Why Bundy Drive matters.
Bundy Drive is a storied corridor where Brentwood's foothill character meets an early Westside development road that descends from a mountain canyon through former gentleman farms, postwar commerce and the dense urban plain approaching Santa Monica Airport.
Running through Brentwood between the Santa Monica Mountains and Sawtelle, the Westside corridor follows a north-south descent from the upper reaches of Bundy Canyon across Sunset Boulevard, San Vicente Boulevard, Wilshire Boulevard, Santa Monica Boulevard, Olympic Boulevard and Exposition Boulevard toward the Los Angeles boundary beside Santa Monica Airport. North of Sunset Boulevard, steep slopes compress the roadway between hillside parcels before the terrain opens into the Lower Brentwood basin. San Vicente Boulevard crosses Bundy on a broad landscaped axis whose former railway alignment divides the roadway into parallel carriageways. South of Wilshire Boulevard, apartment buildings, commercial parcels and larger intersections replace the residential scale farther north as Bundy enters the flatter West Los Angeles grid. The result is a corridor whose sustained descent connects Santa Monica Mountain terrain with successive generations of Brentwood and West Los Angeles development before reaching the aviation landscape at the southern edge of the city.
What defines Bundy Drive.
Bundy Drive is best known for carrying the surname of a Santa Monica family whose land development and tennis careers became intertwined with the early growth of the Westside. Charles Leroy Bundy arrived in Santa Monica from Iowa as an infant and later joined the Santa Monica Land & Water Company, the enterprise that developed substantial portions of present-day Brentwood. Robert R. C. Gillis had acquired the company by 1904 and opened the 700-acre Westgate tract beside the Pacific Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers in April 1905, followed by Westgate Acres that June. Charles Bundy and his brother-in-law L. D. Loomis participated in the Westgate development team as the company graded former rancho acreage into residential tracts. Gillis made San Vicente Boulevard the centerpiece, creating a broad landscaped road and working with Sherman and Clark to bring a Los Angeles Pacific Railroad branch through its center in 1905. Westgate advertising promoted access to Downtown in 40 minutes as parcels beginning at $250 drew settlement into territory still dominated by open acreage. Charles built his own house in 1907 at Gorham Avenue and Arcadia Street, placing the Bundy family directly within the developing district. Los Angeles annexed Westgate in 1916, forcing changes to duplicate street names already present elsewhere in the expanding municipality. Arcadia Street became Bundy Drive in 1917, attaching Charles Bundy's surname to the north-south road beside his property. His younger brother Thomas Clark Bundy gave the family wider public prominence through tennis, reaching the 1910 U.S. National Championships singles final and winning three consecutive national doubles titles with Maurice McLoughlin from 1912 through 1914. Thomas married Wimbledon champion May Sutton in 1912, later joined Sutton and G. Allan Hancock in founding the Los Angeles Tennis Club and participated in major real-estate ventures including Sherman Oaks and portions of the Miracle Mile. The avenue carries a family name rooted simultaneously in the subdivision of Brentwood and the emergence of Southern California tennis during the opening decades of the twentieth century.
A small Tudor-style lodge north of Sunset Boulevard gave Bundy Drive an entirely different place in Hollywood cultural history during the 1930s and 1940s. Painter John Decker made the house his headquarters and gathered a circle whose principal figures included W. C. Fields, John Barrymore, Errol Flynn, journalist Gene Fowler and poet and art critic Sadakichi Hartmann. Decker had developed a reputation for comic portraits executed in Old Master styles, including his painting of Fields as Queen Victoria, which later hung inside Chasen's restaurant until its 1995 closing. Fowler memorialized the circle in his 1954 memoir Minutes of the Last Meeting, preserving a literary account of the gatherings after most of their central figures had died. Anthony Quinn joined the younger members around Decker and shared a blood type with Decker and Barrymore, leading to repeated hospital transfusions for the two older men. Decker died in 1947 at age 53 after Hartmann, Fields and Barrymore had already died, bringing the group's most active period to an end before Flynn's death in 1959. Biographer Stephen Jordan revived interest in Decker through the 2005 book Bohemian Rogue, prompting descendants of the circle to assemble at the Bundy Drive lodge that same year for a farewell gathering featuring Decker paintings, family artifacts and home movies. The modest house consequently attached Bundy Drive to a concentrated pre-Rat Pack circle of painters, actors, writers and filmmakers whose friendships crossed Hollywood studio culture, visual art and literary Los Angeles.
How Bundy Drive fits.
Bundy Drive works as the anchor for an outing connecting Brentwood's postwar neighborhood commerce, the return of passenger rail to the western city and an aviation field that became central to Douglas Aircraft's rise.
Begin at Brentwood Country Mart, designed by architect Rowland Crawford and opened on November 18, 1948 after construction by the Baruch Corporation. Louis M. Sentei and A. L. Levin conceived the property as a one-stop shopping center influenced by Farmers Market in the Fairfax district, placing small businesses around courtyards within a 30,000-square-foot complex. Crawford used board-and-batten siding, gambrel roofs and divided-light windows to recall American and English country marketplaces at a time when horseback arrivals still occurred in Brentwood. The mart later faced an uncertain period as vacancies increased, and James S. Rosenfield acquired the property in 2003 through a transaction valued at $30 million before undertaking restoration. The surviving complex preserves a postwar retail model built around independently scaled storefronts and shared outdoor space near Bundy's San Vicente crossing. Continue south to Expo/Bundy Station, where passenger rail returned in 2016 to a transportation right-of-way whose origins reach the nineteenth century. Rail service through the site began in 1875, decades before surrounding West Los Angeles reached its present density, and the later Exposition corridor carried successive railroad operations before passenger service disappeared. Metro rebuilt the crossing as an elevated E Line station 30 feet above Bundy Drive, using an island platform between two tracks and retained-fill approaches extending toward Barrington Avenue and Centinela Avenue. The station opened on May 20, 2016 as part of the Expo Line extension to Santa Monica, restoring passenger rail between Downtown and the coast after more than six decades. Its elevated structure now marks one of Bundy Drive's sharpest changes in scale, placing regional rail infrastructure directly above the Westside street grid. Conclude at Santa Monica Airport, whose eastern edge meets the continuation of Bundy Drive near Airport Avenue. Aviation activity began on the property during the late 1910s, and Clover Field took its name from Greayer Clover, a Los Angeles aviator killed during a 1918 training flight in France. The field was formally dedicated in 1923 and became a major base for Donald Douglas's aircraft enterprise, placing Santa Monica inside Southern California's rapidly expanding aerospace industry. Douglas developed the DC-1 there, whose first flight took place on July 1, 1933 and initiated the engineering lineage leading to the DC-2 and DC-3. The immense experimental XB-19 made its first flight from the airport on June 27, 1941 before 45,000 spectators, demonstrating the scale the Douglas operation had reached before wartime production accelerated further. Douglas remained associated with the property until shifting operations toward Long Beach during the 1950s, leaving an aviation landscape whose industrial history reached far beyond Santa Monica. The progression moves from Crawford's 1948 neighborhood marketplace through the restoration of passenger rail above Bundy Drive and culminates at the former Douglas aviation field, connecting three successive forms of Westside development through commerce, metropolitan transportation and aerospace engineering.
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