Why Alvarado Street matters.
Alvarado Street is a storied corridor where Westlake's immigrant-commercial character meets a north-south cross-section of Central Los Angeles shaped by hillside settlement, metropolitan expansion and successive communities arriving near Downtown.
Running through Westlake between Echo Park and Pico-Union, the corridor descends from the residential slopes near Glendale Boulevard through Temple Street, Beverly Boulevard, 3rd Street and 6th Street before continuing south across Wilshire Boulevard and 7th Street toward Pico Boulevard. North of Beverly Boulevard, steep cross streets, retaining walls, stairways and compact hillside parcels register the eastern edge of the Elysian Hills as the route falls toward the basin. The approach to 3rd Street replaces that broken topography with longer commercial frontages and increasingly continuous building walls as Downtown rises directly east of the street. South of 6th Street, broad intersections, dense storefronts and successive apartment blocks give Alvarado a metropolitan scale that continues into the older residential fabric surrounding Pico-Union. The result is a corridor whose pronounced topographic descent and abrupt changes in building scale compress hillside Los Angeles, dense Westlake commerce and the prewar fabric south of Wilshire Boulevard into one continuous urban transect.
What defines Alvarado Street.
Alvarado Street is best known for carrying the name of Juan Bautista Alvarado, the Monterey-born politician who became governor of Alta California after leading a revolt against Mexican-appointed governor Nicolás Gutiérrez in 1836. Los Angeles adopted the street name in 1855 during a period when several new roads honored former Mexican governors, preserving Alvarado's surname less than a decade after American forces took control of California. Urban expansion soon pushed the route beyond the settled city as residential development advanced westward during the late nineteenth century. Railroad entrepreneurs Herman Silver and J. F. Crank proposed a double-track cable railway in 1887 with a western terminus at Seventh and Alvarado streets, connecting the emerging district with the transportation network serving Central Los Angeles. Los Angeles Railway subsequently operated its Bonnie Brae line through 7th Street and Alvarado Street as electric streetcars accelerated residential growth around Westlake during the opening decades of the twentieth century. Another architectural chapter survives farther south at 1366 South Alvarado Street, where Elmer Grey designed the 1912 First Church of Christ, Scientist with Romanesque, Italianate and Beaux-Arts influences for a congregation that had outgrown its earlier building. Peoples Temple occupied the church during the 1970s under Jim Jones before the congregation shifted its center of operations to Guyana, leaving Alvarado Street physically connected to one of the darkest institutional episodes of twentieth-century California. The corridor consequently preserves an unusual chronology in which a Mexican gubernatorial name endured through American annexation, streetcar expansion and successive institutional eras as Los Angeles grew around the route.
The Temple-Alvarado section acquired another consequential role as Filipino settlement moved northwest from the earlier Little Manila district during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Filipino households and businesses developed around Temple Street and Alvarado after restrictive housing practices had concentrated many earlier arrivals in limited sections of Central Los Angeles. Construction of the Hollywood Freeway during the early 1950s removed part of that settlement, shifting community activity southward toward Temple Street and Beverly Boulevard. Filipinos displaced from Bunker Hill during redevelopment added another population stream during the early 1960s, strengthening the Temple-Alvarado concentration as older residential districts closer to Downtown disappeared. The Filipino American Community of Los Angeles maintained its base in the area as social clubs, businesses and community organizations made the surrounding blocks an enduring center of Filipino life. Later immigration during the 1970s and 1980s brought another generation into the same district, extending a settlement pattern already several decades old. Alvarado Street became one of the geographic throughlines connecting these successive migrations, giving the corridor a direct place in the westward movement and consolidation of Filipino Los Angeles during the postwar period.
How Alvarado Street fits.
Alvarado Street works as the anchor for an outing through three directly adjoining Westlake institutions that connect Jewish delicatessen culture, the neighborhood's prewar entertainment boom and the nineteenth-century landscape around which the district first developed.
Begin at Langer's Delicatessen-Restaurant, where Albert and Jean Langer opened their business at Seventh and Alvarado streets in June 1947 after Albert acquired a small sandwich shop from two German immigrants. He entered the deal with $500 in cash and borrowed from suppliers to meet the purchase price, then repaid those loans within fourteen months as the restaurant expanded beyond its original handful of seats. Albert had previously worked at Lack's delicatessen in Hollywood, married waitress Jean, operated a bowling-alley concession and ran another deli near the Ambassador Hotel before settling on Alvarado. Norm Langer later assumed leadership of the family business, which received a James Beard Foundation America's Classics award in 2001 and carried a postwar Jewish delicatessen tradition through dramatic changes in the surrounding district. Continue north to Westlake Theatre, built in 1926 for West Coast Theatres as a 1,949-seat motion-picture and vaudeville house designed by Richard D. Bates Jr. Its Spanish Colonial Revival exterior carries Churrigueresque ornament, and Anthony Heinsbergen supplied murals for an interior developed for both film exhibition and live performance. Fanchon and Marco used its unusually deep stage as a proving ground for vaudeville productions before sending acts onto the national circuit. Theater architect S. Charles Lee modernized the building in 1935 with a new marquee, ticket kiosk, lobby alterations and terrazzo sunburst paving. Metropolitan Theatres later shifted programming toward Spanish-language and subtitled films as Westlake's population changed, and the auditorium became a swap meet after a 1991 sale. Conclude at MacArthur Park, whose origins reach the 1880s when Los Angeles acquired a 35-acre tract of marshy land and developed it as Westlake Park on the city's western fringe. A lake and landscaped grounds turned the property into a major recreation destination as residential development gathered around it, and boating and public music became central features by the early twentieth century. Henry Gaylord Wilshire began developing his namesake boulevard immediately west of the grounds in 1895, making the park the eastern anchor for the earliest stretch carrying the Wilshire name. A later extension drove Wilshire Boulevard through the landscape during the 1930s, physically dividing the property before Westlake Park received the MacArthur name in 1942. The progression moves from a postwar Jewish family business through a 1920s entertainment palace and culminates in the nineteenth-century landscape that catalyzed Westlake's development, placing three successive stages of the district's metropolitan growth directly along Alvarado Street.
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