West Los Angeles - The Neighborhood Today

The Neighborhood Today

As with most parts of the Westside, West Los Angeles is an affluent neighborhood. Its central location has made it a locus of commercial development, with several high-rise office buildings along Olympic, Santa Monica, and Wilshire Boulevards. It also contains a large number of Japanese-owned businesses. A satellite congregation of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, one of the most prominent Reform Jewish congregations in Southern California, occupies the northeast corner of Olympic and Barrington.

Housing in West Los Angeles is a mixture of low-rise apartment buildings, mostly inhabited by young professionals and working-class families, and single-story tract house developments built between late 1920 and 1960. Two of Los Angeles's tallest residential towers are at the neighborhood's northern edge, at the intersection of Wilshire and Barrington. There is a trend toward greater density, as single-family houses get replaced by apartment buildings, or apartment buildings by taller ones, as building sites become available through demolition.

University High School, a secondary school named for nearby UCLA, is in the district. "Uni" is one of very few older high schools in Los Angeles that have not had to be completely rebuilt following earthquakes over the years and still has a traditional look to it featuring weathered brick walls and arched entries. As a result, it is popular with film producers as a shooting location, even when school is in session, much to the chagrin of the students and faculty. The campus also contains within its bounds an artesian well (claimed by the Tongva people as their ancestral home) which has never failed, even in the driest years. Junipero Serra's party is said to have camped there in the course of their journey up and down the state.

West Los Angeles is the home of a Consolidated Mail Outpatient Pharmacy (CMOP). It is part of an initiative by the Department of Veterans Affairs to provide mail order prescriptions to veterans using computerization at strategic locations throughout the United States.

The area is also the home of the FBI's Los Angeles field office, located in the federal building on Wilshire Boulevard next to the 405 Freeway.

West Los Angeles has a large Hispanic community evident by the authentic Mexican restaurants and a few Mexican shops. Among the area's Latino residents are a large number of immigrants from Oaxaca.