For four decades, the Holiday Bowl has served a comparable purpose--cultural, architectural, recreational--for the Crenshaw district as the Hollywood Bowl has for the Hollywood Hills. Designed by the firm of Armet & Davis, who defined '50s Googie architecture, the Bowl was built by Japanese entrepreneurs as a combination bowling alley, pool hall, bar and coffee shop in 1958 to serve Crenshaw's Japanese enclave, which had not long before suffered Manzanar's internment camps and a blanket racial ban by the American Bowling Congress. Once haunted at 4 a.m. by swing-shift aerospace workers and nighthawk Central Avenue jazz musicians, the Holiday Bowl, like Leimert Park to its south, remains a concrete expression of community in an era when the whole notion of community has been raised to the level of abstraction.