Why La Cienega Boulevard matters.
La Cienega Boulevard is a storied corridor where Beverly Grove's cosmopolitan character meets vanished wetlands, petroleum extraction and a north-south thoroughfare that became a major stage for Los Angeles dining, art and automobile culture.
Running through Beverly Grove between West Hollywood and Carthay, the southbound corridor follows the western edge of Central Los Angeles from Sunset Boulevard across Santa Monica Boulevard, Melrose Avenue, Beverly Boulevard, 3rd Street and Wilshire Boulevard before extending through Mid-City toward the Baldwin Hills. Between Santa Monica and Beverly, closely spaced storefronts, galleries, design businesses and low commercial buildings occupy a broad roadway framed by the dense apartment neighborhoods spreading east and west from the avenue. Approaching Third Street, larger retail properties and office buildings interrupt that intimate scale as the street enters flatter terrain once defined by persistent groundwater and drainage channels crossing the central basin. South of Wilshire, long commercial parcels gradually alternate with religious, residential and automotive properties before the avenue advances toward the Baldwin Hills, where its straight alignment breaks into a grade-separated passage through dramatically rising terrain. The result is a corridor whose changing scale, unusually broad roadway and passage from dense central neighborhoods into the Baldwin Hills reveal how a former wetland edge became one of Los Angeles's longest metropolitan streets.
What defines La Cienega Boulevard.
La Cienega Boulevard is best known for taking its name from the marshlands that once occupied the low basin between Beverly Hills and the Baldwin Hills. Francisco Ávila received Rancho Las Cienegas in 1823, and Vicente Sánchez received the neighboring Rancho Cienega o Paso de la Tijera in 1843, placing much of the future roadway within a landscape shaped by persistent wetlands and seasonal drainage. The Spanish ciénaga refers to a marsh or wetland, with the boulevard preserving a variant spelling inherited from the rancho name. Los Angeles announced the modern boulevard project in 1922 as surrounding territory entered rapid subdivision and automobile traffic created demand for longer cross-city roads. Portions were paved in 1923, yet the roadway still terminated at Olympic Boulevard in 1924 and remained incomplete across much of its projected route. Completion of the initial four-mile section between Washington and Santa Monica boulevards required six years. An oil well drilled near Beverly Boulevard before the roadway arrived created one of the strangest consequences of that expansion: when property owners donated land for La Cienega in 1927, they required the producing well to remain, forcing northbound and southbound traffic around an island containing the derrick. The well continued pumping for nearly two decades as commercial development approached, its hand wheel accumulating more than 204 million revolutions before demolition in 1946 cleared the roadway. La Cienega continued lengthening southward after World War II and reached El Segundo Boulevard in 1961, completing a route of 13 miles from the Sunset Strip toward the South Bay.
A concentrated stretch north of Beverly Boulevard entered a separate cultural history when dealers transformed inexpensive storefronts into the center of Los Angeles contemporary art. Esther Waggoner Robles opened Esther's Alley Gallery behind a La Cienega building in 1947, initially combining frames, crafts and modern design before developing a serious commercial art program. Felix Landau moved his operation from Melrose Avenue to La Cienega in 1951 and built an exhibition program encompassing Henry Moore, Sam Francis, Richard Diebenkorn and other American and European artists. Walter Hopps and Edward Kienholz founded Ferus Gallery at 736-A North La Cienega in 1957; Irving Blum replaced Kienholz the following year, and the gallery moved across the street to 723 North La Cienega. Ferus developed a roster including John Altoon, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, Ed Moses and Ed Ruscha, placing Southern California artists beside work arriving from New York. Blum presented Andy Warhol's first solo gallery exhibition of the Campbell's Soup Cans in 1962, giving the boulevard a direct role in the emergence of American Pop art. Monthly Monday evening art walks drew crowds through a district where as many as 25 or 30 galleries participated at peak periods, and 50 galleries operated along the boulevard during the 1960s. Artforum moved its offices above Ferus in 1965, two years before relocating to New York. La Cienega consequently became one of the principal addresses through which postwar Los Angeles art entered national cultural attention.
How La Cienega Boulevard fits.
La Cienega Boulevard works as the anchor for an outing connecting a vivacious Googie coffee shop, a postwar performance complex tied to experimental theater and cinema and a Jewish congregation whose campus grew alongside the surrounding Mid-Wilshire neighborhoods.
Begin at Norms La Cienega, completed in 1957 for restaurateur Norm Roybark at 470 North La Cienega Boulevard. Louis Armet and Eldon Davis designed the coffee shop around automobile visibility, translating Roybark's background as a car salesman into a building whose immense glazing placed customers on view like automobiles in a showroom. A dramatically upswept roof, horizontal diamond-shaped sign and exposed structural elements directed attention toward the property from moving cars, giving the compact restaurant an architectural presence far larger than its footprint. Roybark selected the site when the surrounding dining district was drawing thousands of customers nightly, placing an inexpensive coffee shop among far more elaborate establishments. The building became a major surviving example of Googie architecture and received Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument designation in 2015 after a demolition permit placed its future in doubt. Continue to Coronet Theatre Building, commissioned by Russian vaudeville dancer Frieda Berkoff Gellis and completed at 366 North La Cienega Boulevard in 1946 before opening in 1947. Lyle Nelson Barcume designed the Streamline Moderne complex with Late Moderne elements around a 272-seat theater, smaller performance room, cinema, storefronts, offices and dance studio. John Houseman's Pelican Productions opened its theatrical program with Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth starring Jane Wyatt and Keenan Wynn, followed that summer by Bertolt Brecht's Galileo with Charles Laughton and Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit. Paul Ballard's Hollywood Film Society simultaneously brought art cinema into the building, and Kenneth Anger's Fireworks received an early screening there. Doug Weston's original Troubadour occupied the smaller theater from 1957 through 1961, bringing folk music, jazz and Beat readings into the complex. Conclude at Temple Beth Am, whose institutional history on La Cienega began when the American Hebrew Institute purchased property at 1027 South La Cienega Boulevard in 1936 and erected its first building the following year. A religious school followed, and affiliation with the United Synagogue of America in 1946 accompanied rapid postwar growth. Rabbi Jacob Pressman arrived in 1950 and helped drive a major expansion campaign as the congregation acquired adjoining property. Groundbreaking for a new sanctuary took place in 1954, its cornerstone was laid in 1957 and the completed building entered use in 1958 after a construction campaign costing $440,000 unfurnished. The congregation adopted the Temple Beth Am name during that process, and membership reached 1,000 families by 1964. The progression moves from Armet and Davis's roadside architecture through Gellis and Barcume's theater complex and culminates in a congregation expanded through decades of institutional growth, connecting automobile culture, performing arts and Jewish community building along La Cienega Boulevard.
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