Sunset Park, Santa Monica

Why you should experience Sunset Park in Los Angeles, California.

Sunset Park is a residential enclave where Santa Monica's coastal character meets gently rising inland terrain, early twentieth-century bungalows and a midcentury housing landscape shaped by the extraordinary industrial growth of the city's southeastern edge.

Positioned between Ocean Park, Pico District, and Mar Vista, the neighborhood occupies southeastern Santa Monica across a broad rise extending inland from Lincoln Boulevard toward the Los Angeles boundary, with long residential streets crossing the slope between Pico Boulevard and the city's southern edge. Craftsman bungalows, Minimal Traditional houses, compact stucco cottages and later infill create a predominantly low-rise fabric whose setbacks, mature planting and modest building footprints preserve the scale of successive twentieth-century building campaigns. Ocean Park Boulevard supplies the primary encounter through the center, crossing residential blocks whose gradual elevation changes reveal the neighborhood as a transition between Santa Monica's coastal plain and higher inland ground. Pearl Street creates a secondary passage through quieter blocks where one-story houses, occasional multifamily properties and pockets of architecturally ambitious later construction sit within an unusually consistent street grid. The result is a neighborhood whose domestic scale conceals an unusually consequential relationship between Santa Monica's residential growth, twentieth-century industry and Southern California design.

What you should know about Sunset Park.

Sunset Park is best known for absorbing one of Santa Monica's largest waves of twentieth-century residential construction as Douglas Aircraft expanded into an industrial power beside the neighborhood. Donald Douglas began building aircraft in Santa Monica during the early 1920s, and the company's World Cruisers departed Clover Field in March 1924 on the expedition that completed the first successful aerial circumnavigation of the globe. Douglas increasingly concentrated production beside the airfield during the later 1920s, and the DC series subsequently placed Santa Monica at the center of rapidly expanding commercial aviation. Wartime production changed the scale of the relationship: Douglas employed 44,000 workers at its peak, running shifts around the clock as military contracts drove extraordinary demand for labor. Santa Monica held 53,500 residents in 1940, placing the aircraft workforce on a scale approaching the population of the entire city before the wartime expansion. Housing construction accelerated around the plant, and large sections of Sunset Park filled with compact single-family residences intended for the expanding industrial workforce. The surviving residential concentration includes Minimal Traditional houses and other modest midcentury types across blocks developed during and immediately after World War II. Santa Monica's citywide historic resource inventory groups several contiguous concentrations into the Sunset Park Residential Historic District, with a period of significance extending from 1925 through 1959 and direct association with the influx of Douglas workers. Military aircraft production ended locally during the late 1950s, and Douglas shifted toward commercial jets before the company departed Santa Monica in 1975. The neighborhood remained as one of the clearest physical consequences of the industrial enterprise that had transformed Santa Monica from a coastal city into a major center of American aircraft production.

Sun Tech Townhomes inserted a radically different architectural chapter into this predominantly modest residential fabric in 1981. Architects Steve Andre and David Van Hoy formed Urban Forms Organization and conceived the eighteen-unit complex as four-level residences arranged across four buildings at 28th and Pearl streets, with Van Hoy emerging from the first graduating class of the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Exposed structural elements, tubular railings, metal-frame glazing, prominent chimneys and visible building systems gave the project a High Tech character rooted in the architectural experimentation surrounding SCI-Arc during its early Santa Monica years. Rotating the buildings ninety degrees from one another created pedestrian passages between the residences, and Emmet Wemple & Associates designed landscaping around the complex. Tina Beebe developed its muted exterior coloration, and Steve Mezey handled engineering, expanding the project beyond a single architect-driven composition into a coordinated work across several disciplines. The American Institute of Architects awarded Sun Tech a National Merit Award for Multiple Family Housing in 1983, giving the complex national architectural recognition only two years after completion. Santa Monica granted the property protected architectural status in 2017, making the project the first such designation within Sunset Park. A neighborhood associated overwhelmingly with bungalows and compact midcentury houses consequently contains an eighteen-unit experiment connecting its later architectural history directly with the dramatic Southern California design culture that emerged around SCI-Arc.

How to fold Sunset Park into your trip.

Sunset Park works as the anchor for an outing connecting an artist community with roots in feminist and performance art, an 1894 house preserved as a museum and Santa Monica's last intact example of a nineteenth-century shotgun cottage.

Begin at 18th Street Arts Center, whose origins reach into the 1970s through a property later associated with Judy Chicago's work on The Dinner Party and Linda Frye Burnham's High Performance magazine. Sue Dakin acquired the Santa Monica campus in 1988, and the site gathered organizations including Highways Performance Space, Electronic Café International, Side Street Projects and Cornerstone Theater during its formative period. Linda Frye Burnham and Steve Durland launched Art in the Public Interest in 1995 and published The Citizen Artist: 20 Years of Art in the Public Interest three years later, extending the center's influence into debates surrounding socially engaged artistic practice. Otis College brought Suzanne Lacy's MFA in Public Practice to the campus in 2007, continuing a lineage connecting the property with experimental forms of contemporary art. Continue toward the coast to California Heritage Museum, housed inside the 1894 Roy Jones House designed by Sumner P. Hunt for the son of Santa Monica co-founder Senator John P. Jones. Hunt produced the residence during a transitional period between Queen Anne Revival complexity and the greater restraint of Colonial and Georgian Revival design, making it one of his earliest surviving buildings. The Jones family originally occupied the house on Ocean Avenue; subsequent conversion into a rooming house preceded its relocation to Main Street in 1977 as commercial development threatened the original site. Santa Monica protected the building in 1979, and it subsequently became the home of the California Heritage Museum, linking one of the city's surviving nineteenth-century residences with exhibitions devoted to California culture. Conclude at Shotgun House, built in 1897 as Ocean Park expanded around rail connections, beach recreation and inexpensive vacation cottages. Its board-and-batten construction places three small rooms sequentially beneath a gabled roof, preserving a housing form whose deeper lineage extends through the Caribbean and the American South before its adoption in western railroad settlements and coastal resorts. The cottage remained residential until 1996, survived a demolition threat, moved from its original 2nd Street site in 2002 and passed through two temporary locations before reaching its permanent site in 2014. Rehabilitation converted the surviving structure into the Santa Monica Conservancy's Preservation Resource Center, which opened in January 2016 after nearly two decades of efforts to secure the building's future. The progression moves from a late twentieth-century incubator of experimental art through Hunt's nineteenth-century domestic architecture and culminates inside a three-room cottage surviving from Ocean Park's earliest resort development, connecting three unusually intimate chapters of Santa Monica cultural history around Sunset Park.

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