Mid-Wilshire

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Mid-Wilshire is a district in the City of Los Angeles, California. It is part of the Wilshire region.

It mostly encompasses the area bounded by La Cienega Boulevard to the west, Melrose Avenue to the north, Hoover Street to the east and the Santa Monica Freeway to the south, although some neighborhoods in this perimerter are part of Mid-City West. It derives its name from Wilshire Boulevard, the primary east-west thoroughfare through the area. The service area of the Wilshire Division of the Los Angeles Police Department is congruent to the portions of Mid-Wilshire within the City of Los Angeles. A popular nickname among locals for this district is Midtown.

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[edit] History

See also: History of Los Angeles

Hoover Street marks the western edge of the original city lands of the pueblo of Los Angeles, as granted by the Spanish crown in 1781. Before the 20th century, the area to the west was predominantly farmland and pasture, with significant petroleum extraction beginning in the 1890s. Even as the areas within the old land grant became a booming metropolis, the areas west of Hoover remained virtually unpopulated: the streetcar lines that connected downtown Los Angeles with Palms, Venice, and the city of Santa Monica ran through a landscape little changed from what the original Tongva inhabitants might have seen centuries earlier.

With the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct and the long-awaited development of the Port of Los Angeles, Los Angeles experienced an explosion of economic and population growth. The relatively flat coastal plains beyond Hoover, which had seen only desultory development beforehand, were ripe for large-scale urbanization. In an orgy of building and speculation, they were soon covered with houses both humble and magnificent, spectacularly palm-lined streets, thriving commercial districts along most of the major thoroughfares, and the iconic Miracle Mile on Wilshire Boulevard. The iconic Carthay Circle Theater, in the far northwest reaches of Mid-Wilshire near the border of Beverly Hills, was one of the greatest of the "picture palaces" of the "Golden Age" of Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s.

After World War II, and especially from the mid-1960s onward, suburbanization drew away much of Mid-Wilshire's wealth, especially in the more densely populated areas east of Crenshaw Boulevard, which saw wholesale white flight in the 1950s and 1960s. (Areas such as Carthay and the Miracle Mile District fared better, with middle-class Jewish and African-American families adding considerable social capital to their new neighborhoods.) In the 1970s, Mayor Tom Bradley's successful effort to turn Bunker Hill into the region's premier business district further reduced the desirability of the Wilshire business corridor. By 1980, many businesses had abandoned Wilshire Boulevard for the shiny new office towers of Century City, Beverly Hills, and Westchester, and the office parks of the suburbs. In the Wilshire Center area, salvation came in the form of Korean immigrants displaced by the economic development schemes of South Korean dictator Park Chung Hee; these enterprising Koreans quickly established themselves as the dominant economic force in the eastern part of the Mid-Wilshire district, leading to part of Wilshire Center's rechristening as "Koreatown."

Today, Mid-Wilshire is an ethnically and economically diverse area, with all of Los Angeles' major racial/ethnic groups--whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asian-Americans--well-represented within its borders. Neighborhoods like Hancock Park, Windsor Square, Carthay Circle, and Lafayette Square contain some of Los Angeles' most magnificent residential architecture, primarily in traditional city neighborhood settings. On the whole, the area has retained a low-rise, relatively low-density character, in large part due to the historic preservation movement. The exception is Koreatown, which has long been one of the most densely populated areas in the United States. The Wilshire Center neighborhood has undergone gentrification since approximately 2003, and many apartments are under construction. One of Mid-Wilshire's greatest sources of political conflict is the steady densification of areas along Koreatown's western edges, a seemingly inexorable development that has occurred to the great dismay of the district's affluent white neighbors.

[edit] Transportation

[edit] Electric Rail

Historically, the Pacific Electric Railway had several Red Car streetcar lines running through Mid-Wilshire, which merged into a trunk line on Venice Boulevard at the Vineyard Junction in what is now Mid-City, continuing east to Hill Street and ultimately the Subway Terminal Building downtown. At the system's greatest extent in the late 1920s, streetcars running through this junction connected Mid-Wilshire to most of the neighborhoods and cities of the present-day Westside, as well as the coastal cities of the South Bay. The Pacific Electric lines in Mid-Wilshire were all out of service by 1959 and most trackage was removed by 1970; wide medians on Venice and San Vicente Boulevards are the only remnant of this important component of the area's development.

The Los Angeles Railway's "Yellow Cars" also operated in Mid-Wilshire, with their western terminus at Pico and Rimpau Boulevards (and at Highland Avenue, on the 3rd Street line two miles to the north). Following a 1928 fare increase by Pacific Electric, the city of Santa Monica started its own municipal bus service, with its eastern terminus at the Yellow Car's western end. The advent of this service, which evolved over time into today's well-regarded Big Blue Bus, enabled Santa Monica residents and Westsiders commuting to downtown Los Angeles to bypass Pacific Electric entirely. Today, the Pico/Rimpau depot (which has been rebuilt several times, the most recent renovation opening in January 2006) is still the principal interchange point between the Big Blue Bus and the Pacific Electric's ultimate successor, the Los Angeles MTA.

[edit] Congestion and Responses

Many of the low-wage jobs in the prosperous business districts of the Westside are held by residents of densely populated inner-city neighborhoods such as Westlake, Pico-Union, and Echo Park. The fastest way to Century City, Beverly Hills, and Santa Monica is usually along Mid-Wilshire's surface streets. Similarly, many workers in Hollywood live in South Los Angeles. For this reason, even though much of the region has a relatively low population density for Los Angeles, Mid-Wilshire suffers from significant traffic congestion problems. Residents on a few streets in the area have erected wrought-iron fences and concrete barriers to prevent through traffic from using their streets. Mass transit solutions, both in the form of improved bus service (including limited bus rapid transit on Wilshire, La Cienega, and Crenshaw Boulevards and Fairfax Avenue) and the long-delayed western extension of the Purple Line subway, promise to relieve some of the area's thorny congestion, but progress has been slow.

[edit] Education

Mid-Wilshire is primarily served by three public high schools: Fairfax High, at Fairfax Avenue and Sunset Boulevard on the region's northwestern edge; Los Angeles High, at Olympic and West Boulevards in the east-central portion of the region and Belmont High, just east of Hoover on Beverly Boulevard in Westlake. Some students in the furthest southwest portions of Mid-Wilshire attend Alexander Hamilton High in Beverlywood. The campus of Los Angeles High also includes one of the city's largest adult education centers, as well as a large memorial to alumni killed in World War I.

The area's more affluent residents often send their children to private or religious schools, both inside and outside the district. The most famous of these is the Jesuit Loyola High School in Harvard Heights.

[edit] Neighborhoods of Mid-Wilshire

[edit] See also

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