Why you should experience San Vicente Boulevard in Los Angeles, California.
San Vicente Boulevard is a stately corridor where Brentwood's garden-suburb character meets a former interurban railway, a broad landscaped median and the commercial spine of one of the Westside's earliest planned residential districts.
Running through Brentwood between the West Los Angeles VA campus and Santa Monica, the garden corridor follows a broad curving line west from Wilshire Boulevard toward 26th Street, with Barrington Avenue, Bundy Drive and Montana Avenue crossing its central commercial and residential stretches. A wide planted median dominates the roadway's proportions, separating opposing traffic behind lawns and mature coral trees that create an unusually continuous green axis through the neighborhood. Commercial buildings tighten against the sidewalk around Barrington and Gorham avenues, then give way to deeper residential setbacks and increasingly expansive landscaping as the boulevard bends toward the Santa Monica boundary. The surrounding terrain rises gradually toward the Santa Monica Mountains to the north, allowing the corridor to remain comparatively level even as canyon neighborhoods and foothill ridges become more prominent beyond its edges. The result is a corridor whose sweeping alignment, landscaped median, mature tree canopy and transition between neighborhood commerce and spacious residential frontage preserve the physical ambitions of Brentwood's original suburban plan.
What you should know about San Vicente Boulevard.
San Vicente Boulevard is best known for originating as the transportation axis of Westgate, the early twentieth-century subdivision from which modern Brentwood developed. Robert R. C. Gillis gained control of the Santa Monica Land and Water Company by 1904 and opened the 700-acre Westgate tract for sale on April 11, 1905, followed by Westgate Acres that June. The boulevard took its name from Rancho San Vicente y Santa Monica, the 33,000-acre Mexican land grant Governor Juan Alvarado awarded Francisco Sepúlveda in 1839. Gillis made the roadway a centerpiece of the subdivision, laying out a broad curving avenue with a substantial central reservation and promoting its coastal views as part of the appeal of the new community. He worked with Moses Sherman and Eli P. Clark to extend the Los Angeles Pacific Railroad through that median, and the Westgate line opened in 1906 with double tracks connecting the subdivision with the regional electric railway system. The 25-minute rail connection stimulated lot sales and made San Vicente the organizing line for residential development spreading west from the Soldiers' Home. By 1928, three Spanish Colonial Revival commercial buildings had risen along the boulevard at Gorham Avenue, creating the oldest intact remnant of Brentwood's original commercial center and demonstrating how railway-generated residential settlement produced permanent neighborhood commerce along the same axis.
The disappearance of electric rail produced another consequential physical chapter without erasing the transportation geometry that had created the boulevard. Pacific Electric's Westgate service ended in 1940, leaving the unusually broad central reservation available for a new landscape treatment. A Los Angeles Beautiful grant supported a 1949 campaign that planted five miles of coral trees beginning near the Soldiers' Home, converting former railway ground into the vegetated median that became Brentwood's most recognizable streetscape feature. Grass replaced the remaining track landscape 1950, turning infrastructure engineered for electric cars into a continuous linear green space. Commercial construction simultaneously expanded around the boulevard as Brentwood's postwar population grew, with apartments beginning to replace detached houses near its business center by the late 1950s and early 1960s. The earlier streetcar geometry nevertheless remained physically legible through the exceptional width of the roadway and median, allowing a transportation system removed generations ago to continue controlling the boulevard's scale. San Vicente consequently preserves a rare Los Angeles sequence in which speculative subdivision created an electric railway avenue, rail removal released an immense linear landscape and postwar growth intensified the surrounding neighborhood.
How to fold San Vicente Boulevard into your trip.
San Vicente Boulevard works as the anchor for an outing connecting a postwar marketplace conceived as a neighborhood institution, a women's university built into the Santa Monica Mountains and a hilltop cultural campus that concentrated several branches of the Getty Trust within a single architectural composition.
Begin at Brentwood Country Mart, opened on November 18, 1948 as entrepreneurs Louis M. Sentei and A. L. Levin pursued an early version of the one-stop neighborhood shopping center. Architect Rowland Crawford designed the complex and the Baruch Corporation completed construction in six months, arranging shops and stalls around a courtyard within a red board-and-batten structure derived from early American and English country marketplaces. The concept was promoted at opening as an innovation in modern merchandising, and its golden ram became the center's commercial emblem. Hollywood figures including Joan Crawford, Robert Mitchum, Elizabeth Taylor, Burt Lancaster, Shirley Temple Black and Gregory Peck subsequently appeared in contemporary coverage of the property, connecting the small-scale marketplace with Brentwood's growing concentration of entertainment-industry residents. By 1953, the Los Angeles Examiner was treating the Mart as a community center, completing its transition from retail experiment into a durable neighborhood institution. Continue into the foothills at Mount Saint Mary's University Chalon Campus, created after the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet founded Mount St. Mary's College in 1925 in response to Bishop John Cantwell's request for a Catholic institution of higher education for women. The Sisters acquired land in the Santa Monica Mountains in 1928, broke ground for the new campus in 1929 and began classes there in 1931 under founding president Mother Margaret Mary Brady. Brady Hall became the first major building, followed by Mary Chapel in 1939, Rossiter Hall in 1940, St. Joseph's Hall in 1945 and the Charles Willard Coe Memorial Library in 1947, producing a Spanish Colonial Revival campus whose principal buildings, courts, colonnades and grand stairs occupy a steep ridge above Brentwood. The institution later expanded to the Doheny Estate in 1962, leaving Chalon as the historic mountain campus of a university that remains devoted principally to women's education. Conclude at Getty Center, where the J. Paul Getty Trust transformed a 110-acre Brentwood hilltop into an arts and research campus after purchasing the site in 1982. Thirty-three architects were invited to submit qualifications, Richard Meier received the commission in 1984 and construction began in 1989 after years of planning. Meier organized the museum, Getty Research Institute, Getty Conservation Institute, Getty Foundation and administrative functions across a campus clad with 300,000 blocks of cream-colored travertine quarried near Rome, using the ridge to frame views toward the city, ocean and surrounding canyons. Artist Robert Irwin received the Central Garden commission in 1992 and developed a 134,000-square-foot work incorporating more than 500 varieties of plant life, giving landscape art an independent role within Meier's architectural order. The Getty Center opened on December 16, 1997 after 15 years of planning, design and construction, bringing institutions previously dispersed across Los Angeles together on the mountaintop. The progression moves from Crawford's postwar reinvention of the neighborhood marketplace through the Sisters of St.
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