Why Center Drive matters.
Center Drive is a corporate corridor where Westchester's postwar character meets a late twentieth-century business district created from Howard Hughes holdings beside one of Southern California's busiest freeway interchanges.
Running through Westchester between Playa Vista and Fox Hills, the curving office corridor follows the interior of Howard Hughes Center between Sepulveda Boulevard and Centinela Avenue, wrapping around a compact district bounded by Interstate 405 and Howard Hughes Parkway. Broad setbacks and landscaped slopes separate the roadway from office buildings positioned on elevated parcels above the freeway approaches. Curving segments replace the surrounding orthogonal street grid as Center Drive changes elevation around the triangular property and connects with Park Terrace and the internal circulation system. High-rise offices concentrate near the western and northern portions of the route, with shorter buildings occupying parcels toward its eastern reaches. The result is a corridor whose curved alignment, elevated office sites and freeway-edge geography reveal a business district planned as a self-contained Westside center during the closing decades of the twentieth century.
What defines Center Drive.
Center Drive is best known for forming the internal spine of Howard Hughes Center, a 69-acre Westchester development conceived during the 1980s on land held by Howard Hughes and his estate since the 1940s. Early plans contemplated a vast office and hotel complex at Sepulveda Boulevard and Centinela Avenue, with environmental review beginning in 1983 and a draft proposal encompassing 2.3 million square feet of offices alongside a 600-room hotel or an alternate configuration containing 1.8 million square feet of offices and 1,500 hotel rooms. Howard Hughes Properties advanced the project through Summa Corporation as Los Angeles's Westside office market expanded around Interstate 405 and Los Angeles International Airport. Tooley & Co. created Tooley West in 1985 specifically to manage development of the complex, then projected as 3 million square feet of low-, mid- and high-rise offices with a completed value near $500 million. Los Angeles authorized a development agreement with Howard Hughes Properties in 1986, setting a maximum of 2.7 million square feet of commercial office development alongside retail, fitness and hotel components. A Superior Court ruling in 1987 reversed a municipal density variance associated with the project, forcing another chapter in a development process that extended across multiple ownership periods. The first tower rose during the initial development phase, giving the largely vacant property its first major vertical element. A second office building followed on Center Drive in July 1992, and a health club on Park Terrace reached completion in September 1993. A five-story medical office building joined the complex in November 1997. Arden Realty acquired the remaining development rights from Howard Hughes Properties in April 1998 and engaged Lowe Enterprises to manage construction of the unfinished office program. Center Drive emerged through a prolonged sequence of planning, litigation, financing and phased construction that converted Hughes-held acreage into a substantial Westside employment district.
Arden Realty's arrival initiated the infrastructure campaign that completed the roadway itself and unlocked the remaining Center Drive parcels. The company secured permission in April 1998 for sewer and storm-drain work inside the Center Drive right-of-way, completing those systems in April 1999. Another permit issued in November 1999 covered construction of the roadway between Park Terrace and Howard Hughes Parkway, including a crossing above the southbound Interstate 405 ramps. Caltrans separately authorized the bridge spanning those freeway approaches, and the structure reached completion in March 2000. The Center Drive roadbed followed in August, giving the office district a continuous internal connection through terrain fragmented by freeway infrastructure. A ten-story, 233,414-square-foot office building at 6060 Center Drive reached completion that November as the new roadway opened additional portions of the property to development. Twelve-story 6080 Center Drive followed in 2001, and 6100 Center Drive entered construction during the next phase as Arden assembled a cluster of large office buildings around the newly completed street. By 2006 the Center Drive portfolio included 288,000 square feet at 6080, 286,000 square feet at 6100, 103,000 square feet at 6601 and 318,000 square feet in the principal tower, placing more than 995,000 square feet of office space in four buildings bearing Center Drive addresses. The roadway became the physical armature of a development whose later phases depended on bridges, drainage systems and new street construction to convert an isolated freeway-edge property into a connected business campus.
How Center Drive fits.
Center Drive works as the anchor for an outing connecting Barton Myers's Westchester high-rise, a retail complex conceived around cinema and freeway access and the surviving aircraft plant where Howard Hughes pursued some of the most ambitious engineering projects of his career.
Begin at Howard Hughes Tower, the first major building completed within the business center and the architectural statement that established its skyline presence in 1987. Canadian-born architect Barton Myers designed the 16-story structure at 6701 Center Drive West as the flagship for the projected 69-acre complex, marking his first major completed building in Los Angeles after an established career in Toronto. The building contained more than 313,000 square feet and later carried tenants including Blue Shield of California, Perot Systems, Univision and the National Football League. Prudential Insurance owned the tower before Arden Realty purchased it for $53 million in 1999, when the building was 80 percent occupied and Arden renamed it Howard Hughes Tower. Its height and freeway-facing position made Myers's building the visual marker for a development that subsequently filled with lower office blocks around Center Drive. Continue to HHLA, developed by J. H. Snyder Company as the entertainment component of Howard Hughes Center and completed in 2001. The original Promenade at Howard Hughes Center encompassed 250,000 square feet with an 18-screen theater containing 4,250 seats, retail space and restaurants, inserting a public entertainment destination into a campus conceived primarily around offices. Passco acquired the 248,000-square-foot property for $95 million in 2005, when the Bridge cinema, Borders and Nordstrom Rack anchored the complex. Laurus purchased the property a decade later and commissioned Jerde Partnership to redesign it through a $30 million campaign centered on new courtyards, landscaping, outdoor gathering areas and a pedestrian crossing over Center Drive. A later renovation reached $35 million, and the property changed hands again in 2023 for $80 million after its rebranding as HHLA. The succession of redesigns captures the shift from automobile-oriented entertainment center toward a more pedestrian-focused commercial district as nearby Playa Vista intensified. Conclude at Hughes Aircraft Historic District, where Howard Hughes established an aircraft plant after purchasing 380 acres of Ballona Wetlands property in 1940. The first facility encompassed 60,000 square feet beside a grass runway, forming the nucleus of an industrial complex devoted to experimental aircraft and helicopter development. Hughes engineers designed the immense HK-1 Hercules flying boat there, and Buildings 14, 15 and 16 became associated with assembly of the aircraft later known as the Spruce Goose. The surviving hangar contains immense wood structural members spanning one of the largest enclosed open volumes in Los Angeles, preserving the scale demanded by Hughes's wartime aviation program. Ratkovich Company acquired the industrial district in 2010 and rehabilitated its surviving buildings as Hercules Campus, bringing technology, media and entertainment companies into former aircraft facilities. Google later leased the 319,000-square-foot Spruce Goose hangar after acquiring adjacent land for $120 million, extending the property's engineering lineage into a new technological era. The progression moves from Myers's 1987 flagship tower through a turn-of-the-century entertainment complex repeatedly reshaped around Center Drive and culminates inside Hughes's surviving aircraft works, connecting the corporate district bearing his name with the aviation enterprise that made the surrounding Westside acreage historically consequential.
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