The Westside is slowly taking over L.A.
What once was considered an area west of La Cienaga Boulevard or the San Diego (405) Freeway is migrating east to La Brea and even Western Avenue at least in the minds of marketers, homeowners and real estate agents wanting to capitalize on the perceived affluence of a Westside address.
“If you can be associated with the Westside, it’s highly desirable. There’s a definite cachet,” said Scott Chalmers, first vice president, western region, for Arden Realty Inc., which is marketing its commercial buildings in the Miracle Mile area as Westside properties.
“When I have a client who wants to be near the talent agents in Beverly Hills, they’ll get sticker shock when they look in Beverly Hills or Century City,” he said. “But when I take them to look at nearby Miracle Mile, they say, ‘I can afford this and still be close to the Westside.'”
The recently formed Westside Economic Collaborative whose membership covers the cities of Beverly Hills, Culver City, Los Angeles, Malibu and Santa Monica has come up with the name “Greater Westside” to describe an area stretching from Malibu all the way east to Hoover Street in the Westlake district and Hyperion Avenue in Los Feliz.
“When you take all of Los Angeles County, it’s not unreasonable to think of anything west of downtown as the Westside,” said Tom McCollough, chief operating officer for Century City-based First Regional Bancorp and incoming chairman of the collaborative.
But even McCollough is uncomfortable with the parameters. “When I think of Koreatown, I would agree it’s not part of what most people consider the Westside,” he said. “But it’s not Eastside either. There’s no regional economic development entity that includes this area, so that’s why we have included this in our definition of the greater Westside.”
The “greater Westside” definition is so expansive that the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. has divided the area into “West Westside” and “East Westside,” with the eastern part including Hollywood and mid-Wilshire.
Each of these two sides has distinct economic characteristics. The part west of La Brea is dominated by business and professional services, with nearly 84,000 lawyers, business consultants and other professionals, according to an LAEDC study. About 60,000 workers cater to the tourist trade, including hotel workers and tour companies. Other sectors include government, education, retail, media and entertainment, and finance.
East of La Brea, the largest sector is education and health care, with 48,000 working at universities and hospitals dotting the area. Professional and business services and media and entertainment are the two other major pillars.
Moving westward
Ironically, the eastern boundary of the “greater Westside” is close to the original boundary defining the western part of Los Angeles 100 years ago. That’s when planners drew up Western Avenue, a straight line demarking the western edge of the young city.
Beyond Western Avenue were miles of open space, dotted with pockets of development, such as Windsor Square, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, the oldest of all the major communities now comprising the Westside.
For the next 40 years, the spaces between these pockets filled up first in a burst of development in the 1920s and then in the post-World War II housing and building boom. As that boom accelerated, wealthy and mostly white residents fled the central city for the newer suburbs, finding the proximity to the ocean attractive.
“In the 1920s, the money starts to move west and continues to move west for the next 50 years,” said Tom Zimmerman, a Rancho Park historian and photographer who has just finished a book about the Los Angeles of 1870 to 1930.
But it wasn’t until the late-1960s that the term “Westside” was coined. That’s when a group of homeowner associations roughly paralleling the boundaries of the Fifth Council District banded together under the name “Westside Civic Federation,” according to Diana Plotkin, president of the Beverly Wilshire Homes Association. The boundary of the federation was La Brea Avenue.
By then, the term “Westside” had taken on another meaning. “People started referring to it as the Westside specifically with the connotation of that’s where the wealthy people, the mostly white people, were,” Zimmerman said.
He added that during the boom years, private schools migrated to the Westside and private country clubs sprang up to serve the new wealthy residents.
Perhaps the single biggest turning point was the development of Century City on the old back lot of Twentieth Century Fox Studios. Century City became the center for professionals serving the entertainment industry and financial advisors for wealthy Westsiders.
All this fed the perception of the Westside being a playground for the elite. “Twenty years ago, when I first came to L.A., it was known as the ‘fashionable’ Westside. It’s where you paid more for everything and wore fancier clothes,” said Steve Spector, chair of the Westside Neighborhood Council and senior vice president and general counsel for Macerich Corp.
Drawing boundaries
As such, the Westside soon became a state of mind, an attitude not necessarily hemmed in by fixed boundaries. Indeed, the borders have moved back and forth between economic cycles and in response to social disruptions.
“Following the 1992 riots, Westsiders regarded anything east of La Cienega as the Eastside. People drew boundaries and considered anything west of there as ‘safe,’ and east of there as ‘not safe,'” said Mara Marks, visiting professor of urban studies at Loyola Marymount University in Westchester.
In the last several years, the boundary has moved east again, back toward La Brea. This movement has been prompted, in part, by the transformation of the Miracle Mile stretch of Wilshire Boulevard into a Mecca for media and entertainment companies. The other major development was the opening of the Grove shopping center.
“People are redrawing their mental maps. They say, ‘Well, I’m not really leaving the Westside since so many Westside people are here,'” Marks said. “As a result, the Grove is rapidly becoming a Westside outpost.”
The Westside has also expanded southward in the last 15 years, spurred by development of the Howard Hughes Center, Playa Vista and the revitalization of downtown Culver City.
“Years ago, Culver City was definitely not regarded as Westside material,” said Jay Handal, president of the Greater West Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. But as new shops, restaurants and theaters opened up in the downtown district, “real estate agents started calling Culver City the ‘lower Westside.’ Now, it’s just part of the Westside.”
Not everyone in Los Angeles is looking for Westside identification.
“We’re definitely not the Westside,” said Kerry Morrison, executive director of the Hollywood Entertainment District. “We in Hollywood like being edgy, progressive and cutting edge and a blending and crossroads of culture, not at all like the liberal and wealthy Westside.”
Morrison said that she draws the Westside boundary at around La Cienega, adding, “If anyone from the Westside tries to claim Hollywood as part of the Westside, we will meet them at the border.”
Then there are the purists, such as Terri Tippett, president of the West of Westwood Homeowners Association. “For me, the Westside is a box bounded by Beverly Hills, Sunset Boulevard, the 405 and the 10 (Santa Monica) Freeway, with little extensions for the northern part of Culver City and Brentwood,” she said.
As for the eastern-most locations, “It’s just not the Westside,” she said. “A lot of people are trying to be part of the Westside to improve their property values.”
