Park La Brea, Los Angeles, California
Park La Brea is a district in west-central Los Angeles, California. It is considered part of, or equivalent to, the Fairfax District. The area derives its name from the the mid-rise Park La Brea housing development.
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Geography and Transportation
Park La Brea is bordered by Beverly Hills and West Hollywood on the west and north, Hollywood on the northeast, Hancock Park on the east, and the Miracle Mile on the south. The district's boundaries are roughly Melrose Avenue on the north, La Brea Avenue on the east, Wilshire Boulevard on the south, and the Beverly Hills and West Hollywood city limits on the west.
Principal thoroughfares in Park La Brea include Beverly and La Cienega Boulevards, Melrose, Fairfax, and La Brea Avenues, and 3rd Street.
The Neighborhood
After the arrival of the Spanish in the 1780s and the displacement of the area's indigenous population, most of the the area that is now Park La Brea became part of the Rancho La Brea land grant, and remained largely devoted to agriculture and petroleum production well into the 20th century. The growth of Hollywood and the Miracle Mile made the adjacent areas desirable centers for residential development, and the district shares those areas' Art Deco and Spanish Colonial architectural heritage. The mid-rise apartment towers that give the district its current name were built later, between 1944 and 1948; they represent something of a historical anomaly, having been built at a time when most visions of Los Angeles' development were dominated by low-rise tracts of single-family houses along freeway corridors. After a period of decline in the 1970s and 1980s, the district is once again prosperous and considered one of the more desirable areas of the city of Los Angeles.
As Park La Brea is one of the city's more densely populated areas, but is considerably more affluent than other high-density neighborhoods like Westlake and Koreatown, traffic congestion in the district is bad even by the standards of Los Angeles. To alleviate the problem and provide an alternative to automobiles for less-affluent residents and workers, proposals have been made to extend the Wilshire Boulevard leg of the Los Angeles MTA's Red Line subway to Fairfax Avenue or points further west, from its current stopping point at Western Avenue in Koreatown. However, a federal ban on tunneling operations in the area was passed at the behest of the district's Congressional representative, Henry Waxman, after a 1985 explosion caused by the buildup of pockets of methane in the district's long-depleted oil wells destroyed a department store. As of this writing (April 2005), MTA is exploring potential engineering workarounds to the problem.
Jewish Heritage
Like its neighboring districts, Park La Brea is heavily Jewish, with much of its first wave of 1920s-30s settlement coming from previously Jewish neighborhoods like Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles. Heavy influxes of displaced European Jews arrived after World War II, and many Jewish residents of Westlake and Pico-Union relocated to the Park La Brea area in the 1960s.
For more detail, please see the Fairfax District page.
Attractions
Park La Brea's most notable attraction is the Farmers' Market at 3rd and Fairfax, which has long been a major gathering place for Hollywood's glitterati. The Grove, a major mixed use development, opened on adjacent property in 2002. The Beverly Center, an enormous shopping mall, sits on the district's western edge, adjacent to the famous Cedars-Sinai hospital. Another major retail center in the district is Melrose Avenue, whose cutting-edge boutiques make it a hipster version of Beverly Hills' famous Rodeo Drive. Also within the district is CBS's huge Television City studio and office complex.
External links
Categories: Los Angeles neighborhoods