La Brea, Los Angeles

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

La Brea is an architectural enclave where Mid-Wilshire's metropolitan character meets a north-south corridor shaped by Rancho La Brea, automobile-era commercial expansion and successive waves of residential development across the western Los Angeles basin.

Positioned between Hancock Park, Fairfax, and Mid-City, the neighborhood occupies the La Brea Avenue corridor through Central Los Angeles, where long commercial blocks cross Wilshire Boulevard before continuing through lower-scale residential and retail districts toward the south. Art Deco towers, Streamline Moderne storefronts, apartment courts and tightly spaced commercial buildings give the avenue pronounced changes in scale, with major intersections carrying taller structures above long stretches of one- and two-story frontage. La Brea Avenue supplies the primary encounter through an unusually direct north-south route whose architectural character shifts block by block as older neighborhood commerce gives way to larger Wilshire-era construction. Wilshire Boulevard creates a secondary passage across the district, widening the physical scale through substantial office buildings and former retail properties created for an increasingly automobile-oriented city. The result is a neighborhood whose streets compress the transformation of western Los Angeles from rancho ground and petroleum territory into one of the city's most architecturally varied twentieth-century commercial corridors.

What you should know about La Brea.

La Brea is best known for occupying ground once belonging to Rancho La Brea, the 4,400-acre Mexican land grant awarded to Antonio José Rocha in 1828 with continued public access to its naturally occurring asphalt. The Hancock family acquired the rancho during the nineteenth century, and Henry Hancock eventually divided portions as Los Angeles expanded westward. Petroleum became central to the property after G. Allan Hancock formed the Hancock Oil Company in 1907 and used oil income to consolidate family control over the remaining acreage. La Brea Avenue itself developed around the turn of the twentieth century as a service route connecting wells on the rancho with Hollywood, then the location of the nearest major railroad connection. Rising land values subsequently encouraged Hancock to shift attention from extraction toward real-estate development across former oil ground. The avenue consequently inherited an unusually direct relationship between petroleum production and urban expansion, beginning as infrastructure for an extractive landscape before becoming a major north-south commercial artery. Farther west, the asphalt deposits carried a much deeper chronology: William Denton recognized extinct animal fossils there in 1875, William Warren Orcutt and Frank Anderson began collecting significant specimens in the opening twentieth century, and University of California paleontologist John C. Merriam entered the scientific work in 1905. Los Angeles County received exclusive excavation rights from Hancock in 1913, and work through 1915 recovered more than 750,000 plant and animal specimens from 96 sites. Hancock donated 23 acres in 1924 for permanent preservation of the fossil locality, binding the La Brea name simultaneously to petroleum history, metropolitan development and one of the world's richest concentrations of Late Pleistocene life.

A. W. Ross redirected the district's twentieth-century development during the early 1920s after acquiring Wilshire Boulevard property between La Brea Avenue and San Vicente Boulevard for a commercial center designed around motorists. Skepticism surrounded the venture when the surrounding ground remained sparsely developed, yet Los Angeles automobile ownership and westward expansion supplied Ross with the population his project required. Commercial buildings were conceived to command attention from moving cars, replacing the pedestrian assumptions of older Downtown shopping streets with façades, signage and parking arrangements suited to Wilshire's traffic. Architectural ambition accompanied that commercial strategy, and the corridor accumulated Spanish Revival, Art Deco and Streamline Moderne buildings as increasingly substantial retailers and offices moved west. Meyer & Holler completed the E. Clem Wilson Building at Wilshire and La Brea between 1929 and 1930, placing a slender stepped Art Deco tower above a broad two-story retail base. The building belonged to a trio of major height-limit towers erected along the corridor during the same boom and became Meyer & Holler's final commission after the Great Depression ended the firm's operations. Welton Becket redesigned its ground-floor retail spaces in 1954, extending the building's architectural history into the postwar era without eliminating its original Art Deco lobby. Ross's automobile-oriented commercial district consequently transformed the La Brea intersection into the eastern gateway of Miracle Mile and helped move Los Angeles retail architecture away from the historic center toward a linear boulevard model inseparable from the automobile.

How to fold La Brea into your trip.

La Brea works as the anchor for an outing connecting a small institution born from Los Angeles's craft movement, a museum devoted to the automobile and the restored department store that became the country's largest museum devoted to moviemaking.

Begin at Craft Contemporary, whose origins reach to painter Edith Robinson Wyle's 1965 creation of The Egg and the Eye inside a three-story 1930 building by architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood. Wyle combined a restaurant centered on egg dishes with a gallery devoted to international craft, an unconventional pairing that developed during a period when culturally specific museum practice was gaining greater institutional presence across Southern California. The organization became the Craft & Folk Art Museum in 1973 and later adopted the Craft Contemporary name, carrying Wyle's original emphasis on craft into a museum whose history began during the same year that major cultural institutions were reshaping Wilshire Boulevard. Continue to Petersen Automotive Museum, founded by magazine publisher Robert E. Petersen and Margie Petersen on June 11, 1994. Its home began as a 1962 department store designed by Welton Becket, giving the institution a physical connection to the automobile-oriented retail culture that had transformed Wilshire during the preceding decades. A $90 million renovation completed in 2015 brought Kohn Pedersen Fox's sweeping stainless-steel exterior ribbons around the existing structure, radically altering the building without removing its underlying Becket design; more than 150 vehicles occupy 25 rotating exhibitions inside. Conclude at Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, where the 1939 May Company building by Albert C. Martin Sr. was restored as the Saban Building and joined to a new spherical structure designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop. The original department store marked the western end of Miracle Mile through long horizontal lines, streamlined curves and a cylindrical corner faced with hundreds of thousands of gold-backed glass mosaic tiles. Renzo Piano's project retained the 250,000-square-foot historic building and connected it by glass bridges to a 45,000-square-foot concrete-and-glass sphere containing the David Geffen Theater and an elevated terrace beneath its dome. More than 200,000 replacement gold-backed tiles were produced by Orsoni, the Italian manufacturer responsible for the original pieces, bringing the restored corner cylinder into the museum completed for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The progression moves from Wyle's intimate 1965 craft institution through an automobile museum occupying a former department store and culminates in the adaptive transformation of the May Company into a major institution devoted to motion pictures, connecting craft, automotive culture and cinema along the commercial geography surrounding La Brea.

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