Westlake, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Westlake in Los Angeles, California.

Westlake is a metropolitan enclave where Central Los Angeles's westward expansion meets dense apartment streets, major commercial corridors and successive immigrant communities occupying one of the city's earliest residential districts beyond Downtown.

Positioned between Historic Filipinotown, Koreatown, and Pico-Union, the neighborhood occupies a compact section of Central Los Angeles where a slightly diagonal street grid carries Beverly, Third, Sixth, Seventh and Olympic through tightly developed blocks west of Downtown. Early houses survive among courtyard apartments, masonry apartment hotels and later multifamily buildings, creating abrupt shifts in scale across streets whose architectural layers accumulated during more than a century of intensive settlement. Alvarado Street supplies the primary encounter through a dense north-south commercial spine where storefronts, apartment buildings and transit activity compress metropolitan life into closely spaced blocks. Sixth and Seventh streets create a secondary east-west passage through residential and commercial fabric that becomes increasingly urban as the terrain approaches Downtown. The result is a neighborhood whose physical density captures Los Angeles at several stages of growth, from nineteenth-century expansion through the apartment-building era and the arrival of communities that remade its commercial streets during the later twentieth century.

What you should know about Westlake.

Westlake is best known for developing from agricultural ground at Los Angeles's western edge into one of the city's principal early residential districts as transportation, speculative subdivision and rapid population growth pushed development beyond Downtown. The Fairmount Tract divided part of the area into 132 residential lots in 1877, beginning a subdivision cycle that accelerated during the Southern California land boom of the 1880s. Colina Park followed in 1885 beside the western terminus of the 2nd Street cable railway, placing new residential property directly beside transportation linking the district with the older city center. Fifteen additional tracts appeared between 1885 and 1887 as rail connections strengthened demand for western residential ground. Henry Gaylord Wilshire and William Wilshire acquired 35 acres west of Alvarado in 1887 and laid out a street grid containing Wilshire Boulevard, Rampart Boulevard, Park View, Carondelet and Coronado. Harrison Gray Otis, Arthur Letts and other prosperous Angelenos subsequently built houses in the district as its social standing rose during the closing nineteenth century. Transportation continued driving development as electric streetcars crossed Temple, Beverly, Third, Sixth, Olympic, Pico and Venice and ran north-south along Rampart, Alvarado and Glendale. The same streets later supported increasingly intensive commercial and residential construction, turning an outlying collection of tracts into a densely built extension of metropolitan Los Angeles.

Edward Doheny and Charles Canfield opened another chapter in 1892 when their oil strike near Crown Hill helped ignite the Los Angeles City Oil Field. Wells multiplied across Westlake and adjoining ground until the field supplied more than half of California oil production and ranked as the world's largest producer around the turn of the twentieth century. Derrick construction brought industrial activity directly into residential territory, with some property owners placing wells inside their own yards. Demand generated by oil workers accelerated a housing shift already underway as bungalow courts, duplexes, fourplexes, apartments and apartment hotels increasingly supplanted detached houses. Commercial buildings gathered along the principal east-west streets serving the growing population, reinforcing a development pattern in which residential intensity and neighborhood commerce advanced together. Early film production added another source of workers during the opening twentieth century, further strengthening demand for smaller residential units. By the 1920s and 1930s, the district contained a dense concentration of multifamily housing whose building types ranged from modest courts to substantial apartment hotels. Westlake's transformation from affluent peripheral suburb into one of Central Los Angeles's most intensively occupied residential districts consequently emerged through the collision of petroleum wealth, industrial employment, metropolitan population growth and changing forms of urban housing.

How to fold Westlake into your trip.

Westlake works as the anchor for an outing connecting an architecturally diverse residential terrace, a Gothic Revival church engineered on an immense structural foundation and an Art Deco department store conceived around the rise of the automobile.

Begin at Alvarado Terrace, where Scottish immigrant Doria Deighton Jones subdivided family land in 1902 after its earlier use for agriculture and a golf course, then required purchasers to invest $4,000 in construction as substantial residences began lining the street. Mission Revival, Tudor Revival and Shingle houses appeared in close succession, including Pomeroy Powers's 1904 residence by architect Arthur Haley, whose arched porch, smooth stucco and shaped roofline drew upon California mission architecture. The concentration entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, preserving an unusually compact cross section of elite residential design from the period when Los Angeles was expanding rapidly westward. Continue to First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, the fifth home of a congregation founded in 1867 and a massive English Gothic Revival composition completed beside Lafayette Park in 1932. Allison & Allison designed the concrete building with more than 500 tons of reinforcing steel and a 157-foot tower weighing 30,000 tons. More than 150 caissons descend as far as 45 feet to bedrock beneath the tower, whose four corner pinnacles each weigh three tons and rise another nineteen feet. The structure endured for more than six decades before the 1994 Northridge earthquake damaged the tower, leading to substantial stabilization work. Conclude at Bullock's Wilshire / Southwestern Law School, John and Donald Parkinson's 1929 Art Deco department store created around the changing transportation habits of Los Angeles. The five-story building placed its principal entrance beside rear parking and a porte cochere, making automobile arrival fundamental to the design at a moment when retail activity was migrating away from Downtown. Buff terra cotta, copper spandrels and a 241-foot verdigris tower gave the exterior its vertical emphasis, and Lalique fixtures joined work by more than a dozen artists inside. Southwestern Law School acquired the property in 1994 and spent ten years and $29 million rehabilitating it for academic use. The progression moves from an early residential enclave built during Los Angeles's westward expansion through the structural ambition of a major interwar church and culminates in a department store engineered around automobile culture, tracing three successive forms of metropolitan growth immediately surrounding Westlake.

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