Westside, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Westside in Los Angeles, California.

Westside is a metropolitan enclave where West Los Angeles's coastal-basin character meets automobile-era residential growth, major twentieth-century employment centers and a built environment spanning modest interwar tracts through concentrated corporate towers.

Positioned between Westwood, Beverlywood, and Palms, the neighborhood occupies a central section of western Los Angeles where the basin remains comparatively level before rising toward the Santa Monica Mountains, giving long east-west boulevards unusual geographic reach across successive residential and commercial districts. Tree-lined residential grids, low apartment buildings, detached houses and larger commercial blocks shift repeatedly across the area, with broad arterial streets separating pockets whose building scales still reveal different phases of twentieth-century construction. Pico Boulevard supplies the primary encounter through a continuous east-west corridor where neighborhood storefronts, residential blocks and larger commercial properties compress several forms of Westside development into a relatively narrow band. Overland Avenue creates a secondary north-south passage through quieter residential terrain, crossing streets whose regular grids contrast with the curving hills that begin farther north and east. The result is a neighborhood whose physical variety captures Los Angeles's westward expansion at the point where older residential tracts, commercial corridors and later metropolitan-scale development converged.

What you should know about Westside.

Westside is best known for occupying terrain where several of western Los Angeles's formative land histories converged before successive transportation systems, residential subdivisions and employment centers reorganized the basin during the twentieth century. Rancho San Vicente y Santa Mónica encompassed 33,000 acres after Governor Juan Alvarado granted the property to Francisco Sepúlveda II in 1839, extending across territory that later included substantial portions of western Los Angeles. Farther inland, Rancho San José de Buenos Ayres and Rancho Rincón de los Bueyes contributed additional land to the mosaic from which later Westside communities emerged. Development accelerated around the Pacific Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, created in 1888 on donated land west of the growing city, as veterans, workers and their families settled nearby. An interurban railway reached the Sawtelle area by 1896, connecting the emerging community with Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica and supporting residential growth beyond the older urban core. Japanese immigrants subsequently built a major community around Sawtelle Boulevard, drawn by agricultural work, nursery cultivation and gardening employment on the large residential properties developing across western Los Angeles. By 1927 the Sawtelle community included 400 Japanese Americans, and boardinghouses helped newly arrived gardeners learn the trade before working across surrounding districts. World War II incarceration ruptured that community, yet returning families rebuilt businesses and nurseries after 1945, preserving Sawtelle as one of Southern California's enduring Japanese American centers.

William Fox pushed another section of the Westside into a radically different economic era when Fox Film Corporation developed a major production facility west of Beverly Hills during the closing 1920s. The studio opened a 100-acre complex in 1928 with sound stages constructed specifically for talking pictures, giving the property an early technical distinction from facilities converted out of silent-film production. Fox Film Corporation merged with Twentieth Century Pictures in 1935, placing the site under the company that became Twentieth Century-Fox. Large portions of the surrounding property remained studio backlot for decades, creating an immense reserve of undeveloped ground inside an increasingly valuable section of western Los Angeles. Financial pressure during the late 1950s prompted the company to investigate development of that acreage, and Welton Becket and Associates presented an ambitious master concept in 1958. William Zeckendorf secured an option on the property in 1959, then joined Alcoa Properties in purchasing the 260-acre site in 1961. Alcoa subsequently assumed full ownership and retained Welton Becket to direct a new design dividing the property into residential, studio, office and commercial sectors connected by landscaped boulevards, plazas and fountains. Century City emerged from that former backlot during the 1960s as a concentrated high-rise center, shifting major employment westward and giving the surrounding residential districts a metropolitan business core distinct from Downtown. The conversion of studio acreage into Century City marked the culmination of a broader Westside transition from ranchland and dispersed early settlements into one of Los Angeles's principal concentrations of residential, commercial and entertainment-industry development.

How to fold Westside into your trip.

Westside works as the anchor for an outing connecting a hilltop arts institution conceived on an immense architectural scale, a museum founded around a petroleum executive's European collection and a 1931 movie palace created for the rapidly developing western city.

Begin at Getty Center, where the J. Paul Getty Trust consolidated its museum, research, conservation and philanthropic programs on a 110-acre Santa Monica Mountains site acquired in 1982. Richard Meier was selected from 33 architectural candidates in 1984, construction began later in the decade and the complex opened on December 16, 1997 after fifteen years of planning and development. Meier organized the campus around a central arrival plaza and clad its buildings with 1.2 million square feet of Italian travertine weighing 16,000 tons; five museum pavilions use controlled natural light for galleries devoted principally to European art. Artist Robert Irwin received the commission for the 134,000-square-foot Central Garden in 1992, bringing more than 500 plant varieties into a composition conceived as an artwork within Meier's architectural order. Continue to Hammer Museum, founded by Occidental Petroleum chairman Armand Hammer and opened in Westwood in November 1990 inside a building designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes. Hammer created the institution around his holdings of Old Master and nineteenth-century European paintings and drawings alongside a substantial collection connected with Honoré Daumier; his death three weeks after the museum opened left portions of the building unfinished. Negotiations with UCLA began in 1992, an operating agreement followed in 1994 and the museum subsequently incorporated the university's Wight and Grunwald collections. Michael Maltzan and designer Bruce Mau began a long architectural reworking of the institution in 2000, followed by the Billy Wilder Theater and successive alterations that changed the original Barnes building over more than two decades. Conclude at Regency Village Theatre, opened in 1931 after William Fox announced plans two years earlier for a major cinema serving the rapidly developing university district. Architect Percy Parke Lewis designed the theater in Mediterranean Revival form, incorporating blue and gold into decorative features connected with the neighboring university community. Its prominent tower and ornate auditorium placed film exhibition at the center of the newly constructed Westwood Village commercial district during the opening years of sound cinema, linking the Westside's residential expansion with Hollywood's growing theatrical economy. The progression moves from Meier's vast hilltop cultural complex through Hammer's collection-driven Westwood institution and culminates in a surviving movie palace from the district's interwar expansion, connecting three distinct stages in the Westside's architectural and cultural development.

MAKE IT REAL