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| Westchester Apartment Locator Services : Westchester |  | Contents | |
History
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| Howard Hughes, the famous aviator, movie director
and tool company owner, operated a large manufacturing plant in lower Westchester
in the area now known as Playa Vista. Curiously, the Hughes facilities were commonly
- and incorrectly - called "Hughes's Culver City" facilities, even though
this area has never been part of the City of Culver. This wrong appellation continues
today in any number of publications that discuss Howard Hughes himself, or his
companies. The Westchester facilities were owned by Hughes Tool Co., operated
by Hughes Aircraft (a company that specialized in building aviation navigation
and communication systems), and the profits went to the Howard Hughes Medical
Institute. Hughes's nearly spruce-free "Spruce Goose" wood bodied
transport airplane was built in Westchester. The plane was disassembled into major
components, transported to Long Beach and reassembled. Howard Hughes himself flew
the H4 for little over one mile, thus proving that the H4 transport flying boat
project was not a war profiteering folly. |
At the center of
Westchester, what was once the Loyola movie theater is now a medical office building.
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| | 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, a number of streets just north of the airport have been
decommissioned, and the homes along those streets have been demolished. The 18-hole
Westchester golf course became a 15-hole course. Also, a local elementary school
was closed in 2004, in part due to airport noise. 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 (http://www.lmu.edu) and Otis only
blocks from one another, 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 addition, the Intercontinental
University (http://www.aiula.com/American), with approximately 1800 full time
students, is located on Jefferson Blvd. at the northern edge of Westchester. In
2004, the Graduate School of Pepperdine University (http://bschool.pepperdine.edu/)
relocated to the north-east quadrant of Westchester. The private college/university
students, paying tuition typically well in excess of $20,000.00 per year, are
a boon to local merchants. Adding living expenses to tuition, merchants gladly
count the $35,000.00-50,000.00 per student, per year, dropped into the local economy. |
| 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. | | |
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