Why San Vicente matters.
San Vicente is a refined enclave where Brentwood's Westside character meets a broad former streetcar corridor, mature coral-tree medians and a commercial spine descended directly from the community's earliest suburban expansion.
Positioned between Brentwood Park, Brentwood Heights, and Westgate, the neighborhood occupies the central east-west axis of Brentwood, where the boulevard runs from the San Diego Freeway toward 26th Street beneath the lower slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains. A wide landscaped median separates opposing traffic lanes across much of the corridor, giving low-rise storefronts, apartment buildings and larger commercial properties an unusually generous setback from one another and preserving the boulevard scale created for electric railway service. San Vicente Boulevard supplies the primary encounter through alternating commercial clusters and quieter residential stretches, with the densest pedestrian concentration gathered around Barrington Avenue and Bundy Drive. Side streets rapidly transition into residential Brentwood, allowing the commercial corridor to remain visually distinct from the curving roads and larger parcels extending north toward Sunset Boulevard. The result is a neighborhood whose unusual width, continuous planting and surviving early storefronts preserve the physical imprint of the transportation line around which Brentwood first developed.
What defines San Vicente.
San Vicente is best known for developing as Brentwood's principal transportation and commercial corridor from the original Westgate subdivision, whose streets began taking shape during the opening years of the twentieth century. Robert C. Gillis controlled former Rancho San Vicente y Santa Monica lands through the Santa Monica Land and Water Company and began subdividing Westgate in 1905, naming the tract for its position beside the western gate of the federal Soldiers' Home. San Vicente Boulevard was laid out that year as an exceptionally broad avenue containing a central reservation for two electric railway tracks, with separate road surfaces flanking the line for other traffic. Pacific Electric's Westgate Line opened along the boulevard in 1906 and connected the emerging settlement with Los Angeles and Santa Monica, making San Vicente the principal route through the new community. Residential tracts spread beside the railway as Brentwood Park and related subdivisions extended development north toward the Santa Monica Mountains. Commercial construction gained momentum during the 1920s as the expanding residential population created demand for shops and services along the transit spine. Three Spanish Colonial Revival storefront buildings completed at San Vicente and Gorham Avenue in 1928 survive as the oldest intact portion of Brentwood's original commercial center, retaining red-clay tile roofs, stucco walls and sidewalk-facing shopfronts. The western storefront housed the Brentwood branch of the Los Angeles Public Library between 1935 and 1947 before Brentwood Hardware & Supply occupied the premises during the 1940s and 1950s. Electric railway service eventually disappeared, and the tracks were replaced in 1949 by the coral trees that converted the former transit reservation into the boulevard's defining planted median.
Lester and Esther Adams opened Vicente Foods on San Vicente Boulevard in 1948, beginning another chapter in the corridor's development as Brentwood shifted from its interwar commercial core toward postwar retail architecture. Twelve successful years prompted the family to commission Ronald Cleveland and Sterling Leach of Leach, Cleveland and Associates, a firm responsible for more than 100 Southern California supermarkets, for a substantially larger building on the same property. Completed in 1962, the new Vicente Foods used an L-shaped plan beneath a low-pitched front-gabled roof, with a broad glass curtain wall opening the principal elevation toward San Vicente. Tan brick laid in decorative patterns, mosaic tile panels and exposed laminated wooden beams gave the supermarket a carefully composed architectural character uncommon among later standardized grocery buildings. Farther east, architect Milton Caughey had completed the Barry Building in 1951 around a landscaped interior courtyard, translating postwar ideas about indoor-outdoor spatial relationships into a commercial property. Its International Style composition joined offices and shops around open circulation areas at a point where San Vicente's commercial center was expanding beyond its 1920s storefront scale. The corridor contains an unusually legible sequence of Brentwood retail architecture, extending from Spanish Colonial Revival streetcar-era shops through Caughey's courtyard modernism and the purpose-built supermarket architecture of Leach, Cleveland and Associates.
How San Vicente fits.
San Vicente works as the anchor for an outing connecting an experimental postwar housing cooperative in the Brentwood hills, a major cultural campus built across the Sepulveda Pass and a Westwood museum transformed through its relationship with UCLA.
Begin at Crestwood Hills, where four musicians pooled their resources in 1946 and created the Mutual Housing Association, which expanded to 400 members and acquired 800 acres in the Santa Monica Mountains. Architects A. Quincy Jones and Whitney R. Smith joined structural engineer Edgardo Contini in developing twenty-nine house plans built around exposed concrete block, redwood siding, Douglas fir ceilings and broad expanses of glass; residences were carefully oriented to preserve privacy and hillside views, bringing architectural ambitions associated with custom modern houses into a cooperative middle-income development. Continue to Skirball Cultural Center, conceived by scholar, administrator and rabbi Uri D. Herscher with support from philanthropist Jack H. Skirball and opened to the public in April 1996. Herscher selected a fifteen-acre site in the Santa Monica Mountains and commissioned Moshe Safdie, who designed all four phases of the campus through clusters of buildings, courtyards, arcades and landscaped ravines adapted to the steep terrain; pink Tadoussac granite, recessed glazing and stainless-steel vaulted roofs unify Safdie's first American cultural project. Conclude at Hammer Museum, founded by Occidental Petroleum chairman Armand Hammer and opened in Westwood in November 1990 inside a building designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes for Hammer's Old Master, nineteenth-century European and Daumier holdings. Hammer died three weeks after the opening, and UCLA entered an operating partnership with the institution in 1994, subsequently moving the Wight Art Gallery and Grunwald Center collections there. Ann Philbin became director in 1999, the Hammer Projects series developed during her tenure and architect Michael Maltzan progressively reshaped the Barnes building before a major expansion added 40,000 square feet and increased gallery area by 60 percent. The progression moves from cooperative domestic modernism in the Brentwood hills through Safdie's mountain cultural campus and culminates in a museum whose evolution joined a private collection with UCLA's wider artistic program, tracing three distinct institutional responses to architecture across the Westside.
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