Westwood Village Looks to Its Past for Its Future

Can Westwood Village, the once-elegant shopping area south of the UCLA campus, be restored to its former glory, or is it doomed to remain a 33-acre clutch of movie theaters, pizza parlors and yogurt dispensaries, lost in the shadows of the new high-rise office buildings along Wilshire Boulevard?

City planners and City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, in whose district the village lies, believe that the area can be salvaged through a new “specific plan” that would limit building height, provide more parking, encourage “upscale” retail development and preserve buildings of architectural importance.

An ordinance embodying this plan will be considered by the City Planning Commission on July 23 and, if approved there, will go to the City Council.

“We have a unique opportunity in the village,” said Vincent Marella, president of the Westwood Homeowners Assn. “It’s still there, more or less in its original shape, and we have a chance to save it.”

But others think Westwood Village, trapped between the high-rise buildings to the south and an ever-expanding UCLA to the north, will never regain the air of pedestrian-oriented tranquility it enjoyed in the 1950s and before, and that the current planning effort is somewhat silly.

“Westwood Village is an anachronism,” said a large property owner who asked not to be identified. “People are not going to come back and behave in a civilized fashion and walk the streets to shop again. They’re going to drive to Beverly Center or Westside Pavilion or the other big shopping centers on the Westside.”

But Gruen Associates, the consultants who were paid $350,000 to prepare the plan, think otherwise. So do Yaroslavsky and many others. They believe that Westwood can become something of a “village” again and perhaps even regain some of the “Mediterranean ambiance” its original developers intended.

The last undivided ranchero in Los Angeles, Westwood appears as rolling hills and empty fields in aerial photographs taken as late as the early 1920s.

But in the late ‘20s the Janss Investment Corp. announced that a “high-quality shopping complex” would be built in the area. At the same time, the UC Board of Regents selected Westwood as the site for the university’s “southern campus,” starting a boom that lasted for more than four decades.

However, in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, as a flurry of first-run movie theaters opened (the village now has 10, with more than 6,000 seats) and teen-agers flocked to them, quality retailers began to move out and “impulse-buying” shops replaced them.

A reporter recently found 15 hamburger stands, 11 yogurt shops, nine pizza parlors and six cookie stores in a less-than-exhaustive walking tour of the village. One Gayley Avenue shop was peddling Amaretto yogurt, while around the corner another sold T-shirts emblazoned with an “SC Sucks” message.

The village atmosphere was further diluted in the 1960s by several high-rise buildings, including a 21-story office building with a garish red and yellow restaurant sign on the roof.

Islands of Civilization

Some islands of civilization remain.

The tiny Butler-Gabriel bookstore has survived for more than a year at the corner of Westwood Boulevard and LeConte Avenue by stocking carefully selected books on literature, writing, film and theater and by using a volunteer sales staff.

“We depend heavily on volunteers,” said Idalia Gabriel, one of the store’s three owners. “One lady works 20 to 30 hours a week, just because she likes books so much.

“We’re paying ourselves and we’re paying our bills,” Gabriel said. “That’s about all we can expect. We didn’t go into the book business to make money.”

However, many residents of surrounding neighborhoods said they no longer go to the village to shop or eat because it is noisy, congested and sometimes dangerous. Nor are there retail stores that residents need--there is no grocery store, no hardware store, only one drug store.

‘Shabby and Expensive’

“The village used to be a village, it used to be a college town,” said Laura Lake, president of the Friends of Westwood, a homeowners group that claims to represent 10,000 West Los Angeles households. “Now it’s shabby and expensive and there’s nothing to entice us in.” Pressed by homeowners, merchants, UCLA officials and others, Yaroslavsky asked for a plan to upgrade the village and also for a comprehensive plan for the greater Westwood area, stretching from Sunset Boulevard on the north to Santa Monica Boulevard on the south and from the Beverly Hills city limits on the east to the San Diego Freeway on the west.

Both plans will be considered by the Planning Commission, along with an interim transportation measure intended to deal with the traffic problems that additional development is expected to bring.

Yaroslavsky also requested, and the City Council approved, a construction moratorium in Westwood Village while the plan was being prepared.

The plan produced by Gruen Associates contains these major features:

- A 50% “down-zoning” that would reduce the maximum square footage of a new building from four times the lot area to twice the lot size.

- Height limits of 40 feet in the “village center” and 70 feet elsewhere.

- Parking space requirements would be increased for new commercial and office buildings. In addition, a new parking structure for 1,000 or more cars would be built, and a coordinated system for validated parking would be initiated.

- Measures would be taken to preserve buildings regarded as excellent examples of 1930s and 1940s architecture, such as the Bruin and Fox theaters, Alice’s Restaurant and a 1929 Mediterranean-style structure that houses the Westwood Playhouse, the Contempo modern furniture store and Stratton’s Restaurant. A system of “transfer rights” is proposed, for example, in which new developers would subsidize owners of “architecturally significant” buildings to encourage owners to preserve the buildings instead of demolishing them to make way for something larger. A new developer purchasing these transfer rights would be granted limited exemptions from the square-footage or height restrictions.

- Space bonuses would be given to retailers who open stores for neighborhood use, such as drug stores, book stores, art supply houses and grocery or hardware stores. At the same time, limits would be placed on new fast-food or other “impulse-buying” outlets.

- Movie seats would be limited to the current 6,030.

- Sidewalks would be widened and some streets would be specially paved, to encourage retailers to open sidewalk cafes and other “pedestrian amenities.”

- A “management entity” would be created to coordinate village planning and make sure the new ordinance is enforced. The village manager would play a role similar to that of the manager of a major shopping mall, though he would have to depend mostly on persuasion to achieve results.

“This is a terribly important part of the plan,” said Peter W. Blackman, vice chancellor for capital programs at UCLA. “The plan is an excellent review of ideas but it needs some sort of energetic leadership to succeed.”

This management approach, tried in Sacramento and San Diego but novel in Los Angeles, would cost at least $250,000 a year and would be financed by a special assessment fee paid by property owners and developers. UCLA, which paid for half of the Gruen Associates work, might also finance part of the management costs, Blackman said. A remarkable consensus seems to have formed in support of the Westwood Village Specific Plan. Groups that often fight one another--property owners, merchants, UCLA, homeowner groups such as the Friends of Westwood and the Los Angeles West Chamber of Commerce--all agree with the major points, although they differ about details.

‘General Agreement’

“When we started on this, there was quite a conflict between community people and property owners,” said Ki Suh Park of Gruen Associates, “but I think we have come up with a balancing act that has general agreement.”

But there are still points of disagreement.

At a public hearing on the plan last month, Everett Ascher, chairman of the board of the Los Angeles West Chamber of Commerce, said the chamber could not yet support the “management entity” idea because “it has been insufficiently developed.”

Several residents complained that new village development, even the reduced amount called for in this plan, would further aggravate an already congested traffic situation.

City Department of Transportation figures show that four of the busiest intersections in Los Angeles are near Westwood Village: Santa Monica and Sepulveda boulevards and Wilshire Boulevard’s intersections with Veteran Avenue, Gayley Avenue and Westwood Boulevard. Furthermore, the stretch of Wilshire between Veteran and a point west of the San Diego Freeway carries 106,000 vehicles a day, the highest traffic volume on any street in the city.

“We are at a near-gridlock condition in the great Village of Westwood,” local homeowner George Spoth said.

Homeowners have asked for speed bumps, cul-de-sacs or other impediments to deal with the expected increase in traffic, but the Department of Transportation opposes such measures, contending that they only shift street congestion from one neighborhood to another.

However, Yaroslavsky said, “We will approve some sort of traffic flow control techniques for that area.”

The Friends of Westwood and other homeowner groups object to the 70-foot height limit on new buildings--they want it lower--and they want fast-food enterprises thinned out even more than the plan proposes. They also want assurances that more parking will be provided in the village and that every effort will be made to attract grocery stores and other “neighborhood-use” businesses.

The Friends of Westwood are adamantly opposed to the plan’s provision for 750 new hotel rooms in the village, nor will they accept the 600-room figure now being discussed by city planners.

“We’ll swallow a 315-room hotel but that’s it,” said Sandy Brown, treasurer of the Friends of Westwood, “and we’ll only swallow that if we get a lot of protection.”

By “protection,” she meant a hotel without facilities for banquets or large meetings, with landscape buffers between the hotel and the adjacent residential neighborhoods and with traffic mitigation devices such as speed bumps or cul-de-sacs.

But Allan A. Sigel, attorney for the Westwood Village Development Co., which owns about one-third of the village, said no hotel developer would come into the village under such restrictions.

The hotel dispute is likely to be the toughest issue to resolve, but Yaroslavsky expressed confidence that “we can sort it all out” as the ordinance moves through the Planning Commission and the City Council.