Why Lafayette Park Place matters.
Lafayette Park Place is a storied corridor where Westlake's metropolitan character meets Wilshire Boulevard's first elite subdivision, early twentieth-century residential ambition and a short urban passage shaped by the westward expansion of Central Los Angeles.
Running through Westlake between Koreatown and Historic Filipinotown, the northbound corridor follows an irregular line from Hoover Street across Wilshire Boulevard and 6th Street before continuing through dense residential blocks toward 3rd Street. South of Wilshire, the roadway angles sharply through a compact collection of early commercial and residential buildings, with narrow parcels and courtyard forms breaking from the surrounding orthogonal grid. Around Sixth Street, the avenue enters a broader landscape where large institutional properties, mature trees and surviving early apartment buildings create pronounced shifts in setback and building scale within only a few hundred feet. Northward, the street narrows again among multistory apartments and closely spaced residential parcels whose density marks Westlake's evolution from detached houses into one of Central Los Angeles's most intensely inhabited districts. The result is a corridor whose changing alignment, compressed length and architectural variety condense more than a century of urban growth into a street that originated beside Los Angeles's first Wilshire Boulevard subdivision.
What defines Lafayette Park Place.
Lafayette Park Place is best known for combining pieces of separate nineteenth and early twentieth-century streets into a single route named for the Marquis de Lafayette. Henry Gaylord Wilshire purchased a 35-acre barley field west of Westlake Park in 1887 and joined his older brother William Benton Wilshire in developing the Wilshire Boulevard Tract during the 1890s. The brothers conceived an elite residential subdivision between two public green spaces and laid out a 120-foot-wide graveled boulevard across the tract. A shorter intersecting road received William Benton Wilshire's middle name and became Benton Boulevard, initially extending only between Sixth and Seventh streets. The subdivision was supplied with concrete curbs, sidewalks, generous residential lots and palms as the brothers sought affluent households moving beyond the older city center. Wilshire persuaded the City Council to prohibit heavy hauling, railways and streetcars on his namesake boulevard, protecting the residential character of the development during an era when electric lines were spreading rapidly across Los Angeles. Andrews Boulevard subsequently developed north of the tract and approached the same district from the opposite direction. Local property owners petitioned in 1920 to rename Andrews Boulevard after Lafayette, whose name had recently been adopted nearby following a campaign led by French Americans. Lafayette Park Place later absorbed the short Benton Boulevard segment, joining roads created through separate stages of Westlake's development into the present corridor.
The residential world surrounding the new street changed rapidly as Wilshire became a prestigious apartment and hotel address during the opening decades of the twentieth century. Large detached houses initially occupied prominent parcels around the original tract, yet rising land values encouraged progressively larger residential buildings after 1910. The Bryson rose nearby in 1913 as a ten-story apartment building designed by Frederick Noonan, signaling the extraordinary increase in density overtaking the former house lots. Another ambitious residence appeared at 310 South Lafayette Park Place in 1915, built in an Italian Renaissance mode for wealthy winter resident Charles McKinley and later acquired by mortuary proprietor Maytor McKinley in 1945. The house contained 17 rooms and occupied one of the increasingly rare estate-sized parcels surviving amid apartment construction. By the postwar decades, office development and institutional expansion were replacing additional remnants of the early residential district. The McKinley property stood vacant after Vari McKinley McCormac died in 1986, and plans emerged to divide the 13,000-square-foot residence into sections and transport it 50 miles by road to Chatsworth. That relocation never secured the house's survival on Lafayette Park Place; fire destroyed the remaining structure in 1994. The vanished mansion and surviving apartment buildings trace the corridor's transition from an enclave of private estates into a dense urban district within less than a century.
How Lafayette Park Place fits.
Lafayette Park Place works as the anchor for an outing connecting a Spanish Colonial Revival live-work complex, a Classical Revival library by Austin Whittlesey and a contemporary arts center assembled largely from repurposed shipping containers.
Begin at Granada Buildings, completed in 1927 at 672 South Lafayette Park Place as an unusual combination of shops, studios and residences. Kentucky-born journalist turned developer Franklin Harper designed the block-long Spanish Colonial Revival complex as four interconnected buildings organized around landscaped courtyards and passageways. More than 56,000 square feet accommodated 42 suites, with commercial or studio rooms below and residential quarters on mezzanine or upper levels. Photographer George Hurrell occupied Suite 9 early in his Hollywood career and photographed Ramon Novarro and Norma Shearer there before becoming one of the studio era's celebrated portraitists. The complex received Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument designation in 1981 and entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1986. A late-1980s rehabilitation returned the property to office and studio use and received a Los Angeles Conservancy Preservation Award in 1990. Continue to Felipe de Neve Branch Library, completed in 1929 from Austin Whittlesey's composition combining Mediterranean and Classical Revival architecture. The branch received the name of Felipe de Neve, the Spanish governor of Las Californias who oversaw the founding of Los Angeles in 1781. A symmetrical facade, tiled roof and formal garden setting distinguished the building from the larger commercial structures developing nearby. Structural concerns forced its closure in 1990, beginning a prolonged rehabilitation campaign. Altoon + Porter Architects designed a $2.3 million restoration that strengthened the original building and added two pavilions. National Register recognition arrived in 1987 and Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument designation followed in 1989. Conclude at HOLA Arts & Recreation Center, created for Heart of Los Angeles after the nonprofit outgrew facilities scattered across the Rampart neighborhood. HOLA had begun in 1989 and developed academic, athletic and arts programs with a particularly substantial music component. Berliner Architects designed the new center around prefabricated construction, arranging more than 40 repurposed shipping containers into a 25,000-square-foot complex. The containers arrived in 2018 and were assembled within two weeks, ultimately forming 18 classrooms, ensemble rooms, offices and a large performance pavilion. A 30-foot hangar door opens that pavilion toward an outdoor amphitheater, allowing the building to support performances connected with Youth Orchestra Los Angeles. The completed center opened in 2021 and Berliner's design received a Westside Urban Forum Design Award that year. The progression moves from Harper's courtyard live-work complex through Whittlesey's purpose-built branch library and culminates in Berliner Architects' container-based arts center, connecting creative work, public learning and youth music education along Lafayette Park Place.
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