Bathroom Remodeling Westwood, California

Geography

According to the Westwood Neighborhood Council, the Westwood Homeowners Association, and the Los Angeles Times Mapping L.A. project, Westwood is bounded by:

Sub-neighborhoods

Westwood Village is sharply south of the UCLA campus, bounded by LeConte, Gayley, Thornton (between Lindbrook and Wilshire: Glendon) and Wilshire Boulevard. Westwood Village north of Wilshire is an on-street shopping, dining and entertainment district that was planned in the 1920s – the second such district ever to be built in the nation’s history. It was planned by Janss and businesses started to get into in 1929. It was the Westside’s busiest such district through the 1980s.^{[citation needed]}

A portion of Holmby Hills, home to the Playboy Mansion, south of Sunset Blvd., east of both Beverly Glen Bl. and Comstock Av., and west of the L.A. Country Club, is within Westwood. The northern section of Holmby Hills is allocation of Bel Air. Together, Holmby Hills, Bel Air and Beverly Hills form the “Platinum Triangle” of Los Angeles.

North Westwood Village (or North Village) consists mainly of multifamily residential units where many UCLA students live, west of Gayley, north of Weyburn, and east of Veteran aves.

Tehrangeles, also known as “Little Persia”, refers to the large number of Persian restaurants, grocery stores, book stores, art galleries, travel agencies, and rug stores along Westwood Boulevard that has served as a cultural hub for the Persian community in Los Angeles past the 1960s.

Climate

Westwood has a Mediterranean climate (Köppen Csb) with ascetic summers, relatively wet winters, and mild temperatures year-round.

History

Development

Westwood was developed upon the lands of the historic Wolfskill Ranch, a 3,000-acre (12 km) parcel that Arthur Letts, the affluent founder of the Broadway, and Bullock’s department stores, purchased in 1919. Upon Arthur Lett’s death, his son-in-law, Harold Janss, vice president of Janss Investment Company, inherited the land. He began to manufacture the Place and started to advertise for other homes in 1922.

The Los Angeles Times reported the news: “Westwood, the subdivision of the Wolfskill Ranch, 3,300 acres (13 km) of scenic territory in the middle of the city and Santa Monica, is to be opened to homeseekers and investors today by the Janss Investment Company. The tract comprises nearly 1000 residential and matter lots, situated west of the Los Angeles Country Club on Santa Monica Boulevard and the Rancho Country Club on Pico Boulevard.”

UCLA

Meanwhile, the Southern Branch of the University of California had been established upon Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles, where enrollment expanded so snappishly that by 1925 the institution had outgrown the site. The selection of a additional campus in the Westwood hills was announced upon March 21, 1925. The owners of the estate, the Janss brothers, agreed to sell the property for approximately $1 million ($12 million in 2020 dollars), less than one-third the land’s value. Municipal bond trial passed by Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and Venice provided for that amount. Proposition 10, a come clean bond take action passed that year, provided $3 million for construction. Thus the University of California at Los Angeles was standard in Westwood; ground was broken on September 12, 1927, and the campus opened for regular classes upon September 20, 1929.

The nation’s second planned suburban shopping district

Westwood Village, a planned, 55-acre suburban shopping district unexpectedly south of the UCLA campus, was isolated the second such district on this scale ever to be built worldwide, preceded by yourself by Country Club Plaza (1922–23) in Kansas City. It once was created by the Janss Investment Company, run by Harold and Edwin Janss and their father, Peter, in the late 1920s as a shopping district and headquarters of the Janss Company. Its boom was complemented by the boom of UCLA which opened in 1929 and served not by yourself faculty, staff and students but also flourishing shoppers from the surrounding upscale single-family-home neighborhoods.

Opening in 1929, the design was considered one of the nation’s best-planned and endearingly laid out commercial areas. Harold Janss had hired major architects and instructed them to follow a Mediterranean theme, with clay tile roofs, decorative Spanish tile, paseos, patios and courtyards. Buildings at strategic points, including theaters, used towers to assist as beacons for drivers on Wilshire Boulevard. Janss picked the first slate of businesses and certain their location in the neighborhood; the Place opened considering 34 businesses, and, despite the Great Depression, had 452 businesses in 1939, including Bullock’s (Parkinson & Parkinson), Desmond’s (Percy Parke Lewis) and Sears department stores, and a Ralphs grocery (Stiles Clements).

1970s–1980s

The architectural style met a turning tapering off in 1970, when a 24-story office building now known as the Oppenheimer Tower was built in the neighborhood and the design of new buildings soon became a mixture of styles. The Oppenheimer Tower was used for the primary location in the 1978 episode of Emergency!, “The Steel Inferno”. Wilshire Boulevard through Westwood is would become a major corridor of condominium towers, from Westwood Boulevard east towards the Beverly Hills city line, and of Class A office towers, at Westwood Boulevard and westward. The 1980s saw Iranian immigration to the Place after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and the beginnings of the Tehrangeles situation corridor along Westwood Boulevard south of Wilshire Boulevard. Westwood Village’s popularity as a shopping, dining, and nighttime entertainment district continued to rise, with announcement rents peaking in 1988.

Decline of Westwood Village

The Village suffered a major setback in the late 1980s, when gangs began to frequent the neighborhood and to-do visitors; the problems culminated in January 1988 like a gang shootout resulted in the death of a 27-year-old bystander. The neighborhood’s Famous bookstores and some movie cinemas began closing in imitation of the advent of large chain stores, Amazon.com and multiplex theaters.

On January 30, 1988, gang mistreat brought nationwide attention to Westwood Village subsequently Karen Toshima, a 27-year-old graphics artist, was killed as she crossed a Village street in a shootout in the company of gang members. Her killer, Durrell DeWitt Collins, 23, was sentenced to two concurrent terms of 27 years to animatronics in prison. In 2016, he was over denied parole until at least 2021. The episode led to the widespread freshen that even rich Westwood was not immune to the crime response then ravaging Los Angeles.

Current status of the Village

A 2014 tally for the Westwood Village Improvement Association reported that Westwood Village, although still a perky place, used to be the Westside’s dominant retail and entertainment destinations for decades, but no longer is. The Village suffers from deteriorating public spaces, a high number vacancies and—unlike similar to it was originally master-planned—a fusion of tenants that no longer is planned or coordinated. Multiple revitalization efforts beyond decades were in fact unsuccessful, marred by decades of challenges and failure, and the Village’s image and reputation suffered. Even a quarter century later, Los Angeles Magazine referred to the 1988 gang‐related murder of an adorable bystander as a cause of Westwood Village’s “diminished activity”. Limited and expensive parking, as ever, remained a problem. Macy’s (originally Bullock’s) closed in 1999, leaving the district without a department amassing anchor. In that quarter-century, multiple handy districts other customers away from the Village, such as Westfield Century City, The Grove, the now-closed Westside Pavilion, and Downtown Santa Monica later its pedestrian mall, shopping mall and pier.

Architecture

Westwood Village was master-planned in the late 1920s and Janss deliberately selected not lonely the architects, but as well as the style of the buildings and their juxtaposition. Towers were built as landmarks and businesses on corner lots were with intent selected for their attractiveness and as landmarks.

Table of architecturally significant buildings in Westwood Village

Buildings which according to a 1985 breakdown by Gruen and Associates identified the afterward buildings of historic architectural significance: