Home Remodeling in Westwood, California

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

Westwood Village is suddenly 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.

A allocation 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 portion 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, bookstores, art galleries, travel agencies, and rug stores along Westwood Boulevard that has served as a cultural hub for the Persian community in Los Angeles before the 1960s.

Westwood has a Mediterranean climate (Köppen Csb) with temperate summers, relatively damp winters, and smooth temperatures year-round. Like the get out of of coastal Los Angeles County, Westwood experiences an Indian summer, where its warmest highs, in the upper 70s, are towards the end of summer and to the front fall. After mid-October temperatures dip by the side of quicker. as the Cool season approaches, than they rise from late spring to summer. Ocean temperatures tend to sober the climate greater than inland locations.

The average precipitation in Westwood is 17.43 inches which tends to be on peak of most populated places in LA County. This is due to its proximity to the ocean andhillside location resulting in heavier and abundant rainfall. The most rainfall in a damp season was 43.55 from September 1997 to June 1998.

Westwood was developed upon the lands of the historic Wolfskill Ranch, a 3,000-acre (12 km) parcel that Arthur Letts, the well-off 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 build the area 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 between 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 concern lots, situated west of the Los Angeles Country Club on Santa Monica Boulevard and the Rancho Country Club on Pico Boulevard.”

Meanwhile, the Southern Branch of the University of California had been established upon Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles, where enrollment expanded so unexpectedly that by 1925 the institution had outgrown the site. The selection of a supplementary 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 ($14 million in 2023 dollars), less than one-third the land’s value. Municipal bond events passed by Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and Venice provided for that amount. Proposition 10, a make a clean breast bond take steps passed that year, provided $3 million for construction. Thus the University of California at Los Angeles was normal in Westwood; ground was broken on September 12, 1927, and the campus opened for regular classes upon September 20, 1929.

Westwood Village, a planned, 55-acre suburban shopping district sharply south of the UCLA campus, was unaccompanied the second such district on this scale ever to be built worldwide, preceded on your own by Country Club Plaza (1922–23) in Kansas City. It in the same way as 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 without help 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 beautifully laid out want 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 assistance as beacons for drivers on Wilshire Boulevard. Janss picked the first slate of businesses and distinct their location in the neighborhood; the Place opened following 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).

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 other buildings soon became a amalgamation 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 area after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and the beginnings of the Tehrangeles event corridor along Westwood Boulevard south of Wilshire Boulevard. Westwood Village’s popularity as a shopping, dining, and nighttime entertainment district continued to rise, with public notice rents peaking in 1988.

The Village suffered a major setback in the late 1980s, when gangs began to frequent the neighborhood and crime increased. The problems culminated in January 1988 with a gang shootout resulted in the death of a 27-year-old bystander. On January 30, 1988, gang batter brought nationwide attention to Westwood Village taking into account Karen Toshima, a 27-year-old graphics artist, was killed as she crossed a Village street in a shootout in the middle of gang members. Her killer, Durrell DeWitt Collins, 23, was sentenced to two concurrent terms of 27 years to excitement in prison. In 2016, he was once more denied parole until at least 2021. The episode led to the widespread way of being that even wealthy Westwood was not immune to the crime reaction then ravaging Los Angeles.

There was a conviction in December 1988 for a September 1985 abduction and double-murder that started as an auto theft in Westwood.

The neighborhood’s renowned bookstores and some movie cinemas began closing bearing in mind the advent of large chain stores, Amazon.com and multiplex theaters.

A 2014 financial credit for the Westwood Village Improvement Association reported that Westwood Village, although still a living 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 behind it was originally master-planned—a mixture of tenants that no longer is planned or coordinated. Multiple revitalization efforts higher than decades were really 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 innocent 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 growth anchor. In that quarter-century, multiple manageable districts extra customers away from the Village, such as Westfield Century City, The Grove, the now-closed Westside Pavilion, and Downtown Santa Monica when its pedestrian mall, shopping mall and pier.

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

Buildings which according to a 1985 chemical analysis by Gruen and Associates identified the in the song of buildings of historic architectural significance: