Carthay is a large residential district encompassing several neighborhoods in western Los Angeles. It is considered part of Mid-City Los Angeles.
Geography
Carthay is bordered by Country Club Park on the east, Culver City and Baldwin Hills on the south, Beverlywood on the west, and the Miracle Mile and the city of Beverly Hills on the north. The district is roughly bounded by Wilshire Boulevard on the north, La Cienega Boulevard on the west, the Santa Monica Freeway on the south, and La Brea Avenue on the east. Principal thoroughfares include Wilshire, La Cienega, San Vicente, Pico, and Venice Boulevards and La Brea and Fairfax Avenues. Major subdistricts include Picfair Village (whose name is a tribute to Mary Pickford's and Douglas Fairbanks' estate, Pickfair), South Carthay, Carthay Circle, Carthay Square, Wilshire Vista, and Little Ethiopia, a community of relatively recent Ethiopian and Indian immigrants.
Carthay takes its name from a now-demolished movie theater which stood on the corner of San Vicente and Crescent Heights Boulevards. The neighborhood was mostly developed in the 1930s, capitalizing on the success of the Miracle Mile. Most houses are built in the Art Deco or Spanish Colonial styles popular at the time. Single-family houses are most prevalent in Carthay Circle, while multi-unit houses are more common in South Carthay and Carthay Square. Mid-sized apartment buildings line the major streets in all three neighborhoods. Strict enforcement of restrictive covenants by the area's homeowners associations meant that most of these remained standing into the 1980s, when all three neighborhoods in the district were designated for preservation in Los Angeles' Historic Preservation Overlay Zone program.