Why Persian Square matters.
Persian Square is a diasporic enclave where the Westside's commercial character meets Iranian migration, Farsi-language commerce and a Westwood Boulevard concentration that became the symbolic center of Persian Los Angeles.
Positioned between Westwood Village, Century City, and Rancho Park, the neighborhood occupies the Westwood Boulevard corridor south of Wilshire Boulevard, where a major north-south artery narrows into closely spaced storefront blocks before continuing toward Pico Boulevard. Low commercial buildings, apartment properties and compact shopfronts place restaurants, bakeries, markets, booksellers and professional businesses directly against the sidewalk, producing a street scale far tighter than the office towers surrounding nearby Wilshire Boulevard. Westwood Boulevard supplies the primary encounter through successive blocks where Persian script, specialty food businesses and Iranian-owned establishments give the corridor a visual character distinct from the broader Westside. Wilkins Avenue creates a secondary point of orientation at the city-designated square, concentrating the district's symbolic geography at an ordinary street intersection whose significance derives from the commercial community surrounding it. The result is a neighborhood whose physical modesty amplifies its cultural importance, turning a short Westwood commercial corridor into one of the most consequential geographic centers of the Iranian diaspora in the United States.
What defines Persian Square.
Persian Square is best known for marking the commercial center of an Iranian community that began taking shape in Westwood during the 1960s and expanded dramatically after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Iranian students and businesspeople had already arrived in Southern California during the preceding decades, creating the foundation for a small cluster of Persian establishments along Westwood Boulevard. Political upheaval in Iran brought a much larger migration after 1979, including families leaving a country transformed by the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and establishment of the Islamic Republic. Restaurants, grocery stores, bakeries and bookshops multiplied south of Wilshire Boulevard as newcomers built businesses serving a rapidly expanding diaspora. By 1986 the name Tehrangeles was already appearing in Los Angeles coverage of the corridor, capturing the concentration of Farsi signage, Persian food businesses and social activity along Westwood Boulevard. The community subsequently dispersed across Beverly Hills, the San Fernando Valley and other parts of Southern California, yet Westwood retained its position as a commercial center and gathering place. Los Angeles City Councilmember Paul Koretz, joined by Eric Garcetti, introduced the 2010 motion giving formal municipal recognition to the Westwood Boulevard and Wilkins Avenue intersection. The City Council adopted the designation on February 26, directing installation of Persian Square signs at the southeast and northwest corners. A Nowruz gathering on March 28 publicly marked the new name during Persian New Year celebrations on Westwood Boulevard. Persian Square converted a commercial concentration created through decades of migration into an officially named geographic marker of Iranian American Los Angeles.
Farsi-language broadcasting gave the surrounding Iranian community a second institutionally important sphere whose reach extended far beyond Westwood Boulevard. Southern California became a production center for Iranian radio and television after the revolutionary period, allowing exiled performers, broadcasters and producers to reach Persian-speaking audiences across the region and eventually overseas. By 1989 Iranian magazines, television programs and radio shows formed an extensive local media culture alongside concerts by Persian singers including Dariush, Shahram and Moein. Westwood businesses participated directly in this transnational circulation: bookstores carried Persian publications and recorded music, televisions inside local shops carried Iranian programming and the boulevard functioned as a physical counterpart to media distributed across Southern California. By 2006 viewers in Los Angeles had access to twenty Farsi-language satellite channels, more than a dozen originating in Southern California and transmitting programming back toward Iran. That broadcasting infrastructure allowed cultural production developed in exile to circulate across national boundaries even as its commercial center remained rooted in a few Westwood blocks. Westwood Boulevard also became a recurring gathering point when events in Iran reverberated through Southern California, placing shops and restaurants beside public demonstrations and political debate among a diaspora encompassing divergent religious backgrounds and views of Iranian history. Persian Square developed significance beyond commerce: the corridor became a physical center for a community whose publishing, broadcasting, music and public gatherings connected Los Angeles with Persian-speaking audiences thousands of miles away.
How Persian Square fits.
Persian Square works as the anchor for an outing connecting a museum created around an industrialist's art collection, a 1929 clubhouse converted into a major professional theater and a five-acre sculpture garden assembled across the northern reaches of Westwood.
Begin at Hammer Museum, founded by Occidental Petroleum chairman Armand Hammer and opened in November 1990 inside a building designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes adjacent to Occidental's Westwood headquarters. Hammer died three weeks after the opening, leaving an institution originally centered on his European and American collection, including works by Rembrandt, Titian, Rubens, Goya, Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, Manet, Monet and Van Gogh. UCLA assumed management in 1994, and the following year the Wight Art Gallery and Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts transferred their collections and staffs to the museum. Architect Michael Maltzan began a long architectural reworking in 2000, subsequently adding the Billy Wilder Theater, reshaping galleries and public areas and completing a broader expansion that added 40,000 square feet before its principal architectural phase concluded in 2023. Continue to Geffen Playhouse, whose Spanish Mediterranean building was constructed in 1929 as one of Westwood's first twelve structures and initially functioned as a Masonic clubhouse serving students and alumni. Donald and Kirsten Combs acquired the property during the early 1970s, restored original architectural elements and established the Westwood Playhouse inside the building. The family donated the theater to UCLA in 1994 with the requirement that theatrical use continue, and Gilbert Cates developed an independent nonprofit company renamed for founding benefactor David Geffen. The new organization opened in 1995 with John Patrick Shanley's Four Dogs and a Bone, featuring Brendan Fraser, Elizabeth Perkins, Parker Posey and Martin Short; a later $17 million campaign funded extensive rehabilitation and the addition of the Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater, with both performance spaces opening in 2005. Conclude at Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, conceived by UCLA chancellor Franklin D. Murphy after he saw artistic potential in a gravel parking area on the university's north campus. Murphy worked with supervising architect Ralph D. Cornell to shape five acres into a formal brick plaza, a triple row of South African coral trees and an informal sloping lawn threaded by curving paths. A purchase of Jacques Lipchitz's Song of the Vowels helped initiate the collection, followed by a major expansion after sculptures belonging to David and Dolly Bright brought works by Lipchitz, Alexander Calder, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore into UCLA's holdings. Dedicated in 1967, the garden now contains more than seventy modern and contemporary sculptures, including works by Auguste Rodin, Joan Miró, David Smith and Hans Arp. The progression moves from a private art collection transformed through university stewardship through a Masonic clubhouse remade as a professional theater and culminates in Murphy and Cornell's conversion of utilitarian campus ground into an outdoor collection of modern sculpture, connecting three distinct forms of cultural institution building around Persian Square.Persian Square works as the anchor for an outing connecting a museum created around an industrialist's art collection, a 1929 clubhouse converted into a major professional theater and a five-acre sculpture garden assembled across the northern reaches of Westwood.
Begin at Hammer Museum, founded by Occidental Petroleum chairman Armand Hammer and opened in November 1990 inside a building designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes adjacent to Occidental's Westwood headquarters. Hammer died three weeks after the opening, leaving an institution originally centered on his European and American collection, including works by Rembrandt, Titian, Rubens, Goya, Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, Manet, Monet and Van Gogh. UCLA assumed management in 1994, and the following year the Wight Art Gallery and Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts transferred their collections and staffs to the museum. Architect Michael Maltzan began a long architectural reworking in 2000, subsequently adding the Billy Wilder Theater, reshaping galleries and public areas and completing a broader expansion that added 40,000 square feet before its principal architectural phase concluded in 2023. Continue to Geffen Playhouse, whose Spanish Mediterranean building was constructed in 1929 as one of Westwood's first twelve structures and initially functioned as a Masonic clubhouse serving students and alumni. Donald and Kirsten Combs acquired the property during the early 1970s, restored original architectural elements and established the Westwood Playhouse inside the building. The family donated the theater to UCLA in 1994 with the requirement that theatrical use continue, and Gilbert Cates developed an independent nonprofit company renamed for founding benefactor David Geffen. The new organization opened in 1995 with John Patrick Shanley's Four Dogs and a Bone, featuring Brendan Fraser, Elizabeth Perkins, Parker Posey and Martin Short; a later $17 million campaign funded extensive rehabilitation and the addition of the Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater, with both performance spaces opening in 2005. Conclude at Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, conceived by UCLA chancellor Franklin D. Murphy after he saw artistic potential in a gravel parking area on the university's north campus. Murphy worked with supervising architect Ralph D. Cornell to shape five acres into a formal brick plaza, a triple row of South African coral trees and an informal sloping lawn threaded by curving paths. A purchase of Jacques Lipchitz's Song of the Vowels helped initiate the collection, followed by a major expansion after sculptures belonging to David and Dolly Bright brought works by Lipchitz, Alexander Calder, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore into UCLA's holdings. Dedicated in 1967, the garden now contains more than seventy modern and contemporary sculptures, including works by Auguste Rodin, Joan Miró, David Smith and Hans Arp. The progression moves from a private art collection transformed through university stewardship through a Masonic clubhouse remade as a professional theater and culminates in Murphy and Cornell's conversion of utilitarian campus ground into an outdoor collection of modern sculpture, connecting three distinct forms of cultural institution building around Persian Square.
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