Why you should experience the Fairfax District in Los Angeles, California.
Fairfax District is a cosmopolitan enclave where Central Los Angeles's westward expansion meets Jewish cultural history, interwar apartment streets and commercial corridors that became enduring centers of food, entertainment and immigrant enterprise.
Positioned between Beverly Grove, Melrose, and Mid-Wilshire, the neighborhood occupies a dense section of the Los Angeles basin where residential blocks extend between Beverly Boulevard and the commercial arteries approaching Wilshire Boulevard. Spanish Colonial Revival duplexes, Tudor Revival apartment houses, courtyard buildings and modest single-family residences create a predominantly low-rise fabric developed across compact parcels during the district's principal interwar building period. Fairfax Avenue supplies the primary encounter through a linear concentration of storefronts whose narrow frontages preserve the scale of twentieth-century neighborhood commerce amid increasingly substantial development nearby. Beverly Boulevard creates a secondary east-west passage across broader commercial blocks before adjoining streets quickly return to closely spaced residences and mature landscaping. The result is a neighborhood whose intimate residential scale and unusually concentrated commercial streets preserve the physical setting in which Jewish Los Angeles established one of its most consequential twentieth-century centers.
What you should know about the Fairfax District.
Fairfax District is best known for becoming the principal westward center of Jewish commerce and community life as Jewish Angelenos moved from Boyle Heights toward neighborhoods surrounding Fairfax Avenue during the 1920s, 1930s and postwar decades. Residential construction accelerated during the 1920s across an area without the racial covenants that excluded Jewish households from numerous Los Angeles subdivisions. The Beverly Fairfax residential district began developing in 1922 and accumulated Spanish Colonial Revival, Tudor Revival, Chateauesque, Colonial Revival, Monterey Revival, Art Deco and Streamline Moderne architecture through the early 1950s. Commercial growth followed along Fairfax Avenue during the 1930s, then expanded substantially after World War II as kosher butchers, bakeries, delicatessens, markets, bookstores and clothing merchants served the surrounding population. Fairfax Theatre had opened in 1929 as one of the district's earliest major commercial buildings and became a fundraising center for Jewish congregations and organizations, including Etz Jacob and Fairfax Temple in 1933 and Western Jewish Institute in 1934. Solomon's Bookstore opened on Fairfax Avenue in 1948, and Norty's Music Center followed in 1954 before specializing in Jewish music as Hatikvah Music. Canter's joined the corridor after the Canter family shifted west from its Boyle Heights operation, eventually moving into the former Esquire Theatre in 1953 and expanding into neighboring property before opening the Kibitz Room in 1961. Diamond Bakery entered its long-standing Fairfax location in 1957, reinforcing a commercial concentration whose food businesses became inseparable from the district's cultural reputation. By 1961, Jewish residents constituted more than sixty percent of the Beverly Fairfax district, including families who had escaped Nazi persecution and Holocaust survivors who settled there after World War II. Fairfax Avenue consequently became more than a retail corridor: its theaters, religious fundraising, specialty businesses and family enterprises formed the commercial infrastructure of a major Jewish population shift across twentieth-century Los Angeles.
The Gilmore family's acreage around 3rd Street created a separate concentration of commerce, sports and broadcasting that reshaped the southern side of Fairfax during the same decades. A. F. Gilmore and a partner purchased two dairy farms in 1880, and Gilmore assumed control of a 256-acre ranch when they divided their holdings ten years later. Drilling intended to locate water struck oil 1900, converting dairy ground into the Gilmore oil field before urban expansion restricted large-scale derrick operations. Fred Beck and Roger Dahlhjelm approached E. B. Gilmore during the Depression with a proposal allowing farmers to sell produce directly from trucks, and a dozen farmers joined several merchants when Farmers Public Market opened in July 1934. Permanent stalls appeared within months as restaurants, grocers and service businesses joined the property. Gilmore Stadium opened during the same year as an 18,000-seat venue associated with midget-car racing and the Los Angeles Bulldogs, followed by Gilmore Field in 1938 as the home of the Hollywood Stars baseball club. The Gilmore Gas-a-teria joined the complex in 1938 as an early self-service filling station, and Gilmore Drive-In arrived in 1948. CBS purchased the stadium property in 1950, demolished the venue and commissioned William Pereira and Charles Luckman to create Television City across the 25-acre site. The first broadcast originated there on October 3, 1952, followed by a November dedication attended by figures including Fletcher Bowron, Art Linkletter, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Rabbi Edgar Magnin, placing national television production on ground that had passed within seventy years through dairy farming, petroleum extraction, produce commerce and professional sports.
How to fold the Fairfax District into your trip.
Fairfax District works as the anchor for an outing connecting a survivor-founded Holocaust institution, Los Angeles County's independent art museum and a former department store transformed by Renzo Piano into the country's largest museum devoted to moviemaking.
Begin at Holocaust Museum LA, founded in 1961 after a group of Holocaust survivors discovered during conversations that they possessed photographs, personal objects and other artifacts carried from prewar Europe and resolved to create a permanent home for them. The institution became the first survivor-founded Holocaust museum in the United States, combining preservation of those personal objects with commemoration of family members murdered during the Holocaust. Its permanent Pan Pacific Park home opened on October 14, 2010 in a building by Hagy Belzberg whose architecture descends into the landscape, and the project received AIA honors for architecture and interior architecture alongside a Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission Design Honor Award. Continue to Los Angeles County Museum of Art, whose institutional lineage begins with the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art established in Exposition Park in 1910. The art division became an independent institution in 1961 and opened its Wilshire Boulevard campus in 1965 with the Ahmanson Building, Hammer Building and 600-seat Bing Theater. Expansion brought the Anderson Building in 1986 and Bruce Goff's Pavilion for Japanese Art in 1988, extending a collection spanning numerous cultures and historical periods across a campus whose development mirrored Los Angeles's emergence as an international arts center. Conclude at Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, occupying the former May Company building completed in 1939 at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. Architect Albert C. Martin Sr. designed the Streamline Moderne department store as the western anchor of the Miracle Mile, giving its corner cylinder a skin of 350,000 glass mosaic tiles backed with 24-karat gold foil. Renzo Piano Building Workshop restored the historic structure as the Saban Building and connected it by glass bridges to a new concrete-and-glass sphere containing the David Geffen Theater. More than 200,000 replacement gold-backed tiles came from Orsoni, the original Venetian manufacturer, during rehabilitation of the exterior. The progression moves from survivors safeguarding personal artifacts through a county art institution separated from its encyclopedic predecessor and culminates inside an architectural union of 1939 retail design and contemporary cinema culture, connecting memory, collecting and cultural preservation across the Fairfax-Wilshire corridor.
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