Barrington Avenue, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Barrington Avenue in Los Angeles, California.

Barrington Avenue is a distinctive corridor where Brentwood's foothill character meets an early Westside subdivision route that descends from the Santa Monica Mountains through postwar commercial enclaves and dense residential Los Angeles.

Running through Brentwood between Brentwood Glen and Sawtelle, the Westside corridor follows a north-south descent from Sunset Boulevard across San Vicente Boulevard and Wilshire Boulevard before continuing through West Los Angeles toward National Boulevard and Mar Vista. North of San Vicente Boulevard, Barrington responds to the Lower Santa Monica Mountain terrain through changing grades, curving approaches and residential streets that rise toward Mandeville Canyon and Kenter Canyon. The crossing at San Vicente Boulevard introduces a broader metropolitan scale as the boulevard median, commercial frontage and surrounding apartment blocks replace the secluded street pattern farther north. South of Wilshire Boulevard, the alignment enters a tighter grid of multifamily buildings before crossing Santa Monica Boulevard and continuing toward the lower-density blocks approaching National Boulevard. The result is a corridor whose sustained descent connects Brentwood's canyon-edge terrain with successive layers of Westside development across one of the clearest north-south transects between the Santa Monica Mountains and Mar Vista.

What you should know about Barrington Avenue.

Barrington Avenue is best known for originating in the 1905 Westgate subdivision, among the earliest development campaigns that pushed residential Los Angeles westward between the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers and Santa Monica. The Santa Monica Land & Water Company introduced the street as grading transformed former rancho land into the Westgate tract, where residential lots were advertised for $150 and upward during the first sales campaign. Robert C. Gillis had acquired the development company in 1904, one year before Westgate entered the market as the first of several planned tracts across the surrounding foothill territory. San Vicente Boulevard was laid out through the development with a broad median reserved for two streetcar tracks, and the Westgate line began service in 1906, accelerating subdivision activity across land adjoining Barrington. Brentwood Park emerged immediately west that same year after the Western Pacific Development Company acquired 350 acres and recorded a 320-acre tract named for investor William Lynton Brent. Westgate remained a recognizable place name through the following decades before the expanding Brentwood designation absorbed the earlier community by the 1930s. Barrington consequently survives as one of the street names inherited directly from the development campaign that preceded Brentwood itself, carrying the geometry of Westgate through a district whose later name eclipsed the subdivision that created the avenue.

A radically different postwar development pattern survives farther south between Navy and Indianapolis streets, where a single Barrington block contains 28 two-story apartment buildings completed in 1953. Paul W. Trousdale originally subdivided part of the surrounding land as Westdale Village in 1947 before horticulturalist Paul Howard acquired the Barrington parcels and incorporated them into his Flowerland Park subdivision. Howard operated California Flowerland near Barrington and National Boulevard and had collaborated with Trousdale on Westdale Village's landscaping, supplying trees and flowering plants for the surrounding development. Junior Realty Company acquired the apartment property in 1953 and built two principal building types in Mid-Century Modern and Minimal Traditional styles across deep rectangular parcels. Twelve-unit buildings on the eastern side use lots measuring 68 by 195 feet, and detached garages reached from rear alleys leave the street frontage free of driveways. Continuous landscaping extends between buildings with no intervening walls or fences, binding individually developed parcels into an unusually coherent streetscape. Twenty-five of the 28 buildings retain contributing status within the Barrington Multi-Family Residential Historic District, preserving one compact demonstration of how the postwar housing boom increased residential density along Westside automobile corridors.

How to fold Barrington Avenue into your trip.

Barrington Avenue works as the anchor for an outing through three Brentwood institutions that connect automobile-era architecture, fraternal welfare and an unusual privately financed chapter in Los Angeles public-library history.

Begin at Brentwood Gas Station, where architect Raymond A. Stockdale designed a Spanish Colonial Revival service station completed in 1939 at the intersection of Barrington Avenue and Sunset Boulevard. Brick columns, a red-tile roof and a 40-foot tower gave an automobile facility the architectural scale and ornament associated with the residential district developing around it, making the building a conspicuous survivor from the period when gasoline stations evolved into substantial neighborhood structures. A demolition proposal during the 1980s prompted architect William Krisel and other Brentwood residents to pursue preservation, and the Cultural Heritage Commission unanimously supported designation in 1988 after staff concluded that alterations had left the building's form, scale and proportion substantially intact. Los Angeles subsequently designated the property Historic-Cultural Monument 387, preserving a late example of the elaborate service-station architecture once associated with affluent automobile suburbs. Continue across Sunset Boulevard to Eastern Star Home, conceived as a retirement and convalescent residence for members of the Order of the Eastern Star. San Francisco architect William Mooser II and the firm Train & Cressy developed the Spanish Colonial Revival complex during the early 1930s, arranging private rooms around communal spaces that included a library, dining rooms, sun porches and gardens. The institution opened in 1933 and remained in Brentwood for more than six decades, representing the extensive welfare programs fraternal organizations built for aging members during the twentieth century. Los Angeles designated the complex Historic-Cultural Monument 440 in 1989, and the Order relocated its senior community to Yorba Linda in 1999 after selling the Brentwood property to The Archer School for Girls. The surviving building and grounds subsequently entered the National Register of Historic Places in 2020, extending preservation across a property whose institutional purpose had changed completely. Conclude at Donald Bruce Kaufman - Brentwood Branch Library, where an eleven-year campaign produced one of Los Angeles's most striking examples of private philanthropy financing a municipal cultural building. Glorya Kaufman began pursuing a replacement for Brentwood's undersized 1960 branch after her husband, developer Donald Bruce Kaufman, died in a plane crash, eventually contributing more than $1 million toward the project. Friends of the Brentwood Library supplied another $780,000, and 1,950 residents participated in the fundraising campaign as private contributions covered most of the construction expense. The $2.4 million, 10,400-square-foot branch opened in 1994 with a round reading room, broad balcony and large skylight, replacing a building one-third its size. The project turned a neighborhood effort lasting more than a decade into a permanent civic institution carrying Donald Kaufman's name. The progression moves from a 1939 automobile building rescued through local preservation through a fraternal retirement complex adapted to a new institutional life and culminates in a public library largely financed by neighborhood philanthropy, tracing three distinct ways Brentwood converted private initiative into enduring architecture around Barrington Avenue.

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