Larchmont Village, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Larchmont Village in Los Angeles, California.

Larchmont Village is a village-scaled enclave where Mid-Wilshire's residential character meets a compact 1920s commercial corridor, streetcar-era urban form and an unusually intact concentration of neighborhood storefronts created for the districts growing around it.

Positioned between Hancock Park, Windsor Square, and Melrose Hill, the neighborhood occupies a narrow north-south seam of Central Los Angeles where Larchmont Boulevard passes through low-rise residential blocks before concentrating commerce between 1st Street and Beverly Boulevard. One- and two-story brick and stucco buildings stand close to broad sidewalks beneath mature street trees, preserving a horizontal scale sharply distinct from the larger commercial corridors surrounding Mid-Wilshire. Larchmont Boulevard supplies the primary encounter through short storefronts arranged in close succession, with frequent entrances and shallow building depths concentrating activity along only a few blocks. Residential streets immediately east and west shift into California bungalows, Spanish Revival houses and Period Revival residences, tightening the transition between the shopping street and the domestic districts it was built to support. The result is a neighborhood whose unusually compact physical structure preserves the logic of an early Los Angeles streetcar shopping district within the much larger metropolitan fabric that subsequently grew around it.

What you should know about Larchmont Village.

Larchmont Village is best known for developing in 1921 as a purpose-built commercial center serving the residential districts expanding westward from Central Los Angeles. The street itself had carried the Glenwood name before becoming Larchmont Boulevard in 1912, and the surrounding territory remained sparsely developed during the following years. Hollywood Mineral Hot Springs near Melrose Avenue became an excursion destination during the World War I era, prompting the Los Angeles Railway to extend electric service north along Larchmont Boulevard in 1920. Julius J. La Bonte, a former Michigan ironworks businessman living nearby on Arden Boulevard, recognized the commercial possibilities created by that transportation link and the rapidly developing residential tracts surrounding it. La Bonte and business associate Charles Ramson purchased seven lots and pursued a business district planned for thirty stores between 1st Street and Beverly Boulevard. Construction began across the 100 and 200 blocks, and the principal early building at 126 through 148 North Larchmont used colored pressed brick with ornamental stucco work. Windsor Square Pharmacy, Larchmont Café, Larchmont Electric Company and Larchmont Motor Service Station occupied portions of the new development, placing household services and automobile commerce beside the electric railway. La Bonte also built a Mission-style theater seating 900 people and containing an organ valued near $40,000. Floodlights mounted on the railway power poles illuminated the boulevard as the business district grew beside the tracks, completing a concentrated commercial spine whose scale remains fundamental to Larchmont Village more than a century later.

Chevalier's Books opened on Larchmont Boulevard in January 1940 and became one of the commercial district's longest-running institutions, beginning under Joseph Chevalier as a lending library before developing into the independent bookstore that survives on the street. A different neighborhood institution emerged in 1963 when Jane Gilman and Dawne Goodwin created the Larchmont Chronicle, initially producing a twelve-page newspaper for communities surrounding the boulevard. The publication's first edition entered a part of Los Angeles that lacked a dedicated local newspaper despite its established residential population, and the Chronicle subsequently expanded its reach across Hancock Park, Windsor Square, Fremont Place, Brookside, Windsor Village and neighboring districts. Merchants created the Larchmont Boulevard Association in 1965, continuing a tradition of locally organized commercial activity that had characterized the street since its early development. Another durable institution arrived on June 17, 2001, when the first Larchmont Farmers Market assembled in the municipal lot on North Larchmont Boulevard, changing Sundays on a street whose businesses had previously generated far less activity that day. A Wednesday edition later joined the Sunday gathering, extending the market's presence within the commercial district. Chevalier's, the Chronicle and the farmers market span more than six decades of neighborhood history, giving the short boulevard institutions whose longevity reinforces the small commercial scale inherited from its 1921 origins.

How to fold Larchmont Village into your trip.

Larchmont Village works as the anchor for an outing connecting an early institution in Southern California women's education, a century-old center of West Coast tennis and the surviving Hollywood studio whose corporate lineage reaches into the formative years of feature filmmaking.

Begin at The Ebell of Los Angeles, an organization founded in 1894 under Harriet Williams Russell Strong to advance women's study of literature, art and science during an era of restricted educational access. Architect Sumner Hunt designed its present campus, opened in 1927 with a theater that became one of the city's enduring performance stages; the Art Salon followed in 1929 as an early Los Angeles gallery devoted to displaying work by women artists, and Henry Lion created the Fountain of Honor in 1930 in memory of relatives of Ebell members killed during World War I. Frances Gumm, later Judy Garland, performed on the Wilshire Ebell Theatre stage before MGM producer George Sidney in 1934, adding film history to an institution created four decades earlier around women's intellectual life. Continue to Los Angeles Tennis Club, founded in 1920 with Thomas Bundy as its first president and May Sutton Bundy, the first American woman to win Wimbledon singles, among the extraordinary tennis family associated with its beginnings. A Spanish-style clubhouse followed in 1923, and by 1927 the property contained seventeen courts, including a center court and stadium. The Pacific Southwest Championships began there that year and subsequently brought generations of major players to Los Angeles, with the club's competitive history extending through figures including Bill Tilden, Jack Kramer, Pancho Gonzales, Rod Laver, Arthur Ashe and Billie Jean King. Conclude at Paramount Pictures, whose lineage reaches to Adolph Zukor's 1912 Famous Players Film Company and Jesse L. Lasky's Hollywood production company. Their enterprises merged in 1916 as Famous Players-Lasky after Lasky's company had produced The Squaw Man, the first feature-length film made in Hollywood, and consolidation with Paramount's distribution operation produced the company that carries the Paramount name. Lasky oversaw construction of a new Hollywood studio lot in 1926, beginning the physical complex that subsequently expanded from 26 acres and four stages to 65 acres and thirty stages. Paramount remains the only major studio still operating within Hollywood itself, placing more than a century of filmmaking history immediately northeast of Larchmont Village. The progression moves from a women-led cultural institution through the competitive center that helped shape West Coast tennis and culminates at Hollywood's surviving major studio lot, connecting education, sport and motion-picture production across the districts surrounding Larchmont Village.

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