Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles

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

Fairfax Avenue is a storied corridor where the Fairfax District's Jewish cultural character meets interwar urban expansion, successive immigrant communities and a north-south commercial spine that became one of twentieth-century Los Angeles's most recognizable neighborhood streets.

Running through the Fairfax District between West Hollywood and Carthay, the north-south corridor follows a long urban line from Sunset Boulevard across Melrose Avenue, Beverly Boulevard, 3rd Street, Wilshire Boulevard and Olympic Boulevard before continuing toward Pico Boulevard and Mid-City. North of Beverly Boulevard, closely spaced storefronts create a low-rise street wall surrounded by apartment buildings and compact residential blocks. Around Third Street, the avenue expands beside larger parcels whose scale interrupts the finer commercial grain farther north. Southward, Fairfax crosses the denser metropolitan landscape surrounding Wilshire Boulevard before narrowing through residential districts approaching Pico Boulevard. The result is a corridor whose changing building scale and commercial intensity expose several distinct stages in the westward development of Central Los Angeles.

What you should know about Fairfax Avenue.

Fairfax Avenue is best known for becoming the commercial center of a Jewish community that moved west across Los Angeles during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Portions of the avenue remained unpaved until 1919, and substantial commercial construction did not arrive until the 1930s. Residential subdivisions surrounding the street had begun attracting Jewish households during the 1920s and 1930s as families moved beyond the older Jewish center in Boyle Heights. The shift accelerated after World War II, when Fairfax between Beverly Boulevard and Rosewood Avenue developed a dense concentration of Jewish bakeries, delicatessens, butchers, markets, bookstores, clothing shops and religious institutions. Solomon's Bookstore opened at 445 North Fairfax Avenue in 1948 and became a long-running source of Jewish books and gifts. Norty's Music Center followed nearby in 1954, later becoming Hatikvah Music and specializing in Jewish recordings. The surrounding Beverly Fairfax residential district contained 463 identified properties, including 366 contributing buildings, with Spanish Colonial Revival, Chateauesque, Tudor Revival, Colonial Revival, Monterey Revival, Art Deco and Streamline Moderne architecture concentrated across apartment blocks developed principally during the interwar years. The absence of restrictive covenants across portions of the district helped make the area accessible to Jewish residents excluded elsewhere, including refugees from Nazi persecution and Holocaust survivors who settled there after World War II. By 1961, more than 60 percent of the Beverly Fairfax district's population was Jewish. Orthodox Jewish households strengthened their presence beginning during the 1980s, extending a community history that had already reshaped the commercial meaning of Fairfax Avenue for half a century.

A separate architectural chapter developed at Beverly Boulevard as the neighborhood's rapid interwar growth generated demand for entertainment and professional space. Architect Woodbury C. Pennell designed the Fairfax Theatre Building in 1929-1930 as a reinforced-concrete Art Deco complex combining a cinema, street-level shops and second-floor offices. Its Beverly Boulevard elevation used angled parapets, reeded pilasters and a tower conceived as a miniature skyscraper, originally crowned by 15 neon tubes descending from a circular element to create an illuminated globe. The theater entrance received a marquee carried by iron braces, with a coffered underside containing sunburst ornament and individual lamps. The surrounding business district grew largely between the 1930s and 1950s, producing the continuous low storefront scale associated with the central avenue. The Fairfax Theatre itself operated for eight decades before closing in 2010, surviving long after neighborhood cinemas disappeared from many Los Angeles commercial streets. Its location at Beverly Boulevard formed the southern gateway to the most concentrated Jewish business blocks, joining an entertainment building conceived for a newly developing automobile suburb with the commercial community that subsequently defined the avenue.

How to fold Fairfax Avenue into your trip.

Fairfax Avenue works as the anchor for an outing connecting an interwar school campus created for a rapidly developing western district, a Depression-era public market born on former dairy and oil land and an automobile museum occupying a transformed department store at Wilshire Boulevard.

Begin at Fairfax High School, founded in 1924 on a 28-acre campus designed by Parkinson & Parkinson in the Spanish Colonial Revival style. The school was conceived partly around agricultural and mechanical education, with early programs encompassing landscape gardening, forestry, architecture and agronomy. Principal Rae G. Van Cleve recalled that 38,000 loads of dirt were obtained to raise the Melrose Avenue frontage by 22 inches before construction, a striking response to the physical conditions of the site. The original ensemble centered on a rotunda and auditorium, with a reflecting pool forming part of the formal approach. Major rebuilding during the 1960s replaced much of the original campus, yet preservation retained the historic auditorium and rotunda. Those surviving elements preserve the work of John and Donald Parkinson inside an institution that opened just as residential construction was accelerating across the surrounding district. Continue to Original Farmers Market, whose site began as part of two dairy farms acquired by A. F. Gilmore and a partner in 1880. Gilmore took control of a 256-acre ranch after the partnership divided its holdings a decade later, then discovered oil 1900 during drilling intended to secure water for an expanded dairy herd. By the Depression, much of the property stood available for new uses. Entrepreneurs Fred Beck and Roger Dahlhjelm approached E. B. Gilmore with a proposal allowing farmers to sell directly from the property, and in July 1934 a dozen farmers and several merchants began trading from trucks at 3rd Street and Fairfax Avenue. Permanent stalls followed by October. The Clock Tower arrived in 1948, carrying the phrase “An Idea” in recognition of the concept that had converted former ranch and oil-field land into an enduring Los Angeles marketplace. Conclude at Petersen Automotive Museum, founded by publishing entrepreneur Robert E. Petersen and his wife Margie on June 11, 1994. The museum occupies a 1962 department-store building originally designed by Welton Becket at Fairfax Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard. Robert Petersen had built a publishing empire beginning with Hot Rod in 1948, making the museum an institutional extension of Southern California's deeply rooted automobile culture. A $90 million reconstruction completed in 2015 radically altered the property, with Kohn Pedersen Fox wrapping the original building in sweeping stainless-steel ribbons. Twenty-five rotating exhibition spaces now occupy the redesigned interior, with more than 150 vehicles displayed across the museum. The progression moves from Parkinson & Parkinson's 1924 educational campus through a farmers market created from former ranch and oil land and culminates in Petersen's automobile collection inside a reworked Becket department store, connecting institutional growth, Depression-era enterprise and Southern California motoring culture along Fairfax Avenue.

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