Westwood is a district in western Los Angeles. Developed by the Janss family in the 1920's, it is best known as the home of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The eastern portions of the district are often thought of as a distinctly different neighborhood, Holmby Hills.
Located in the northern central portion of Los Angeles' West Side, Westwood is bordered by Brentwood on the west, Bel-Air on the north, Century City and Beverly Hills on the east, West Los Angeles on the southwest, Rancho Park on the southeast, and unincorporated Sawtelle on the south and southwest. The district's boundaries are generally considered to be Santa Monica Boulevard on the southeast, the city limits of Beverly Hills on the northeast, and Sunset Boulevard on the north; its southwestern boundary is the San Diego Freeway between Santa Monica and Wilshire boulevards, and Veteran Avenue between Wilshire and Sunset.
Westwood's major thoroughfares include Santa Monica, Sepulveda, Beverly Glen, Wilshire, Westwood, and Sunset Boulevards. The district is served by the San Diego Freeway. Numerous bus lines serve the area, and recently instituted bus rapid transit service runs along Wilshire. The area's notorious traffic has led to calls for the extension of the Wilshire leg of the Los Angeles Metro's Red Line subway to Westwood from its current endpoint at Western Avenue in Koreatown. The Metro and Caltrans have also recently begun a project to widen the San Diego Freeway between the its interchanges with the Marina Freeway (CA/SR-90) in Culver City and the Ventura Freeway (US-101) in Sherman Oaks; the project, which will finally add a northbound carpool lane to the congested route, is not scheduled for completion until 2007 at the earliest.
A center of movie-going on the Westside and the site of many movie premieres, Westwood is home to several vintage movie theaters, including the Pacific Crest, the Fox Village and the Bruin. These classic Art Deco "picture palaces" anchor the Westwood Village retail district, a picturesque, pedestrian-oriented shopping area. Westwood is also home to the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery, the last resting place of many of Hollywood's biggest stars. A museum named for and endowed by activist and philanthropist Armand Hammer, longtime head of Occidental Petroleum (which maintains its headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard), has become one of Los Angeles' trendiest cultural attractions since UCLA assumed its management in the 1990's. The Hammer, as it is commonly known, is particularly notable for its collection of Impressionist art and cutting-edge modern art exhibitions.
Built by the Janss family and wildly successful from its earliest stages, the
Westwood Village shopping district successfully retained its cozy village atmosphere
even as the San Diego Freeway came through the area in the 1950's and high-rise
office towers went up around it in the following decades. However, much of this
construction was planned around the never-built Beverly Hills Freeway; in combination
with a severe parking shortage at UCLA, high-density development in Westwood has
created some of the worst traffic congestion in Los Angeles. Even with the opening
of numerous municipal parking structures in the 1990's and 2000's, finding a parking
spot in Westwood Village is still a notoriously difficult task, and parking and
traffic issues dominate local planning debates.