Garage Conversion 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 quickly 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 log on in 1929. It was the Westside’s busiest such district through the 1980s.^{[citation needed]}

A ration 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 share 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 previously the 1960s.

Climate

Westwood has a Mediterranean climate (Köppen Csb) with ascetic summers, relatively damp winters, and smooth 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 flourishing 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 produce the area and started to advertise for new 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 approximately 1000 residential and event lots, situated west of the Los Angeles Country Club upon Santa Monica Boulevard and the Rancho Country Club on Pico Boulevard.”

UCLA

Meanwhile, the Southern Branch of the University of California had been established on Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles, where enrollment expanded so snappishly that by 1925 the institution had outgrown the site. The selection of a other campus in the Westwood hills was announced on 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 dealings passed by Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and Venice provided for that amount. Proposition 10, a state bond play a role passed that year, provided $3 million for construction. Thus the University of California at Los Angeles was expected in Westwood; ground was damage 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 snappishly south of the UCLA campus, was unaccompanied the second such district on this scale ever to be built worldwide, preceded deserted by Country Club Plaza (1922–23) in Kansas City. It afterward 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 forlorn faculty, staff and students but also booming shoppers from the surrounding upscale single-family-home neighborhoods.

Opening in 1929, the design was considered one of the nation’s best-planned and attractively laid out classified ad 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 relief as beacons for drivers on Wilshire Boulevard. Janss picked the first slate of businesses and certain their location in the neighborhood; the Place opened later than 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 point in 1970, when a 24-story office building now known as the Oppenheimer Tower was built in the neighborhood and the design of other buildings soon became a fusion 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 maxim Iranian immigration to the Place after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and the beginnings of the Tehrangeles thing corridor along Westwood Boulevard south of Wilshire Boulevard. Westwood Village’s popularity as a shopping, dining, and nighttime entertainment district continued to rise, with classified ad 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 commotion visitors; the problems culminated in January 1988 subsequent to a gang shootout resulted in the death of a 27-year-old bystander. The neighborhood’s renowned bookstores and some movie cinemas began closing as soon as the advent of large chain stores, Amazon.com and multiplex theaters.

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

Current status of the Village

A 2014 balance for the Westwood Village Improvement Association reported that Westwood Village, although nevertheless a active 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 tall number vacancies and—unlike in the declare of it was originally master-planned—a amalgamation of tenants that no longer is planned or coordinated. Multiple revitalization efforts more than decades were in reality 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 beatific 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 accrual anchor. In that quarter-century, multiple welcoming districts other customers away from the Village, such as Westfield Century City, The Grove, the now-closed Westside Pavilion, and Downtown Santa Monica considering its pedestrian mall, shopping mall and pier.

Architecture

Westwood Village was master-planned in the late 1920s and Janss intentionally selected not isolated the architects, but plus the style of the buildings and their juxtaposition. Towers were built as landmarks and businesses upon corner lots were intentionally selected for their attractiveness and as landmarks.

Table of architecturally significant buildings in Westwood Village

Buildings which according to a 1985 laboratory analysis by Gruen and Associates identified the subsequently buildings of historic architectural significance: