Why Wilkins Avenue matters.
Wilkins Avenue is a storied corridor where Westwood's residential character meets the Janss family's westward development campaign, a street named for one of the enterprise's principal executives and the cultural center of Persian Los Angeles.
Running through Westwood between Century City and Holmby Hills, the neighborhood corridor follows a compact east-west line across the residential blocks south of Wilshire Boulevard, crossing Westwood Boulevard before continuing toward the neighborhood's quieter western streets. Detached houses, mature trees and low apartment buildings define much of the roadway, creating an intimate scale distinct from the towers concentrated along Wilshire immediately to the north. Approaching Westwood Boulevard brings storefronts and denser multifamily buildings into the streetscape as the residential corridor intersects the commercial spine running south from Westwood Village. The roadway returns quickly to residential proportions beyond the intersection, making the commercial concentration around Westwood Boulevard feel unusually compressed within the surrounding neighborhood. The result is a corridor whose tree-lined residential blocks, modest scale and concentrated commercial crossing connect the planned Westwood of the 1920s with one of Los Angeles's most consequential immigrant cultural districts.
What defines Wilkins Avenue.
Wilkins Avenue is best known for carrying the name of Alfred Harold Wilkins, the Janss Investment Company executive who helped sell Westwood during its conversion from the former Wolfskill Ranch into one of twentieth-century Los Angeles's most ambitious planned districts. Canadian-born Wilkins arrived in Los Angeles in 1905 and worked for Arthur Letts at The Broadway department store before returning to the city in 1911 and joining Edwin and Harold Janss as their advertising manager. His career subsequently advanced to vice president and general sales manager, placing him near the center of the company that acquired the enormous Westside property associated with Letts and began opening Westwood subdivisions in 1922. The original Westwood unit debuted on October 22 that year after a transaction promoted at $7 million, drawing several thousand people to its opening and initiating development across the southern flats. Expansion moved north of Santa Monica Boulevard by 1924 through subdivisions including the Prosperity Unit and Country Club Unit as the Janss enterprise converted former agricultural acreage into a coordinated residential district. A decisive change followed in 1925 when the University of California selected 385 acres from the Janss holdings for its new Los Angeles campus, creating the institutional center around which Westwood Village and surrounding neighborhoods subsequently grew. The Janss family retained 2,900 acres around the university site and used UCLA's impending arrival as a powerful catalyst for further development. Wilkins directed sales within Westwood Village as that commercial district emerged during the late 1920s, and he settled in neighboring Holmby Hills in 1928, tying his professional and personal life directly to the district whose growth he had helped advance. The avenue bearing his surname preserves the presence of a figure deeply involved in the sales campaign that converted thousands of Westside acres into Westwood, Holmby Hills and the commercial district built beside UCLA.
A radically different cultural chapter developed at Wilkins Avenue's intersection with Westwood Boulevard after immigration from Iran reshaped the surrounding commercial blocks during the final quarter of the twentieth century. The first Persian business in Los Angeles opened at that corner in 1974, giving the intersection a direct connection to the emergence of the city's Iranian commercial community before the Iranian Revolution produced a much larger migration after 1979. Restaurants, markets, bookstores and other businesses subsequently concentrated along Westwood Boulevard between Wilshire Boulevard and Ohio Avenue, turning the district into a major center for Persian language, food and commerce. By 1989, the half-mile stretch near UCLA had become an established gathering district where Iranian-owned businesses served families dispersed across Southern California and connected younger generations with cultural traditions carried from Iran. The intersection acquired formal cultural significance on February 26, 2010, when the Los Angeles City Council designated Westwood Boulevard and Wilkins Avenue as Persian Square and directed installation of identifying signs on its southeast and northwest corners. That designation placed Wilkins Avenue at the named center of a diaspora district whose growth had begun at the same intersection thirty-six years earlier. The street connects two unusually specific chapters of Westwood history: its name preserves the Janss executive who helped market the district during the 1920s, and its principal commercial intersection marks the birthplace and enduring center of Persian business life in Los Angeles.
How Wilkins Avenue fits.
Wilkins Avenue works as the anchor for a Westwood sequence tracing the district's evolution from an intricately planned 1920s commercial center through a university-linked theater and into an art museum created from one industrialist's private collection.
Begin at Janss Investment Company Building, completed in 1929 as the headquarters of the family enterprise developing Westwood Village around the newly arriving UCLA campus. Architects Allison & Allison, also responsible for major buildings at UCLA, designed the structure around an octagonal corner composition crowned by a colorful terra-cotta dome with Moorish zigzag ornament. Its position at the convergence of Westwood Boulevard, Broxton Avenue and Kinross Avenue made the building a visual center for the commercial district, whose master plan had been prepared by Harland Bartholomew and L. Deming Tilton around a Mediterranean architectural theme. Westwood Village opened with 34 businesses, and the Janss company retained control over tenant selection and placement until the family sold its holdings in 1955. The headquarters occupied both the architectural and managerial center of a commercial district deliberately constructed beside one of California's rapidly expanding universities. Continue to Geffen Playhouse, constructed in 1929 as the Masonic Affiliates Clubhouse for UCLA students and alumni and counted among the first twelve buildings erected in Westwood. Architect Stiles O. Clements designed the building within the Mediterranean architectural program governing the young village, and a Malibu Potteries fountain occupied its central courtyard. The clubhouse remained associated with the Masons for nearly four decades before Donald and Kirsten Combs acquired it during the early 1970s, restored original features and incorporated a theater known as the Westwood Playhouse. The Combs family transferred the property to UCLA in 1994 with the requirement that it remain a theater, and Gilbert Cates developed a professional nonprofit company there with support from an endowment gift by David Geffen. Its inaugural 1995 production of John Patrick Shanley's Four Dogs and a Bone brought Brendan Fraser, Elizabeth Perkins, Parker Posey and Martin Short to the stage under director Lawrence Kasdan. A major renovation culminated in 2005 with the reopening of the larger theater and addition of the Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater. Conclude at Hammer Museum, founded by industrialist and collector Armand Hammer and opened in November 1990 beside Occidental Petroleum's Westwood headquarters. Architect Edward Larrabee Barnes designed the museum around an interior courtyard for Hammer's Old Master and nineteenth-century European paintings, drawings and extensive holdings devoted to Honoré Daumier and his contemporaries. Hammer died three weeks after the opening with portions of the institution unfinished, setting off a period of uncertainty that led to negotiations with UCLA beginning in 1992. UCLA assumed management in 1994, and the institution subsequently incorporated the university's Wight Art Gallery and Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts collections and staff. Michael Maltzan later designed the Billy Wilder Theater and a series of architectural interventions, followed by a multiyear expansion that incorporated 40,000 square feet of additional space into the museum. The progression moves from the Janss family's architectural headquarters through a Masonic clubhouse converted into a professional theater and culminates in Hammer Museum's evolution from a private collector's institution into a major university-affiliated arts center, tracing three stages in Westwood's development from planned commercial district to cultural destination.
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