Why Union Avenue matters.
Union Avenue is a storied corridor where Pico-Union's immigrant character meets one of Central Los Angeles's early residential suburbs, surviving prewar architecture and a street whose name became inseparable from the neighborhood surrounding it.
Running through Pico-Union between Westlake and University Park, the urban corridor follows a predominantly north-south line across 7th Street, Olympic Boulevard, Pico Boulevard, Venice Boulevard and Washington Boulevard before meeting the denser street network approaching the Santa Monica Freeway. Northern stretches descend from Westlake through closely packed apartment blocks and commercial corners, with Downtown rising immediately east and the older residential districts surrounding MacArthur Park extending westward. Traveling south brings successive layers of Victorian houses, early twentieth-century apartments, neighborhood storefronts and institutional buildings into a compact streetscape whose narrow lots preserve the dimensions of Los Angeles before widespread automobile ownership. The terrain remains gently rolling as the corridor crosses Pico Boulevard and approaches the historic residential fabric extending toward Hoover Street and University Park. The result is a corridor whose compact blocks, surviving prewar architecture, changing residential scale and proximity to Downtown preserve an unusually legible section of Los Angeles's westward growth.
What defines Union Avenue.
Union Avenue is best known for giving half of Pico-Union its name and preserving a street whose origins reach into Los Angeles's first major period of expansion beyond the nineteenth-century center. The avenue appeared by November 1875 and initially extended through the Fairmount tract between present-day 6th Street and James M. Wood Boulevard. The Fairmount property belonged to the Real Estate Associates of Los Angeles, a group of 26 investors, after earlier ownership by former Los Angeles mayors Prudent Beaudry and John G. Nichols. An adjoining Fairview tract owned by merchant tailor Jacob Strelitz carried Union Avenue during the same formative period, placing the street within subdivisions created as Los Angeles began spreading west from its older core. Residential construction subsequently accelerated across the surrounding district, where streetcar access along major east-west routes helped convert former peripheral land into a middle- and upper-middle-class suburb during the opening decades of the twentieth century. The intersection with Pico Boulevard acquired particular importance as the district matured, eventually supplying the compound name that the Community Redevelopment Agency formally adopted for Pico-Union in 1970. A nineteenth-century subdivision street had become a geographic reference for an entire Central Los Angeles neighborhood.
Immigration transformed that surrounding district into another consequential urban world during the late twentieth century. Postwar suburbanization had reduced demand for local commercial and residential property by the 1960s and 1970s, leaving vacancies and deteriorating housing across portions of Pico-Union. Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees arrived in substantial numbers during the late 1970s and 1980s as civil wars and political violence displaced populations across Central America, joining Mexican and other immigrant communities already living near Union. Pico-Union became a major center of Central American settlement by the early 1980s, with older houses and apartment buildings absorbing a population whose growth made the neighborhood one of the city's densest. New restaurants, markets, courier businesses and street-vending enterprises developed around these communities, turning the aging prewar district into an important commercial and social center for newcomers. Preservation followed this demographic transformation: the Pico-Union Historic Preservation Overlay Zone became the nineteenth such district in Los Angeles in 2004, protecting residential architecture spanning Queen Anne, Craftsman and other prewar styles. Union Avenue carries the physical fabric of an early Los Angeles suburb through a later history in which immigration gave the same blocks an entirely new metropolitan significance.
How Union Avenue fits.
Union Avenue works as the anchor for a Central Los Angeles sequence connecting an elaborate 1920s food emporium with an architecturally eclectic residential enclave and the first permanent church created for the city's early Filipino immigrant community.
Begin at Young's Market Company Building, completed in 1924 at 7th Street and Union Avenue as the headquarters and flagship retail property of a grocery enterprise begun by John G. Young in 1888. Architect Charles F. Plummer designed the reinforced-concrete building in an Italian Renaissance Revival mode, giving its street elevations a granite base, limestone facing, immense arched openings and a bracketed terra-cotta cornice. The Young brothers formally opened the market in February 1925 after their business had expanded beyond forty stores, placing an unusually elaborate food emporium at the edge of the rapidly developing Westlake district. The company departed for Central Avenue in 1958, and the building survived fire and looting during the 1992 civil unrest before rehabilitation returned it to use. Continue to Alvarado Terrace Historic District, created after Scottish immigrant Doria Deighton Jones subdivided former agricultural land in 1902 and required purchasers to construct houses costing $4,000 or more. Pomeroy Powers commissioned architect Arthur Haley for his 1904 Mission Revival residence, among six houses on the north side of the terrace later designated together as Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monuments. The surviving group ranges across Mission Revival, Tudor Revival, Craftsman, Victorian and Shingle influences, concentrating the architectural ambitions of affluent Los Angeles during the city's rapid prewar expansion. Powers also persuaded Los Angeles to create a small public park beside the tract in 1904, adding a landscaped centerpiece to the curving residential composition. Conclude at Filipino Christian Church, whose congregation began in 1928 when young Filipino men attending California Christian College formed the Filipino Christian Fellowship to serve immigrants confronting discrimination in housing, employment and worship. The fellowship became a formal church in 1933 and moved repeatedly through Little Manila, Bunker Hill and Temple-Figueroa as redevelopment displaced its earlier homes. In 1950 the congregation acquired the former Union Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church in the Temple-Beverly district, giving Los Angeles's earliest Filipino Christian institution a permanent home. Its relocation encouraged other Filipino organizations to settle nearby and contributed directly to the concentration that became Historic Filipinotown. The progression moves from the Young brothers' metropolitan retail enterprise through Doria Deighton Jones's carefully controlled residential tract and culminates in a Filipino congregation whose permanent home helped consolidate a new immigrant district, tracing commerce, residential expansion and community institution building across the neighborhoods surrounding Union Avenue.
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