Westchester real estate and community info

SEE ALL HOMES CURRENTLY FOR SALE IN WESTCHESTER

Westchester is separated from the Pacific Ocean by Playa del Rey on the west. Its northern border is defined by Jefferson and Centinela Boulevards, where it borders the neighborhood of Del Rey, as well as Culver City, and the unincorporated area of Ladera Heights. The Playa Vista housing and retail community is located in north Westchester. The city of Inglewood is to the east, and the city of El Segundo is to the south. The southern portion of the neighborhood is taken up by the Los Angeles International Airport (a.k.a. LAX). The San Diego Freeway runs through the northeastern portion of the area.

Like most of what is now southern Los Angeles County, Westchester began the 20th century as an agricultural area, growing a wide variety of crops in the dry farming-friendly climate. The rapid development of the aerospace industry near Mines Field (as the airport was then known), and population growth in Los Angeles as a whole, created a demand for housing in the area. In the late 1930s, real estate magnate Fritz Burns developed a tract of inexpensive prefabricated single-family homes on the site of a former hog farm at the intersection of Manchester and Sepulveda Boulevards. This community, dubbed "Westchester," grew by leaps and bounds as the aerospace industry boomed in World War II and afterward.

Howard Hughes, the famous aviator, movie director and tool company owner, operated a large manufacturing plant in lower Westchester in the area now known as the Playa Vista community. Hughes Airport, a private airport, was part of the manufacturing plant. The street named Runway Drive is laid out in the approximate location of the former Hughes Airport runway.

The Hughes facilities were commonly called "Hughes's Culver City" facilities, even though this area has never been part of the City of Culver City. This appellation continues today in any number of publications that discuss Howard Hughes himself, or his companies. The Westchester facilities were owned by Hughes Tool Company, operated by Hughes Aircraft, a company that specialized in building aviation navigation and communication systems, and the profits went to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Hughes's nearly spruce-free "Spruce Goose" wood bodied transport airplane was built in Westchester. The plane was disassembled into major components, transported to Long Beach and reassembled. Howard Hughes himself flew the H4 for little over one mile, but the plane was never flown again.

At the center of Westchester, what was once the Loyola Theater is now a medical office building.

The 1960s saw the introduction of airliners that could make trans-Pacific flights without refueling, causing a massive increase in air traffic at LAX. While Westchester residents successfully blocked a northward expansion of the airport, the increase in noise from jet takeoffs greatly decreased the desirability of the residential areas adjoining LAX. In response, the city of Los Angeles began a longstanding program of purchasing houses from noise-weary homeowners; as a result, a number of streets just north of the airport have been decommissioned, and the homes along those streets have been demolished. The 18-hole Westchester golf course became a 15-hole course. A local elementary school, the Westchester Neighborhood School, relocated out of the area in 2005, in part due to airport noise, and renamed itself the Westside Neighborhood School. With this experience fresh in mind, local opposition to an expansion of LAX first proposed in the late 1990s rose to fever pitch. As of 2006, no alterations to LAX have taken place, and expansion of the City of Los Angeles-owned airports in the distant cities of Ontario and Palmdale appears more likely.

As part of the 1960s expansion and modernization of LAX, the now famous landmark "Jet Age" style Theme Building opened. This iconic building has itself been modernized and most recently contained the Encounter Restaurant.

In the late 1990s, Otis College of Art and Design, with approximately 1000 full-time and 3000 part-time students, moved to Westchester from its previous location near downtown Los Angeles. What is now named the Kathleen Ahmanson Hall was designed by architect Eliot Noyes in 1963 to house an IBM research center. This well known local landmark, a seven story, 115,000 square foot building, has a distinctive "punch card" window design. The two story Galef Fine Arts Center, designed by Frederick Fisher Architects, opened on the campus in 2001. The complex geometry and corrugated metal forms contrast with the "punch card" vocabulary of Ahmanson Hall. Together, these buildings comprise the Elaine and Bram Goldsmith Campus. Ironically, the Otis building has Westinghouse brand elevators.

With Loyola Marymount University and Otis only blocks from one another, Westchester has undergone a subtle shift away from defense/aviation related industries (which have declined significantly since the end of the Cold War) and has become something of a college town. In keeping with this greater eclecticism, Westchester's diversity has also increased: what was once an all-white area, with segregation enforced by neighborhood covenants, has become one of the more diverse neighborhoods in western Los Angeles. In particular, the black population has increased as middle-class African-American families continue to leave the troubled areas of South Los Angeles that lie east of the Harbor Freeway.