California (Los Angeles Area)
Westwood Village

Just west of Beverly Hills, on the north side of Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood Village is one of LA’s more user-friendly neighborhoods, a grouping of low-slung redbrick buildings that went up in the late 1920s around the central Broxton Avenue, along with the nearby campus of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). It’s an area that’s easily explored on foot, and one very much shaped by the proximity of the university campus, which is really the lifeblood of the area. Once LA’s prime movie-going district, Westwood Village has lost its cinematic eminence due to a 1980s gang scare and a real lack of parking, but remains the most densely packed movie-theater district in the country, and its 1931 “Village” cinema is still often used for premieres or special “sneak” previews to gauge audience reactions.

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South of the Village, Wilshire Boulevard exploded in the 1970s with oil-rich highrise developments; now modest detached houses sit next to twenty-story condominium towers in which penthouse apartments with private heliports sell for upwards of $12 million. Inside one such tower, on the corner with Westwood Boulevard, is the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Center (Tues, Wed, Fri & Sat 11am–7pm, Thurs 11am–9pm, Sun 11am–5pm; $4.50, free Thurs 6–9pm), amassed over seven decades by the flamboyant late boss of Occidental Petroleum. Its Rembrandts and Rubens are less than stunning, but Van Gogh’s intense and radiant Hospital at Saint Rémy is a real jewel.

Outside the museum, behind the tiny Avco cinema, Hammer’s marble tomb in Westwood Memorial Park stands near the lipstick-covered plaque that marks the resting place of Marilyn Monroe.