Where the road meets the runway

All roads to LAX lead to Westchester, a community of graceful neighborhoods, old and new, that is largely invisible to the myriad people who traverse its major arteries each day on their way to and from the airport.

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Beginnings

Westchester was annexed to Los Angeles in 1917. Eleven years later, the city took over Mines Field, a dirt runway that eventually became Los Angeles International Airport.

Rabbits outnumbered residents until 1940, when builders began putting up tract housing around La Tijera and Sepulveda boulevards and Manchester Avenue.

Workers in the defense industry flocked to the two- and three-bedroom homes, which initially cost from $3,500 to $6,000. After World War II, real estate agents called some of the more modest models “Jeeps” because of their popularity with returning veterans who could afford them on the GI Bill.

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Drawing card

Sea breezes bathe this self-proclaimed “Home of LAX,” which is also a citadel of higher education. Loyola Marymount University sits on the Westchester bluffs. More recent additions, the Otis College of Art and Design and several of Pepperdine University’s graduate programs, also are based there.

Residents can find plenty to do. The Kentwood Players, a community theater group that formed in 1950, performs at the Westchester Playhouse. The dance group the Westchester Lariats also has been active for more than 50 years. Family-friendly is how Mylah Wessels describes it. There’s Little League, soccer, the Westchester YMCA, a Fourth of July parade, and the beach is minutes away.

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Good news, bad news

Griping about LAX is a popular sport among some residents.

Old-timers still lament the major airport expansion in the 1970s that led to the removal of 3,500 homes and displaced 10,000 people. Gone too is the elementary school attended by John Wessels, Mylah’s husband. “That’s under Parking Lot C,” he said.

The airport, its parking lots and buffer zones anchor Westchester, which flows -- give or take a few pockets -- north to Centinela Avenue, east to La Cienega Boulevard and west to Hastings Avenue, according to Patty Crockett, a real estate agent with Team Crockett at ReMax All Cities Realty in Westchester.

Some residents fear the LAX land grab isn’t over.

“The airport is an arrogant neighbor,” said Adelle Wexler, a longtime Westchester activist. She and her husband, Jack, paid $43,000 in 1967 for a three-bedroom home with views of the ocean, Mt. Baldy, the Hollywood sign and, at night, city lights. Their two adult sons also have settled in Westchester.

“The traffic is terrible,” she said, describing stacked-up airport vans on Sepulveda Boulevard and workday gridlock requiring nightmarish detours along Lincoln Boulevard.

Living cheek-by-jowl with LAX, however, can be useful.

“The airport is right there, and you can travel all around the world,” said Crockett, a third-generation real estate agent in Westchester who lives in her childhood home. “I’ve always felt very grateful to be near the airport.”

Her late mother, Mary Lou Crockett, served on the city’s Airport Commission and many other boards and committees, among them groups that set noise standards for airports.

So, are the jumbo jets noisy?

“You do hear the planes if they’re changing their pattern of flight, but for the most part you don’t know you’re this close,” Mylah Wessels said. John, a lifelong resident who teaches at his old junior high, wanted their children to grow up in Westchester, so in 1994 they bought a 1,200-square-foot home with two bedrooms and a den for $250,000.

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Housing stock

Westchester’s 10,000 homes range from those built by the first developer, Silas Nowell -- who favored lathe-and-plaster walls, oak tongue-and-groove floors, indented wedding-cake ceilings and arched doorways -- to the newest addresses going up along the bluffs, said Jack Davis, a Coldwell Banker agent who lives in Westchester.

The small, older homes farthest east from the airport cost the least, he said, with view homes and those along the bluffs being the most expensive. Views can be found in custom-built ranch homes, the two-story “UCLA homes” intended originally for faculty in the ‘90s, and more recent construction.

There are 47 homes on the market, according to real estate agent Crockett, ranging from an older house with two bedrooms and one bathroom listed at $659,000 to a new five-bedroom, five-bathroom view home, listed for $2.1 million.

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Report card

Part of the L.A. Unified School District, Westchester has five public elementary schools: Cowan Avenue, which scored 857 out of a possible 1,000 on the 2006 Academic Performance Index Growth Report; Kentwood Elementary, 784; Loyola Village, 804; the Open Magnet Charter School, with 880; and Westport Heights, 751. Orville Wright Middle School posted 689 and Westchester Senior High School, 615.

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Historical values

Residential resales:

Year...Median Price

1990...$335,500

1995...$245,000

2000...$367,750

2004...$649,750

2005...$750,000

2006...$785,000

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gayle.pollard-terry@latimes.com

Sources: “Historic Adobes of Los Angeles County” by John Kielbasa; DataQuick Information Systems; www.cde.ca.gov.