Holmby Hills, Los Angeles, California
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Holmby Hills is an affluent neighborhood in western Los Angeles, California. It is bordered by Beverly Hills on the east, Century City on the southeast, Westwood on the southwest, Bel-Air on the northwest, and Beverly Glen on the west. Sunset Boulevard is the area's principal thoroughfare. In an effort to slow traffic in the neighborhood, speed bumps have been installed on several key streets.
Holmby Hills, Bel-Air, and Beverly Hills form the "Golden Triangle" of Los Angeles' priciest and most exclusive neighborhoods. Many of the estates in Holmby Hills boast panoramic views of the entire Los Angeles Basin. Many high-level entertainment industry executives, such as Interscope Records founder Jimmy Iovine, television producer Aaron Spelling, and Playboy founder Hugh Hefner (whose home is better known as the Playboy Mansion), reside or resided in the area. The area gained a significant amount of notoriety as it was home to the legendary Walt Disney and Humphrey Bogart.
[edit] History of Holmby Hills
The first developer of the land that Holmby Hills, Westwood, and UCLA now occupy was Don Maximo Alanis, a Spanish soldier who obtained title to 4,438 acres under a Mexican land grant in 1843. He called it San Jose de Buenos Ayres.
In 1884, about 2,000 acres of this land came into the possession of a forty-niner named John Wolfskill, who paid $10 an acre for it and built a ranch house near the present-day Mormon Temple.
But the actual development of Holmby Hills began when millionaire Arthur Letts, Sr. purchased 400 acres of the original Wolfskill ranch at $100 an acre. Letts, who was born in England in 1862, had made his fortune by transforming a small, bankrupt dry goods business in Los Angeles into the Broadway Department Store empire. He was not only a shrewd businessman, but also a skilled horticulturist; the grounds of his Hollywood home were planted with an astonishing variety of trees, shrubs, and flowers, and his cactus collection was known across the country.
His master plan for the prime acreage he had purchased in west L.A. was to create a neighborhood of grandiose estates. He personally christened the development "Holmby Hills," which was loosely derived from the name of his birthplace, a small hamlet in England called Holdenby. Sadly, Letts died suddenly in 1923, before he could realize his vision.
His son-in-law, Harold Janss, took over the project, which was billed as "The Ultimate in Residential Estate Development." Zoning for the community, which straddles Sunset Boulevard, was designed to accommodate large lot sizes (up to 4 acres). Electric and telephone lines were buried beneath the wide, tree-lined streets to preserve the landscape. Handsome, English-style street lamps, designed exclusively for Holmby Hills, were erected throughout the neighborhood.
Among the first mansions built here in the late 1920s was the Tudor-style home of the founder's son, Arthur Letts, Jr. (purchased in 1971 by Hugh Hefner as his Playboy Mansion West). Thanks to its lush landscaping, enormous lot sizes, and privacy, from the beginning Holmby Hills has attracted the rich and famous. In the 1950s, Walt Disney built his dream home here, which featured a miniature steam railroad, complete with 300 feet of track and a 90-foot-long tunnel. In years past, and right into the present, celebrities such as Gary Cooper, Barbra Streisand, Aaron Spelling, Sonny & Cher, and many others have all called Holmby Hills their home.
[edit] Education
Residents are zoned to the following Los Angeles Unified School District schools: Warner Avenue Elementary School, Emerson Middle School, and University High School.
