Tam's Burgers, The Corner Temple

There are corners in this country that mean more than the buildings standing on them. Compton & Rosecrans is one of those corners. The orange-and-yellow stucco walk-up that has lived there since 1971 — Tam's Burgers #21 — has been photographed for album covers, name-checked in lyrics from at least three generations of West Coast rappers, and pilgrim'd to by visitors who flew across the country to stand under its sign. None of that was the plan. Tam's was just a burger stand. It opened in the years right after the Watts uprising, when the corner stores around it were still putting plywood over their windows on the weekends. It served two-dollar combos to the kids walking home from Compton High and the third-shift workers coming off the auto plants. It made the chili the same way every day. It stayed open late. What the corner became — and why the corner mattered — has more to do with the city around it than with any one rapper. Compton in the 1980s was a city the rest of Los Angeles County had decided not to look at, and Tam's was a place where the looking was already happening. You could sit on the wall outside with a milkshake and watch the whole city move past. Lowriders coming off Long Beach Boulevard. Cousins meeting up before a house party. Mothers walking with their kids back from the swap meet. The rappers who made the corner famous didn't invent it. They were just the first generation of Compton kids who got asked to put a camera on the place they already loved. The video for Kendrick Lamar's "King Kunta" — shot a block away from this counter in 2015 — is essentially a love letter to a sidewalk these kids have been standing on for forty years. The Museum's small standing exhibit on Tam's pulls together a counter receipt from 1979, three album covers shot here, a hand-written note from the Mexican-American family that has owned the building since 1981, and a 90-second loop of the corner at lunchtime, edited from footage donated by a city archivist. Stand at the wall. The corner does the rest.