Ocean Park Boulevard, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Ocean Park Boulevard in Los Angeles, California.

Ocean Park Boulevard is a layered corridor where Mar Vista's Westside character meets early Ocean Park expansion, hillside residential streets and a continuous route descending from inland Los Angeles toward the Pacific.

Running through Mar Vista between Palms and Santa Monica, the Westside corridor follows a predominantly east-west line from National Boulevard across Centinela Avenue toward Lincoln Boulevard and the coastal blocks beyond, traversing rolling terrain before descending toward the ocean. Eastern stretches climb and fall through low-rise residential districts where detached houses, apartment buildings and mature street trees occupy slopes that reveal the underlying contours of the Westside. Traveling west brings increasingly concentrated neighborhood commerce around major intersections before the roadway crosses into Santa Monica and begins a more pronounced descent through Sunset Park. The final approach toward Main Street passes through smaller blocks and older residential fabric before the corridor reaches the broad coastal plain immediately inland from the beach. The result is a corridor whose rolling topography, changing block dimensions, low-rise development and sustained descent toward the Pacific connect inland Westside neighborhoods with one of Southern California's oldest coastal communities.

What you should know about Ocean Park Boulevard.

Ocean Park Boulevard is best known for carrying an early Ocean Park roadway inland after a 1917 extension opened previously isolated residential land between 4th Street and the beach. The coastal segment originated partly as Dwight Avenue within George Hart and A. R. Fraser's 1900 Central Beach Tract, taking its first name from George Hart's brother Dwight Howard Hart. Dwight Avenue initially terminated at Neilson before an extension carried it east to Main Street, and Central Avenue approached the same district from inland Santa Monica. A major 1917 street project pushed Central Avenue west across 4th Street, joined it with Dwight Avenue and opened adjoining parcels to residential construction. The roadway intervention immediately altered the surrounding neighborhood: most houses in the later Fourth Street Corner Historic District rose between 1917 and 1925, including Craftsman bungalows, Mediterranean Revival residences and an unusual bungalow court. Central Avenue received the Ocean Park Boulevard name in 1926, consolidating the earlier street segments beneath a designation derived from the coastal community through which they passed.

A second major physical chapter unfolded during the middle twentieth century as the western boulevard was widened into a substantially larger automobile route. Redevelopment activity during the 1960s removed structures around its coastal end, widened the roadway and reconfigured its crossing at 4th Street with a vehicular bridge and underpass, imposing a new transportation scale on a district developed around small houses and pedestrian blocks. Decades later, the western section underwent another substantial redesign. Work between Lincoln and Cloverfield boulevards in 2008 added bicycle lanes, left-turn pockets and curbside parking; average annual severe-injury collisions subsequently declined 71 percent on that segment. Construction beginning in December 2011 rebuilt the section from Neilson Way to Lincoln Boulevard with wider sidewalks, stormwater biofilter swales, infiltration areas, more than 100 new trees, landscaped medians, bicycle lanes and 75 pedestrian-scaled light poles. Completed in 2013, the project received honors from the American Public Works Association's Southern California chapter and the statewide Outstanding Local Streets and Roads Project Awards program in 2014. Ocean Park Boulevard consequently carries successive generations of street design within the same alignment, moving from a 1917 residential expansion through automobile-era widening into a twenty-first-century reconstruction built around landscape, stormwater capture and multiple forms of movement.

How to fold Ocean Park Boulevard into your trip.

Ocean Park Boulevard works as the anchor for an outing connecting a nineteenth-century residence preserved through relocation, an aviation collection rooted in the Douglas Aircraft Company and a former railroad property converted into one of Santa Monica's principal concentrations of contemporary art.

Begin at California Heritage Museum, housed inside the Roy Jones House, an 1894 residence designed by Sumner P. Hunt for the son of Santa Monica co-founder Senator John Percival Jones. Hunt produced one of his earliest surviving buildings through a design bridging Queen Anne Revival ornament with the emerging restraint of American Colonial and Georgian Revival architecture. The Jones family occupied the house on Ocean Avenue before Gustavus S. Homes became its next resident, and the property later entered service as a rooming house. Commercial development threatened the building during the 1970s, prompting Santa Monica to preserve it by moving the entire structure to Main Street in 1977. Municipal historic designation followed in 1979, and the residence became home to the California Heritage Museum, where its permanent holdings include photographs tracing the relocation, the Jones family and the ostrich farm that occupied substantial Ocean Park land in 1893. Continue to Museum of Flying, an institution founded by Donald Douglas Jr. in 1974 as the Douglas Museum and Library to preserve artifacts associated with his father, Donald Wills Douglas Sr., and the aircraft company he created. The museum first opened on Airport Avenue in 1979, then entered a second phase after Douglas Jr. and entrepreneur David G. Price developed a new facility that opened in 1989 with vintage aircraft joining the original collection. Economic difficulties closed that building in 2002, but a new site on the south side of Santa Monica Airport was secured in 2008. Construction began in 2010 and the present museum opened on February 25, 2012, with 22,000 square feet devoted to Southern California aviation history. Its collection spans a Wright Flyer replica, jet-age aircraft, aviation art and Douglas artifacts, including a recreated company boardroom and Donald Douglas's desk and drafting table. A defining object stands outside: the Spirit of Santa Monica, a Douglas aircraft built at the airport and delivered to the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1942, restored during the 2000s and dedicated as a monument in 2009. Conclude at Bergamot Station Arts Center, occupying property whose transportation history reaches to 1875, when the site entered service as a station for the Los Angeles and Independence Railroad and later the Santa Monica Air Line. Rail passenger service ended in 1953, after which the warehouse complex passed through uses involving celery packing, ice production and water-heater manufacturing. Santa Monica eventually acquired the property and retained it for a future rail connection, but postponed light-rail ambitions opened an interim opportunity for cultural reuse. The city approached developer and Shoshana Wayne Gallery co-owner Wayne Blank, who converted the industrial complex into an arts campus that officially opened on September 17, 1994. Nearly five acres of former railroad and industrial property subsequently became home to galleries and arts organizations, and rail service returned beside the campus on May 20, 2016 with the opening of the Metro E Line's 26th Street/Bergamot station.

MAKE IT REAL