Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles, California.

Pico Boulevard is a storied corridor where Mid-City's metropolitan character meets one of Los Angeles' earliest electric railways, a century of westward urban expansion and an immense cross-city route named for California's final governor under Mexican rule.

Running through Mid-City between Pico-Union and Pico-Robertson, the metropolitan corridor follows an extended east-west line from Downtown toward Santa Monica, crossing Hoover Street, Vermont Avenue, Western Avenue, Crenshaw Boulevard, La Brea Avenue, Fairfax Avenue and La Cienega Boulevard before continuing across the Westside to the Pacific. Eastern blocks maintain a tight commercial profile of adjoining storefronts, apartment buildings and short lots, with surviving early twentieth-century buildings holding the sidewalk closely through Pico-Union and Mid-City. Traveling west brings longer blocks, lower commercial buildings and increasingly broad intersections into view as the roadway crosses successive residential districts and major north-south arteries. The western reaches pass through Pico-Robertson, Century City, Rancho Park and West Los Angeles before the surrounding terrain descends gradually toward Santa Monica and the coast. The result is a corridor whose exceptional length, shifting building scale, dense commercial frontage and continuous passage from the central city to the Pacific make more than a century of Los Angeles expansion physically legible along one street.

What you should know about Pico Boulevard.

Pico Boulevard is best known for carrying the name of Pío de Jesús Pico, the last governor of Alta California under Mexican rule, and for becoming one of the principal routes along which Los Angeles expanded west from its nineteenth-century core. Pico was born at Mission San Gabriel in 1801, served twice as governor and held the office when American forces entered California during the Mexican-American War. Los Angeles applied his name to Pico Street by 1855, placing one of the most consequential Californio political figures directly onto the growing city grid. Transportation soon gave the street a larger metropolitan role. Colonel Charles H. Howland secured a franchise for the Los Angeles Electric Railway Company, whose line began operating along Pico in January 1887 using Leo Daft's electrical technology; Metro characterizes it as the first electric railway west of the Rocky Mountains. The experimental system linked Pico with Downtown but proved short-lived after its powerhouse boiler exploded in June 1888. Los Angeles Railway subsequently incorporated Pico into its expanding electric streetcar network, and its Pico and 1st Street route was operating by 1895. The roadway became Pico Boulevard in 1914, then extended west toward Santa Monica in 1917 by absorbing portions of Fremont Avenue, giving the historic city street a substantially larger geographic reach.

The 1920s converted the enlarged boulevard into a powerful commercial axis through the rapidly developing western city. Los Angeles Railway extended its Pico service west to Rimpau Boulevard in 1920, placing new residential districts along a direct electric connection with Downtown. Commercial construction concentrated beside the tracks as subdivisions filled Mid-City, and surviving buildings from 1906 through 1927 preserve one of the city's increasingly scarce streetcar-era commercial districts. Road widening and paving in 1926 and 1927 responded to rising automobile traffic and strengthened Pico's role as a direct route toward the ocean. Stores, banks, offices, restaurants and neighborhood theaters subsequently filled much of the corridor, yet development remained predominantly compact and low-rise through Mid-City. Transit patterns changed again at Rimpau in 1928 when Santa Monica began operating municipal buses westward along Pico. A permanent transfer loop followed in 1935, linking Santa Monica buses with Los Angeles Railway streetcars and making Pico and Rimpau a durable interchange between two transportation systems. The P streetcar survived through successive transit operators until March 31, 1963, when buses replaced the remaining rail service. Pico's surviving early commercial blocks, widened roadway and enduring Rimpau transfer point preserve successive layers of electric railway, automobile and bus development along the same cross-city alignment.

How to fold Pico Boulevard into your trip.

Pico Boulevard works as the anchor for an outing connecting a Holocaust institution conceived during the closing decades of the twentieth century, a music museum created alongside Downtown's entertainment expansion and Los Angeles' oldest surviving synagogue building, later returned to Jewish stewardship as a multifaith cultural center.

Begin at Museum of Tolerance, founded by the Simon Wiesenthal Center after Rabbi Marvin Hier and colleagues developed plans for a Los Angeles institution addressing the Holocaust, antisemitism and prejudice through multimedia education. Groundbreaking work was underway by 1986, with architect Maxwell Starkman designing the Pico Boulevard complex around galleries, an auditorium, seminar rooms, a research library and communications technology. More than five years of planning and $50 million preceded its dedication on February 8, 1993, when Simon Wiesenthal joined political leaders, diplomats, clergy, students and Holocaust survivors for the opening. The museum was conceived around participatory media and walk-through installations, placing the history of the Holocaust beside examinations of contemporary prejudice. More than eight million people have entered since opening, including millions of students participating in educational programs. Continue east to GRAMMY Museum, which opened on December 6, 2008 as part of the second development phase at L.A. LIVE and as a major institutional project tied to the fiftieth anniversary of the Grammy Awards. Executive director Bob Santelli, previously associated with Seattle's music museum and Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, led the opening of the four-story, 30,000-square-foot institution. Its conception emphasized songwriting, recording technology, musical genres and performance alongside the history of the awards, with a 200-seat theater supporting interviews, performances and public programs. The opening placed a museum devoted to recorded music inside AEG's $2.5 billion entertainment development, adjoining major performance venues during Downtown's large-scale cultural reinvestment of the 2000s. Conclude at Pico Union Project, occupying the 1909 building commissioned by Sinai Congregation and recognized as the oldest surviving synagogue building in Los Angeles. Sinai remained there until 1925 as Jewish settlement shifted west, after which a Welsh Presbyterian congregation occupied the property for 88 years. By 2012 the Welsh congregation had dwindled and approached the Jewish Historical Society of Southern California about returning the building to Jewish stewardship. Musician Craig Taubman subsequently acquired it and founded Pico Union Project in 2013 as a multifaith cultural and community institution. The building's century-long passage from Sinai Congregation through Welsh Presbyterian worship and back into Jewish ownership gives the site an unusual continuity across successive religious communities in Central Los Angeles. The progression moves from a 1993 institution created around Holocaust education through a 2008 museum devoted to recorded music and culminates in a 1909 synagogue whose changing congregations preserve the religious migrations and cultural reinvention surrounding Pico Boulevard across more than a century.

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