La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles

Why you should experience La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles, California.

La Brea Avenue is a storied corridor where Mid-Wilshire's metropolitan character meets Rancho-era landholding, oil-field expansion and a north-south route cutting from Hollywood through the central basin toward the Baldwin Hills.

Running through Mid-Wilshire between Hollywood and West Adams, the southbound corridor follows the eastern side of the historic Rancho La Brea from Sunset Boulevard across Melrose Avenue, Beverly Boulevard, 3rd Street, Wilshire Boulevard, Olympic Boulevard and Pico Boulevard before continuing toward the hills south of Interstate 10. North of Beverly, the avenue moves through tightly assembled commercial blocks where shallow storefronts, production buildings and apartments form a nearly continuous street wall against the flatter ground below Hollywood. Around Wilshire, larger office buildings and broad corner parcels interrupt that scale as La Brea crosses one of Central Los Angeles's principal east-west axes and approaches the long residential blocks of Hancock Park. South of Pico, commercial frontage gradually gives way to lower industrial buildings and residential side streets before the roadway rises through the Baldwin Hills, where the surrounding grid breaks against steep slopes and the basin opens into long views northward. The result is a corridor whose dramatic changes in grade, building scale and parcel form expose the geographic breadth of Los Angeles across a single north-south line.

What you should know about La Brea Avenue.

La Brea Avenue is best known for carrying the name of Rancho La Brea, the 4,439-acre Mexican land grant awarded to the Rocha family in 1828 across territory that later encompassed substantial portions of Central Los Angeles. La brea means “the tar” in Spanish, referring to the natural asphalt deposits that surfaced across the rancho and had long been used for waterproofing. Questions surrounding the Rocha title intensified after California statehood, and attorney and surveyor Henry Hancock acquired much of the property amid the resulting financial difficulties during the 1860s. The northern roadway was initially called Plummer Street after English-born sea captain John C. Plummer, who purchased 160 acres from Hancock in 1874. Henry Hancock died in 1883, leaving an estate whose land and mineral wealth subsequently passed through his family. His son George Allan Hancock formed the Hancock Oil Company in 1907 and developed petroleum deposits beneath the former rancho, generating revenue that helped retire debt on the property and finance later ventures. The north-south road had already acquired a practical role around the turn of the century as a connection between the oil wells and the railroad facilities in Hollywood. Plummer Street received the La Brea name in 1906, permanently tying the avenue to the geological resource and nineteenth-century landholding from which much of the surrounding district developed. As petroleum income declined and Los Angeles land values rose, the Hancock family increasingly shifted former oil acreage toward urban development, placing the corridor at the center of the rancho's conversion into the modern city.

Expansion southward turned that former oil-field road into a metropolitan artery during Los Angeles's explosive automobile-era growth. By 1927, plans called for La Brea to extend from Jefferson Boulevard through the Baldwin Hills toward Inglewood as a 100-foot-wide avenue, making the roadway part of a coordinated campaign to open and enlarge major streets across southwestern Los Angeles. The proposed route confronted topography absent from the older northern section, requiring a direct passage through the low Baldwin Hills before reaching the flatter Inglewood plain. Completion created an unusually long north-south connection between Hollywood, Mid-Wilshire, West Adams and communities beyond the Los Angeles boundary. The avenue eventually reached 21 miles when measured with its continuation through Inglewood, where the roadway meets Century Boulevard and continues south as Hawthorne Boulevard. Its passage through the Baldwin Hills produced one of the corridor's sharpest physical transitions, carrying traffic from the rectilinear central basin into a narrow cut framed by rising slopes. North of the hills, successive commercial strips developed around major east-west intersections as automobile ownership reorganized business geography away from older streetcar nodes. The route later gained another transportation layer at Exposition Boulevard, where electric passenger rail returned to the crossing on Metro's E Line in 2012. La Brea's evolution from a short rancho road into a basin-spanning arterial consequently followed the city's movement from petroleum extraction and speculative subdivision through mass automobile ownership and renewed rail transportation.

How to fold La Brea Avenue into your trip.

La Brea Avenue works as the anchor for an outing connecting a foundational Hollywood production lot, a Machine Age automobile-service building and an early shopping center created for the residential growth surrounding the Baldwin Hills.

Begin at Charlie Chaplin Studio, where Chaplin purchased a five-acre property near Sunset Boulevard in 1917 after signing his lucrative First National contract and needing a permanent production base. Meyer & Holler designed six street-facing buildings to resemble an English village, screening the working stages behind architecture deliberately conceived to temper neighborhood objections to industrial filmmaking. The studio opened in 1918 and became the production base for The Kid, The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times and The Great Dictator. Widening La Brea in 1929 forced several buildings along the avenue to be physically shifted 15 feet backward. Chaplin sold the property in 1953; later occupants included Kling Studios, Red Skelton, CBS and A&M Records, with Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss converting the complex into a major recording facility during the 1960s. Los Angeles granted the property Historic-Cultural Monument status in 1969, and the Jim Henson Company acquired it in 2000. Continue to Firestone Tire and Service Center, completed at La Brea Avenue and 9th Street in 1937 as a prototype automobile facility for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. The Streamline Moderne building translated automotive speed into architecture through long horizontal bands, rounded corners and a low profile wrapping the intersection. Its service bays and prominent corner position belonged to an era when tire companies developed purpose-built facilities along heavily traveled urban arteries. Los Angeles later designated the building for its architectural significance, preserving an unusually intact piece of La Brea's automobile economy. Conclude at Baldwin Hills Shopping Center, developed on the west side of La Brea south of Rodeo Road between 1948 and 1953. Architect Robert Alexander designed the linear center to serve Baldwin Hills Village and the surrounding postwar residential districts, arranging storefronts behind diagonal parking with a larger parking area at the rear. Architectural writers Geoffrey Baker and Bruno Funaro selected the project for Shopping Centers: Design and Operation, presenting it as a model of the emerging neighborhood shopping-center type. Its placement beside a major arterial joined retail directly to automobile circulation and the residential growth spreading across the northern foot of the Baldwin Hills. The progression moves from Meyer & Holler's purpose-built film complex through Firestone's Streamline Moderne automobile architecture and culminates in Robert Alexander's postwar retail center, connecting motion-picture production, motor culture and metropolitan commerce along La Brea Avenue.

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