Cheviot Hills, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Cheviot Hills in Los Angeles, California.

Cheviot Hills is a verdant enclave where the Westside's early suburban character meets rolling residential terrain, curving streets and an architectural landscape created during Los Angeles's rapid expansion toward the Pacific.

Positioned between Century City, Rancho Park, and Castle Heights, the neighborhood occupies an elevated residential district extending through Motor Avenue, Cheviot Drive and Manning Avenue across rolling ground south of Pico Boulevard. Curvilinear roads, mature palms, deep setbacks and moderately scaled parcels give the interior blocks a garden-like character, with custom houses shifting among Colonial Revival, Tudor Revival, Mediterranean Revival, French Norman Revival and Ranch forms. Movement through Cheviot Hills follows streets that bend with the terrain, producing short sightlines within lower blocks before higher elevations open toward Century City, the Santa Monica Mountains and the Los Angeles basin. Concrete electrolier posts and surviving early street improvements reinforce the original subdivision pattern, giving the older core a physical consistency beneath nearly a century of architectural change. The result is a neighborhood whose rolling topography, curving roads, mature canopy and broad architectural range preserve the ambitions of West Los Angeles suburban development during the formative decades between the world wars.

What you should know about Cheviot Hills.

Cheviot Hills is best known for emerging in 1923 when Frans Nelson & Sons began converting a former barley field into an ambitious residential subdivision on the western outskirts of Los Angeles. The firm acquired the undeveloped property for $266,700 and opened Cheviot Hills on August 19, beginning lot sales that November before filing the principal subdivision map in May 1924. Frans Nelson, a Swedish-born former Nebraska banker who had already developed the 560-lot Fair Acres tract in Long Beach, entered the project with sons George and Harvey and committed more than $400,000 to streets, sidewalks, utilities and concrete electroliers. Engineer and builder E. E. Mix directed the physical preparation of the tract, where a workforce assisted by forty mules converted open agricultural ground into residential parcels arranged around the rolling terrain. The Scottish name carried directly into the streets, with Dunleer Drive, Glenbarr Avenue, Haddington Drive, Forrester Drive and other names extending the geographic theme across the subdivision. Nelson reinforced the residential concept through the Palomar Tennis Club, a six-acre development with tennis courts, a clubhouse and swimming facilities created near the new houses during the middle 1920s. Sales advanced rapidly once construction gathered momentum: by April 1927, 80 percent of the property had sold and seventy-one houses valued between $10,000 and $50,000 had already risen across the tract. The neighborhood continued filling through the 1930s as custom houses in multiple Period Revival styles gave the winding streets an architectural diversity uncommon within subdivisions built around a single development campaign. What began as an expensive speculative concept beyond the established city had become, within little more than a decade, among the residential districts carrying Los Angeles decisively westward.

Several adjoining subdivisions gradually expanded the geographic meaning of Cheviot Hills beyond the original Nelson tract. Country Club Highlands entered development in 1923 on former Rancho Rincón de los Bueyes acreage, followed by Monte Mar Vista in 1925 and Cheviot Knolls in 1938, each contributing another residential layer to the hills surrounding the original subdivision. Their separate names weakened during the second half of the twentieth century as the larger district became collectively associated with Cheviot Hills, leaving the 1923 core informally distinguished as Old Cheviot. Another substantial addition emerged east of Motor Avenue from acreage occupied for decades by the California Country Club, whose history reached to 1917 when Culver City founder Harry Culver helped organize a golf club on more than 100 acres of former rancho land. The club passed through several names and ownership groups, hosted golfers including Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan and eventually counted Frank Borzage, Fred MacMurray, Bö Roos and John Wayne among its owners. Hotelier Sandy Adler purchased the property from that group in 1950, ending the golf era and preparing the acreage for residential construction. California Country Club Estates replaced the fairways during the early 1950s, carrying postwar houses across ground whose open golf landscape had previously separated older residential tracts. The change extended Cheviot Hills eastward through a second major building period and added Ranch-era construction to a neighborhood whose western core had been shaped principally during the 1920s and 1930s. By the middle of the century, the district had acquired its enduring form through the accumulation of multiple subdivisions and the conversion of recreational acreage, joining two generations of Westside residential development within the hills south of Pico Boulevard.

How to fold Cheviot Hills into your trip.

Cheviot Hills works as the anchor for a daytime outing connecting Holocaust education, Cold War cultural history and the reinvention of a postwar movie house as a major center for contemporary theater.

Begin at Museum of Tolerance, which opened in February 1993 as an initiative of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and became one of Los Angeles's principal institutions devoted to Holocaust history, antisemitism and prejudice. The center named for Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal conceived the museum during a period when Holocaust denial and racial conflict were receiving renewed public attention, creating an institution built around historical confrontation and education. Its dedication on February 8, 1993 brought UNESCO Director General Federico Mayor to Los Angeles, and the museum subsequently expanded its reach through programs serving millions of students and adult participants. More than eight million people have entered the institution since its opening, placing a locally founded museum within an international effort to preserve Holocaust memory and examine the consequences of organized hatred. Continue south to Wende Museum, founded in 2002 to preserve cultural objects endangered by the political upheavals that followed the collapse of communist governments across Eastern Europe. The German word Wende, meaning a turning point or change, supplied the institution with a name tied directly to the historical rupture that produced its collection. Its holdings grew from objects discarded or dispersed after the fall of the Berlin Wall into a broad body of art, design, personal possessions and political artifacts connected with Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The institution established its permanent Culver City home in a former National Guard armory, giving Cold War objects a setting inside a repurposed American military building. Exhibitions have since moved beyond state propaganda and official culture into dissident art, private life and the competing political worlds that existed behind the Iron Curtain. Conclude at Kirk Douglas Theatre, which began as the Culver Theatre, a 1,160-seat Streamline Moderne movie house opened by Fox West Coast Theatres in 1947. Carl G. Moeller and Albert R. Walker shaped the building, with George Skouras associated with the vivacious decorative treatment surrounding its box office, marquee, terrazzo entrance and four-sided neon tower. The single-screen house became a triplex during the 1970s and later closed, leaving a deteriorated theater whose exterior still retained much of its postwar character. Kirk and Anne Douglas helped finance its revival, and architect Steven Ehrlich directed the conversion that reopened the building in 2004 as Center Theatre Group's 317-seat Westside stage. Productions originating there have subsequently reached Broadway, including Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo and Dana H., giving the former neighborhood cinema a new role in American theater. The progression moves from an institution confronting Holocaust history through a collection born from the collapse of Eastern European communism and culminates inside a 1947 cinema remade for contemporary performance, connecting three distinct forms of cultural preservation across the western basin.

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