated which day had to be Ice Cube’s good day based on the references to real events in his lyrics. I’m going to focus on one particular line. Towards the end of his first verse, Cube decides to find out what his friends are doing:

Called up the homies and I’m askin’ y’all / Which park, are y’all playin’ basketball? / Get me on the court and I’m trouble / Last week f***ed around and got a triple double!

I got to thinking, I wonder where his friends were hooping at? Which park was chosen? What options did they have to choose from? So I created this map of potential options to where they could be playing. I made three assumptions along the way:

1. They’re playing basketball at a public park.
2. They’re in South Central Los Angeles; a pretty easy assumption given South Central is referenced in the song: Plus nobody I know got killed in South Central LA / Today was a good day
3. The court is outside; in the music video they’re playing ball at an outdoor court.

I began with mapping the 3,038 public parks in Los Angeles County. To determine the number of parks in South Central, I used the neighborhood boundaries and definitions from the LA Times’ Mapping LA Neighborhoods project, found with a little Google and Wikipedia searching. According to the LA Times, there are 32 neighborhoods in South Central including the cities of Inglewood and Hawthorne. After filtering based on these boundaries I found 140 South Central parks. To find out how many of these parks had outdoor courts I cross-referenced my park locations with satellite imagery. I identified outdoor courts by the relatively easy identifiable paint markings (baselines, three point lines, half court, etc). As a result, Ice Cube and the homies had 44 parks to choose from, categorized in blue on the map. That’s a lot of options; if he didn’t ask first Ice Cube likely could have went to the wrong park.

ERRORS/LIMITATIONS:
Hindsight is 2020, and right when I completed the map I noticed one huge omission: COMPTON. Turns out Compton is southeast of the South Central neighborhoods and is not included in the LA Times’ list (it’s listed as South East). Although Compton isn’t “technically” in South Central I think it’s important to include in the context of LA hip-hop. It’s the home of N.W.A. and has cultural significance and history when we think of the Black LA experience. If you think I should include Compton, let me know and I’ll kick out an updated version.

SOURCES:
-Los Angeles Times, Mapping LA Neighborhoods https://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods
-Wikipedia, “South Los Angeles” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Los_Angeles#City_of_Los_Angeles
-Ice Cube “It Was a Good Day.” From The Predator album, 1992.
-Basemap: Open Street Map
-Los Angeles County GIS Data Portal, Countywide Parks and Open Space. https://egis3.lacounty.gov/dataportal/2016/10/25/department-of-parks-and-recreation-county-parks-and-open-space/