Home Remodeling Westwood, California

Westwood is a personal ad and residential neighborhood in the northern central portion of the Westside region of Los Angeles, California. It is the house of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Bordering the campus upon the south is Westwood Village, a major regional district for shopping, dining, movie theaters, and extra entertainment.

Wilshire Boulevard through Westwood is a major corridor of condominium towers, on the eastern fade away and of Class A office towers, on the western end. Westwood along with has residential areas of multifamily and single relatives housing, including exclusive Holmby Hills. The neighborhood was developed starting in 1919, and UCLA opened in 1929, while Westwood Village was built up starting in 1929 through the 1930s.

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 shortly 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 right of entry in 1929. It was the Westside’s busiest such district through the 1980s.^{[citation needed]}

A part 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 carpet 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 abstemious summers, relatively damp winters, and serene 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 build the area and started to advertise for supplementary 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 with 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 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 unexpectedly that by 1925 the institution had outgrown the site. The selection of a extra 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 2021 dollars), less than one-third the land’s value. Municipal bond measures passed by Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and Venice provided for that amount. Proposition 10, a allow in bond do its stuff 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 on September 20, 1929.

The nation’s second planned suburban shopping district

Westwood Village, a planned, 55-acre suburban shopping district suddenly south of the UCLA campus, was isolated the second such district on this scale ever to be built worldwide, preceded solitary by Country Club Plaza (1922–23) in Kansas City. It like 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 isolated faculty, staff and students but also affluent 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 advertisement 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 serve as beacons for drivers upon Wilshire Boulevard. Janss picked the first slate of businesses and determined their location in the neighborhood; the area opened subsequently 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 narrowing in 1970, when a 24-story office building now known as the Oppenheimer Tower was built in the neighborhood and the design of extra 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 proverb Iranian immigration to the Place after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and the beginnings of the Tehrangeles business corridor along Westwood Boulevard south of Wilshire Boulevard. Westwood Village’s popularity as a shopping, dining, and nighttime entertainment district continued to rise, with advertisement 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 similar 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 afterward the advent of large chain stores, Amazon.com and multiplex theaters.

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

Current status of the Village

A 2014 explanation for the Westwood Village Improvement Association reported that Westwood Village, although yet a thriving 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 imitation of it was originally master-planned—a combination of tenants that no longer is planned or coordinated. Multiple revitalization efforts on pinnacle of 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 saintly 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 addition anchor. In that quarter-century, multiple to hand districts further customers away from the Village, such as Westfield Century City, The Grove, the now-closed Westside Pavilion, and Downtown Santa Monica subsequent to its pedestrian mall, shopping mall and pier.

Architecture

Westwood Village was master-planned in the late 1920s and Janss with intent selected not abandoned the architects, but in addition to 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 psychotherapy by Gruen and Associates identified the like buildings of historic architectural significance:

Demographics

In 2018, about 50,288 people lived in the 90024 ZIP code, which grossly corresponds to Westwood, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. The 2000 U.S. census counted 47,916 residents in the 3.68-square-mile Westwood neighborhood—or 13,036 people per square mile, an average population density for the city. In 2008, the city estimated that the population had increased to 52,041. The median age for residents was 27, considered young for the city; the percentages of residents aged 19 to 34 was in the course of the county’s highest.

The neighborhood was considered moderately diverse ethnically, with a tall percentage of Asians and of whites. The psychotherapy was whites, 62.9%; Asians, 23.1%; Latinos, 7.0%; blacks, 2.0%; and others, 4.9%. Iran (23.5%) and Taiwan (7.3%) were the most common places of birth for the 31.3% of the residents who were born abroad—about the similar percentage as in the city at large.

The median once a year household pension in 2008 dollars was $68,716, a high figure for Los Angeles. The percentages of households that earned $125,000 once a year and innovative or that earned $20,000 or less were tall for Los Angeles County. The average household size of two people was low for Los Angeles. Renters occupied 64.1% of the housing growth and house-or-apartment owners held 35.9%. The percentages of never-married men and women were accompanied by the county’s highest. In 2000 there were 309 families headed by single parents, a low percentage for the city. Five percent of the population had served in the military, a low figure for both the city and the county.

Entertainment and cultural facilities

Besides the many services of UCLA itself, cultural and entertainment services include:

Historic cinemas

The Village has two historic movie theaters Fox Village Theater (opened 1931, architect Percy Parke Lewis and the Bruin Theater (S. Charles Lee, 1937), which hosted many Hollywood premieres beyond past decades.

Hammer Museum

The Hammer Museum, which is affiliated as soon as UCLA, is an art museum and cultural middle known for its artist-centric and complex array of exhibitions and public programs. Founded in 1990 by the entrepreneur-industrialist Armand Hammer to home his personal art collection, the museum has previously expanded its scope to become “the hippest and most culturally relevant institution in town.” Particularly important accompanied by the museum’s critically respected exhibitions are presentations of both historically overlooked and emerging contemporary artists. The Hammer Museum along with hosts higher than 300 programs throughout the year, from lectures, symposia, and readings to concerts and film screenings. As of February 2014, the museum’s collections, exhibitions, and programs are completely free to anything visitors.

Geffen Playhouse Theater

The Geffen Playhouse Theater was built in 1929 at 10886 LeConte Avenue as the Masonic Affiliates Club, or the MAC, for students and alumni at UCLA. One of the first dozen structures built in Westwood Village, it was meant by architect Stiles O. Clements.

LDS (Mormon) Temple

The Los Angeles California Temple, the second-largest temple operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is upon Santa Monica Boulevard in Westwood. The temple grounds as a consequence includes a Visitors’ Center read to the public and the headquarters for the Church’s missionary efforts in Los Angeles. The church purchased the estate for the temple from silent film star Harold Lloyd in 1937, but did not right of entry the temple until 1956.

The temple grounds are also house to the Los Angeles Regional Family History Center (LARFHC), which is gate to the public as well. It is the second-largest branch in the Family History Library system of the LDS Church, and contains exceeding 100,000 microfiche and 30,000 books.

Parks and recreation

The Westwood Recreation Center is in Westwood. The facility includes barbecue pits, a lighted baseball diamond, lighted external basketball courts, racquetball courts, a children’s exploit area, a community room, an indoor gymnasium in the same way as weights, and a picnic table. The center also has Aidan’s Place, which opened upon December 5, 2001. The place, named after wheelchair-bound Aidan James, is a playground developed for joint use by handicapped and non-handicapped children.

Holmby Park is then in Westwood.

Government and infrastructure

The Los Angeles County Department of Health Services SPA 5 West Area Health Office serves Westwood.

In 2018, Westwood stakeholders voted to subdivide the area into two approved neighborhood council districts. Since subsequently the North Westwood Neighborhood Council has represented UCLA, Westwood Village, the North Westwood Village, and Persian Square areas, while the Westwood Neighborhood Council has continued to represent the surrounding residential areas.

Police

The Los Angeles Police Department operates the West Los Angeles Community Police Station at 1663 Butler Avenue, which serves the community. Law enforcement for the UCLA campus is the answerability of the UCLA Police Department, a isolation of the independent, statewide University of California Police Department. As a acknowledge police agency, the UCLA PD has full affect enforcement powers on and off campus.

Fire and EMS

Fire and emergency medical facilities are provided by the Los Angeles Fire Department. UCLA Emergency Medical Services, a isolation of the UCLA Police Department, operates a Basic Life Support ambulance for the UCLA campus and supports LAFD on medical aid calls in the surrounding community. UCLA with maintains a small flame suppression apparatus staffed by campus fire marshals that responds to university-owned properties and helps the outside community subsequently requested to by LAFD.^{[citation needed]}

Education

Sixty-six percent of Westwood residents aged 25 and older had earned a four-year degree by 2000, a tall figure for both the city and the county. The percentages of residents of that age with a master’s degree or far ahead was the third-highest in the county.

Westwood is house to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

The Los Angeles Unified School District operates public schools. Schools in Westwood are

The zoned senior tall school is University High School in West Los Angeles.

UCLA Lab School Corinne A. Seeds Campus, formerly the Corinne A. Seeds University Elementary School and renamed in 2009, is the University of California, Los Angeles laboratory school.

The Los Angeles Public Library opened a branch in Westwood in 2005.

Notable residents

References

External links