Getting to Know Westwood
The Lay of the Land
Westwood is a neighborhood of the City of Los Angeles in the central Westside, built around UCLA between Sunset Boulevard on the north and roughly Olympic on the south, with Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards running through the middle. Because it is part of the City of Los Angeles, city ordinances and LADOT permits govern a move here, not a local city hall of its own.
The neighborhood reads as a few distinct districts. UCLA and its student housing sit at the center and north, with North Westwood Village, the dense multifamily blocks where many students live, just west and north of campus. Westwood Village, the planned 1929 shopping and theater district, fills the gap between the university and Wilshire. The Wilshire Corridor carries the condominium towers on its eastern run and Class A office towers on its western end. East of campus, north of Wilshire, the single-family enclave known as Little Holmby holds older, larger homes, with Westwood Hills and other family streets nearby; just beyond the western edge sits exclusive Holmby Hills, part of the city’s so-called Platinum Triangle. Most Westwood residents are renters, a direct result of the student population and the apartment-heavy housing stock.
A Town Built for a University
Westwood sits on what was once the Wolfskill Ranch, part of a 3,000-acre stretch the retailer Arthur Letts bought in 1919. After Letts died, his son-in-law, Harold Janss, and the Janss Investment Company set about turning the ranch into a planned community. The pivotal moment came in 1925, when the Janss family sold a discounted parcel that let UCLA move from its cramped East Hollywood campus to the Westwood Hills; the university opened its new campus in 1929.
The Janss brothers built Westwood Village in tandem with the school, opening it in 1929 as a Mediterranean-themed shopping and cinema district, “a town for the gown.” The Janss Dome, the company’s domed 1929 headquarters at the heart of the Village, briefly held one of UCLA’s first dormitories on its second floor, and the firm controlled which businesses opened in the Village until 1955. The film palaces that followed hosted Hollywood premieres, and the Village remains a walkable historic core surrounded now by the office and condo towers that grew up along Wilshire in the decades after.
The Real Work of a Westwood Move
Because Westwood is part of the City of Los Angeles, the rules that govern a move come from the city. For larger jobs, LADOT issues temporary no-parking permits that reserve curb space at the address, and those need to be requested and posted in advance, which matters a great deal on the dense, permit-parked residential streets around campus.
Timing is the variable that catches people out. The student lease cycle concentrates an enormous share of the year’s moves into the late-summer and early-fall changeover, when apartments near UCLA all turn over at once and curb space and elevators are at their scarcest. A move booked early in that window goes far more smoothly than one squeezed into the last weekend before classes.
The Wilshire Corridor towers are their own discipline. Each building runs its own freight-elevator reservations, loading-dock windows, and certificate-of-insurance requirements through the HOA or building management, and a move that has not booked the elevator simply does not happen that day. The student apartments add walk-up staircases and tight, older stairwells, while the family homes of Little Holmby and Westwood Hills bring driveway access and the careful handling that older houses deserve.
We line up the permits, the elevator and dock bookings, the building paperwork, and the right truck size before move day, so none of it stalls the job once we are on site.