Westwood Village, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Westwood Village in Los Angeles, California.

Westwood Village is a collegiate enclave where the Westside's metropolitan character meets Mediterranean-inspired commercial architecture, a deliberately irregular street plan and a district conceived in direct relationship with UCLA's arrival in Westwood.

Positioned between Westwood, Holmby Hills, and Century City, the neighborhood occupies the compact commercial ground immediately south of UCLA, where angled streets and short blocks interrupt the surrounding rectilinear pattern and concentrate activity around Westwood Boulevard, Broxton Avenue and their intersecting cross streets. Tile roofs, corner towers, arcades, courtyards and low-rise façades give the district an architectural coherence rooted in its original Mediterranean conception, with taller postwar buildings rising beyond the early commercial core toward Wilshire Boulevard. Westwood Boulevard supplies the primary encounter through a broad north-south axis terminating visually against the university grounds, placing shops, restaurants and institutional buildings along the principal approach to campus. Broxton Avenue creates a secondary passage through narrower blocks whose theaters and early commercial structures compress the district into a pedestrian-scaled interior distinct from the major boulevards surrounding it. The result is a neighborhood whose street geometry and architectural concentration preserve the unusually deliberate creation of a commercial center alongside one of America's major universities.

What you should know about Westwood Village.

Westwood Village is best known for emerging from the Janss family's decision to pair UCLA's new campus with a purpose-built commercial center across land that had remained ranchland into the early twentieth century. Department-store entrepreneur Arthur Letts paid $2 million for 3,296 acres in 1919 and placed the property under development by the Janss Investment Company, operated by his sons-in-law Harold and Edwin Janss. UCLA's predecessor had outgrown its Vermont Avenue campus within years of becoming the Southern Branch of the University of California, prompting a search for substantially larger ground during the mid-1920s. The Regents selected the Westwood property in May 1925, and the Janss interests supplied hundreds of acres on favorable terms that helped make the university's relocation feasible. That transaction also placed an immense new institution beside thousands of acres the family retained for residential development, creating a direct commercial rationale for a nearby shopping center. Harland Bartholomew and L. Deming Tilton prepared the Village plan during the 1920s, using angled streets and irregular blocks within a Mediterranean architectural conception instead of simply extending the surrounding grid. The Janss family presented its master plan in December 1927 as construction of the university and surrounding residential districts advanced simultaneously. UCLA began classes at Westwood in September 1929, bringing students and faculty into a commercial district developed expressly around their presence and the expanding residential population of western Los Angeles. Westwood Village consequently emerged through an unusually coordinated relationship between university relocation, private land development and commercial design, with UCLA functioning as the catalyst around which an entire district had been conceived.

Ralphs opened a Mediterranean Revival grocery building at Westwood Boulevard and Lindbrook Drive in 1929, placing a two-story corner rotunda beneath a tiled roof at one of the district's most prominent intersections. The Janss Dome followed around the same formative period at the convergence of Broxton, Kinross and Westwood, initially housing the Janss Investment Company headquarters and giving the developers a commanding architectural presence inside their own commercial center. Nearby, the Holmby Building added its clock tower to another major intersection, reinforcing a skyline composed from small towers and vertical accents. Architect Paul Revere Williams contributed the Kelly Music Building in 1930, an early commercial commission whose Mediterranean Revival treatment followed the architectural standards established for the Village. William Fox had announced plans for a major cinema in the growing university district in 1929, and Percy Parke Lewis completed the Fox Westwood Village Theatre in 1931 with a soaring tower, Mediterranean detailing and interior decoration using UCLA blue and gold. The district prospered through the Depression as shops, entertainment venues and professional businesses drew both the university population and residents of the surrounding neighborhoods. Later redevelopment removed portions of the original low-rise fabric, yet Ralphs, the Janss Dome, the Holmby Building, the former Fox theater and other surviving structures retain the architectural concentration created during Westwood Village's opening years. Their survival preserves the visual logic of a commercial district in which individual buildings were conceived as coordinated components of a larger streetscape.

How to fold Westwood Village into your trip.

Westwood Village works as the anchor for an outing connecting a museum created around an industrialist's private collection, a professional theater occupying one of the district's earliest buildings and a nineteenth-century burial ground absorbed into the surrounding metropolis.

Begin at Hammer Museum, which opened in November 1990 through Occidental Petroleum chairman Armand Hammer and architect Edward Larrabee Barnes, initially placing Hammer's European and American paintings and drawings inside a new cultural institution beside Occidental's Westwood headquarters. Hammer died three weeks after the opening, leaving portions of the building unfinished, and negotiations with UCLA began in 1992 before the university assumed management in 1994. UCLA subsequently moved the Wight Art Gallery and Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts collections into the institution, and Ann Philbin's appointment as director in 1999 preceded the development of the Hammer Contemporary Collection and extensive architectural work by Michael Maltzan. Hammer's holdings span the sixteenth through twentieth centuries and include paintings by Rembrandt, Titian, Rubens, Goya, Monet, Van Gogh and Sargent, giving the museum a historical collection alongside its later commitment to contemporary art. Continue to Geffen Playhouse, whose 1929 building originated as a Masonic clubhouse serving UCLA students and alumni and ranked among the first dozen structures erected in Westwood. Donald and Kirsten Combs acquired the property during the early 1970s, restored original elements including its courtyard and tile fountain and incorporated the Westwood Playhouse into a complex containing their furniture business and a restaurant. The family donated the theater to UCLA in 1994 with its theatrical function protected, and Gilbert Cates assembled the nonprofit company that became Geffen Playhouse after David Geffen supplied its founding gift. The company opened in 1995 with John Patrick Shanley's Four Dogs and a Bone, featuring Brendan Fraser, Elizabeth Perkins, Parker Posey and Martin Short, before a $17 million campaign produced a major restoration and the additional Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater in 2005. Conclude at Westwood Memorial Park, a small cemetery whose origins reach the failed 1887 subdivision of the town of Sunset, decades before the surrounding Village took form. The burial ground later became closely associated with Hollywood through the interment of Marilyn Monroe in the Corridor of Memories and an exceptional concentration of film figures including Billy Wilder, Jack Lemmon, Burt Lancaster, Natalie Wood, Dean Martin, John Cassavetes and Darryl F. Zanuck. Musicians Roy Orbison, Frank Zappa, Carl Wilson, Mel Tormé and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky broaden that cultural concentration beyond cinema, leaving a nineteenth-century burial ground surrounded by the dense twentieth-century city. The progression moves from Hammer's private collection transformed through UCLA stewardship through a Masonic clubhouse remade as a professional theater and culminates in a burial ground predating Westwood itself, connecting art, performance and Hollywood memory across three radically different institutions within Westwood Village.

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