West Los Angeles, California

West Los Angeles, California is a commercial and residential neighborhood within the City of Los Angeles. West Los Angeles is located in the Westside region of Southern California, a few miles from the Pacific Ocean. West Los Angeles has major business corridors running east and west along Wilshire Boulevard and Santa Monica Boulevard, and north and south along Sepulveda Boulevard and Westwood Boulevard. These corridors support chain retail stores and restaurants as well as independently owned businesses of the same nature. As a neighborhood of the City of Los Angeles, West Los Angeles has no official boundaries and is mapped differently depending on the source. For the purposes of this article, West Los Angeles includes those portions of the City of Los Angeles east of the City of Santa Monica and west of the City of Beverly Hills.

West Los Angeles is an economic powerhouse and a major center for creative industries. For example, 20th Century Studios is headquartered at the Fox Studio Lot in Century City, a district within the larger West Los Angeles neighborhood. World-class universities, including University of California, Los Angeles, are located in West Los Angeles. West Los Angeles features one of the greatest concentrations of high-rise office buildings and upscale shopping destinations in the nation, as exemplified by the Century City and Westwood districts. West Los Angeles is also home to an impressive collection of fashionable residential enclaves, including Bel Air, Cheviot Hills, and Holmby Hills. But how did the West Los Angeles area become such an economic juggernaut? Surprisingly, part of the answer has its roots in the American Civil War.

The National Military Soldiers’ Home, or Old Soldiers’ Home (officially, the Pacific Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers), was established in about 1887 on 300 acres of land near present-day Westwood. The Old Soldiers’ Home was one of a number of complexes built across the United States for Union veterans of the American Civil War. The Old Soldier’s Home and the large aggregate income from pensions and payrolls was the driving force in expanding the economy of what had been a sparsely populated and underdeveloped area.

Pacific Land Company was in the business of acquiring large tracts of land and creating subdivisions. In 1896, the Pacific Land Company purchased 225 acres of mainly uninhabited land south of the Old Soldier’s Home. In 1897, an electric interurban railway line extended through the area, connecting what would soon become the subdivision of Barrett Villa to the Cities of Santa Monica and Los Angeles. Barrett Villa was named after Andrew Washington Barrett, the onetime local manager of the Old Soldier’s Home. Mr. Barrett was probably instrumental in initiating the policy that permitted veterans to live outside of the Old Soldier’s Home without losing their Government Benefits. This policy provided the subdivision with a plentiful source of willing buyers. Many veterans of the Old Soldier’s Home, who were mainly low income pensioners, purchased bargain-priced vacant lots on the nearby subdivision and built houses in which they could live with their families. Many of the properties had the air of self-sufficiency, with gardens, as well as chickens, rabbits, or goats. This tract of land would eventually become the neighborhood of Sawtelle.

On July 4, 1899, Barrett Villa, which lies squarely within present-day West Los Angeles. was renamed Sawtelle after William Edward Sawtelle. Mr. Sawtelle moved to Los Angeles in 1899, where he became an executive of the Pacific Land Company and, in 1900, the manager of the Sawtelle development. Sawtelle incorporated as a city in 1906 and was known as “the Solider City,” as it consisted mainly of small, wood frame homes constructed by aging veterans with hammers and saws. In fact, at one point in time, 80 percent of the homes in Sawtelle were owned by veterans. The original business district was strung along Sawtelle Boulevard extending south from the entrance of the Old Soldier’s Home at Ohio Avenue. The City of Sawtelle, which struggled financially, particularly because laws at the time prevented the City from collecting taxes from veterans, was annexed to the city of Los Angeles in 1922 to provide residents and businesses with access to reliable water sources and better services. By this point, civil war veterans, who had once been a significant political force and wanted the area to remain semi-rural, were dwindling in numbers and influence. Those who wanted to fully develop this portion of Los Angeles County became the dominate political force. As a symbol of the shift in the area’s power structure, numbered streets, which in 1919 had been renamed to refer to the Civil War, were renamed again to remove Civil War references. The early success of the Sawtelle tract prompted developers to subdivide other areas of West Los Angeles, helping give rise to the modern-day economic powerhouse and affluent residential market of the Westside region.

Over the decades, as the demand for housing grew, most of the original wood frame homes in Sawtelle were replaced by two- or three-story apartment buildings. In the 1950s and 1960s, so-called dingbat apartment buildings with carports, a design that often filled in every available square foot of land, supplanted older homes and yards and gardens. Given the high concentration of apartment buildings in Sawtelle and neighboring portions of West Los Angeles, there are also a large number of apartment managers working in the area. Historically, apartment managers have often been compensated improperly. The result can be several hours per week of unpaid labor.

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