Why you should experience The Grove in Los Angeles, California.
The Grove is a theatrical retail destination where Fairfax District's commercial character meets open-air streets, elaborate public spaces and an entertainment complex conceived at the scale of an urban center.
Set along The Grove Drive near West 3rd Street and just steps from Park La Brea, the pedestrian-oriented complex occupies a compact tract threaded by curving streets, plazas and building façades that compress a city-center arrangement into a tightly controlled site. Multi-story storefronts line broad sidewalks beneath balconies, awnings and ornamental façades, with the central lawn opening the enclosed street pattern into a broad gathering area. Moving through the property alternates enclosed passages with open plazas as storefront elevations, landscaped edges and upper-level architectural features repeatedly narrow and widen the pedestrian field. Granite and limestone paving, elaborate lighting fixtures and carefully scaled building fronts add a second physical dimension, extending architectural detail from the façades into the ground plane and public circulation routes. The result is a retail complex whose carefully composed streets and civic-scale public areas turn movement between individual businesses into the principal spatial character of the property.
What you should know about The Grove.
The Grove is best known for the open-air retail and entertainment center developed by Rick Caruso and Caruso Affiliated Holdings on property controlled by the A.F. Gilmore Company. The Gilmore family had pursued redevelopment of its surrounding acreage for years, including a proposal exceeding two million square feet and a 700,000-square-foot plan approved by the Los Angeles City Council in 1991 before recession halted the project. Caruso entered the development process in 1998 with a substantially revised proposal organized around new streets, arcades, retail buildings and public gathering areas. David Williams of Caruso Affiliated Holdings and San Francisco-based KMD Architects led the initial architectural design for a project proposed across 25 acres with development rights already secured from the earlier city approval. Construction advanced after years of planning, with Nordstrom committing to a 122,000-square-foot store and FAO Schwarz taking 25,000 square feet as major tenants assembled for the opening. The completed center debuted on March 15, 2002 with a development cost at $160 million and 575,000 square feet of retail and entertainment space. Its original program included a 14-screen Pacific Theatres complex, 60 tenants and five full-service restaurants, placing cinema, shopping and dining around an exterior street plan conceived as a concentrated urban destination. The project rapidly exceeded early attendance projections and became one of Caruso's most consequential adaptations of the open-air commercial model he had previously developed in Southern California suburban communities.
Architectural detailing and purpose-built entertainment infrastructure gave the completed property a second layer of distinction independent of its development history. WET Design, creator of the Bellagio fountains in Las Vegas, engineered the central water feature with choreographed jets capable of reaching 70 feet and synchronized movement tied to musical programs. The cinema was constructed with a 3,000-seat total capacity and an interior conceived with hotel-like appointments, including Venetian chandeliers, mahogany columns, backlit onyx and a concierge-style ticket counter. A double-decker trolley runs along 1st Street on a historic undercarriage from a 1950s Boston streetcar, establishing a rail component within the pedestrian circulation system. Its electrical system became the first American transit application of inductive power technology, transferring electricity across an air gap through coils embedded near the trolley depot. Landscape and streetscape detailing extended to hand-laid mosaics, stained and leaded-glass streetlamps and Italian-built pavilions, reinforcing the treatment of exterior circulation as constructed public realm. The fountain recycles its water e two hours, joining a technically engineered water system with the property's most prominent gathering area. These features turned infrastructure normally subordinate to commercial buildings, paving, transit, lighting, water and circulation, into major components of The Grove's physical design.
How to fold The Grove into your trip.
The Grove works as the anchor for a Fairfax-area sequence tracing the rise of broadcast television, survivor-led historical preservation and the architectural reinvention of a major twentieth-century department store for film culture.
Begin at Television City, the production complex CBS created after purchasing 25 acres at Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue in 1950 as television broadcasting entered a period of enormous national expansion. William Pereira and Charles Luckman designed the facility with project architects including Gin Wong, James Langenheim and Charles Stanton, organizing soundstages, studios, rehearsal halls, editing rooms, offices, shops and storage around the technical demands of live electronic production. Completed in 1952, the International Style complex ranked among the earliest major American facilities purpose-built for television and opened with four principal studios equipped for the emerging medium. Productions subsequently associated with the property ranged across decades of American broadcasting, making the campus a physical survivor of the period when network television established Los Angeles as one of its principal production centers. Continue to Holocaust Museum LA, founded in 1961 after Holocaust survivors meeting in Los Angeles discovered that members of their group possessed photographs, documents and personal objects carried from prewar Europe. They resolved to create a permanent institution that would preserve those artifacts, memorialize relatives murdered during the Holocaust and educate succeeding generations, forming the first survivor-founded Holocaust museum in the United States. Its permanent home opened on October 14, 2010 in Pan Pacific Park through a design by Hagy Belzberg that placed much of the 32,000-square-foot building below grade beneath a sloping green roof. Nine galleries organize the collection through a chronological historical sequence, and the building received LEED Gold recognition alongside awards from the American Institute of Architects and the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission. Conclude at Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, where the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences converted the 1939 May Company Wilshire department store into the principal building of the largest American museum devoted to moviemaking. Albert C. Martin Sr. designed the original Streamline Moderne structure, whose cylindrical Wilshire-and-Fairfax corner clad in gold-colored tile became one of the district's most distinctive architectural features. Renzo Piano Building Workshop rehabilitated the former department store as the 250,000-square-foot Saban Building and paired it with a new 45,000-square-foot glass-and-concrete Sphere containing the David Geffen Theater. Glass bridges connect the two structures, physically joining preserved twentieth-century commercial architecture with a purpose-built cinema facility that opened with the museum in 2021. The progression moves from a 1952 studio engineered for network television through a survivor-founded institution preserving Holocaust history and culminates in the conversion of a 1939 department store into a major museum devoted to the art and technology of motion pictures.
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