Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles, California.

Beverly Boulevard is a storied corridor where Beverly Grove's commercial character meets an east-west artery shaped by metropolitan road building, automobile-era storefronts and successive cultural districts extending across Central Los Angeles.

Running through Beverly Grove between Westlake and West Hollywood, the Central Los Angeles corridor follows an extended east-west line from the Downtown edge across Historic Filipinotown, Virgil Avenue, Western Avenue, La Brea Avenue, Fairfax Avenue and La Cienega Boulevard toward Beverly Hills. East of Western Avenue, tightly spaced apartment buildings and neighborhood storefronts occupy a comparatively narrow urban grid as the roadway crosses the flatter basin west of Downtown. The approach to La Brea Avenue expands into longer commercial frontages whose low rooflines preserve the horizontal scale associated with the boulevard's interwar development. West of Fairfax Avenue, larger retail blocks and institutional buildings create another shift before the route reaches the irregular intersection of Beverly Boulevard, San Vicente Boulevard and La Cienega Boulevard. The result is a corridor whose long alignment binds several distinct districts through a succession of building scales, street grids and commercial forms while preserving an unusually legible cross-section of twentieth-century Los Angeles.

What you should know about Beverly Boulevard.

Beverly Boulevard is best known for emerging from an ambitious effort to convert disconnected streets into a continuous route carrying the fashionable Beverly name westward across Los Angeles. The name itself originated with Beverly Hills developer Burton Green, who drew inspiration from Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, after encountering the resort community associated with President William Howard Taft. Los Angeles began assembling the western corridor during the 1910s by combining portions of 1st Street and Temple Street as both roads pushed beyond their earlier termini. The Beverly designation carried substantial real-estate value by that period, giving property interests along the developing route a direct incentive to associate themselves with the rapidly rising prestige of Beverly Hills. Creating a continuous boulevard demanded new roadway sections across private land as engineers attempted to carry the alignment toward the Pacific. Work continued for years before the western route reached completion in 1926. A still larger proposal developed during the 1920s to connect Beverly Boulevard eastward through Downtown, the Los Angeles River corridor, East Los Angeles, Montebello and Whittier, producing a cross-county highway projected at dozens of miles. Montebello renamed Dewey Avenue as Beverly Boulevard in 1924, and Whittier later applied the name to Turnbull Drive as eastern communities anticipated completion of the metropolitan route. The central links never materialized, leaving the present six-mile break between the Los Angeles and eastern Los Angeles County sections as a physical remnant of that unrealized plan. Beverly once extended west of its present terminus through a winding section toward the Pacific, but Los Angeles transferred that disconnected western reach to Sunset Boulevard in 1934. The surviving corridor consequently carries the remains of two separate metropolitan ambitions: a completed westward boulevard assembled from earlier city streets and an unfinished eastward extension intended to bind Beverly Hills with communities approaching Whittier.

The ten-block Beverly-Fairfax commercial section preserves the architectural consequence of the boulevard's interwar expansion with unusual concentration. Development between 1923 and 1958 produced 64 commercial properties between the Formosa-Detroit and Gardner-Stanley blocks, with 38 surviving buildings contributing to the district's historic character. One-story storefronts dominate the street wall, joined by selected two-story commercial blocks whose display windows, sidewalk orientation and limited on-site parking preserve the scale of commerce built during the rise of automobile travel. A 1928 Spanish Colonial Revival block at 7385 Beverly Boulevard uses an indented octagonal corner pavilion, hipped roof, ornamental iron balconies and segmented storefront arches to turn an ordinary commercial parcel into a carefully composed intersection building. Nearby, Anthony Heinsbergen commissioned Curlett & Beelman to design his 1928 decorating-company headquarters at 7415 Beverly Boulevard in Late Gothic Revival and Romanesque forms. Bricks salvaged during demolition associated with the old Los Angeles City Hall entered the building, where a cylindrical tower, cast-stone ornament and friezes depicting artisans gave Heinsbergen's decorative-arts business an architectural advertisement of its own craft. His company employed a large corps of painters and produced decorative work for hundreds of theaters and major civic and hotel interiors across North America, including commissions connected with Los Angeles City Hall, the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Another commercial episode arrived in 1931 when architect J. Robert Harris designed the Silberberg Building at Beverly Boulevard and Poinsettia Place for Abe Silberberg's La Brea Mortgage Company, revising the project during construction to replace portions of the brick exterior with plate-glass retail windows. The building contained seven storefronts beneath a 36-foot Art Deco tower, translating Depression-era commercial development into a conspicuous corner composition. Beverly Boulevard's surviving interwar blocks consequently preserve more than a period streetscape: their storefront geometry, architectural commissions and purpose-built studios reveal how a new arterial acquired commercial permanence during the decades immediately following its completion.

How to fold Beverly Boulevard into your trip.

Beverly Boulevard works as the anchor for an outing through three adjoining Westside institutions whose histories connect Depression-era enterprise, the migration of network television to Los Angeles and the reinvention of the enclosed urban shopping center.

Begin at The Original Farmers Market, whose origins reach Arthur Fremont Gilmore's 256-acre dairy property on Rancho La Brea, where a search for water produced an oil disco and shifted the family business toward petroleum. By the Depression, portions of the Gilmore property stood open, prompting entrepreneurs Fred Beck and Roger Dahlhjelm to approach Earl Bell Gilmore with a plan for farmers to sell produce directly from parked vehicles. Eighteen merchants participated in July 1934, including twelve farmers paying 50 cents per day for space, and permanent stalls, shops and restaurants followed within months. The surrounding Gilmore holdings subsequently contained an 18,000-seat stadium, a baseball field and other entertainment enterprises, yet the market survived those later demolitions and received Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument status in 1991. Its endurance preserves the commercial venture that converted a vacant portion of former oil property into one of the district's longest-running institutions. Continue to Television City, where CBS purchased 25 acres at Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue in 1950 as network president William S. Paley shifted major entertainment operations west from New York. Pereira & Luckman designed the purpose-built television complex with project architects including Gin Wong, James Langenheim and Charles Stanton, creating soundstages, rehearsal rooms, editing facilities, offices and production shops around the technical requirements of live electronic broadcasting. The complex opened in 1952 after a construction investment near $7 million and became one of the earliest large American facilities conceived specifically for television. The Carol Burnett Show, All in the Family and The Price Is Right subsequently emerged from its stages, with The Price Is Right occupying the same soundstage beginning in 1972. Television City converted land previously associated with the Gilmore sports complex into an industrial plant for a medium rapidly displacing radio as the center of American broadcasting. Conclude at Beverly Center, the eight-story retail complex opened in 1982 on the irregular block bounded by Beverly Boulevard, La Cienega Boulevard, 3rd Street and San Vicente Boulevard. Developer A. Alfred Taubman joined Sheldon Gordon and E. Phillip Lyon on the project, with Lou Nardorf of Welton Becket and Associates shaping an immense enclosed structure whose upper retail floors rose above several parking levels. Three decades of changing retail habits eventually prompted a $500 million reconstruction led by Studio Fuksas, with Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas confronting a building originally oriented heavily toward automobile arrival. The 2018 project inserted a 25,000-square-foot ribbon of skylights, enlarged floor openings, new exterior glazing and a perforated metal skin across the 886,000-square-foot center. Refik Anadol supplied a 35-foot digital work for the Grand Court as the reconstruction repositioned a quintessential 1980s enclosed mall for another era of Los Angeles retail. The progression moves from a Depression-era market born on former dairy and oil land through a purpose-built television factory created during broadcasting's westward migration and culminates in the architectural reconstruction of an immense 1980s shopping center, tracing three successive forms of metropolitan commerce along Beverly Boulevard.

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