Westchester, Los Angeles, California Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Westchester is a neighborhood in far southwestern Los Angeles, California. It is home to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) and Loyola Marymount University (LMU).
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2 History 3 Demographics and Neighborhood Composition |
Geography
Westchester is separated from the Pacific Ocean by Playa del Rey on the west. Culver City is located past the steep bluffs and Ballona Creek wetlands to the north. Inglewood is to the east, and El Segundo is on the other side of the airport to the south. The San Diego Freeway runs through the northeastern portion of the area.
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, the areas just north of the airport have become a depopulated ghost town, to the extent that a local elementary school was closed in 2004. 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 this writing (autumn 2004), no alterations to LAX have yet taken place, and expansion of the City of Los Angeles-owned airports in the distant cities of Ontario and Palmdale appears more likely.
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. With LMU and Otis only blocks from one another, western 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 Central Los Angeles that lie east of the Harbor Freeway.
This is an Article on Westchester, Los Angeles, California. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About Westchester, Los Angeles, California History
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 farming-friendly Mediterranean climate. The rapid development of the aerospace industry near Mines Field (as it 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.Demographics and Neighborhood Composition
Approximately 50% of the local housing stock consists of single-family detached homes, most of which are modestly-sized ranches and bungalows on small lots. As of this writing, construction is well underway on the controversial but critically acclaimed Playa Vista high-density mixed-use development, on the site of the former Hughes Aerospace factory and a part of the Del Rey/Ballona wetlands. The project has already attracted large numbers of tenants and buyers for residential and office space, but has been dramatically scaled back in the face of community and environmentalist opposition.