The purpose of this research is to examine the Southern California community of Brentwood in greater west suburban Los Angeles, which is bounded on the north by Sunset Boulevard; on the east by United States government property on which are located a Veteran's Hospital, a military cemetery, and a landscaped park (Veterans Park); on the south by Wilshire Boulevard; and on the east by 26th Street. The plan of the research will be to set forth the ways in which the boundaries or edges of Brentwood define it as a community, to discuss the general history of Brentwood's urban residential and commercial past, and then to detail the commercial and residential scene of today.
The Brentwood area is a community that has been carved out of and surrounded by other suburban Los Angeles communities. Its status as a community derives in part from the natural topographical landscape and in part from its history as a piece of private property. Let us begin with the topography. One aspect of Brentwood as it is currently defined is that it is situated on high ground.1 This, in a city that is generally noted for its topography as a plain, has the natural effect of creating boundaries. Brentwood was derived from the Rancho San Vicente y Santa Monica, one of the Spanish and Mexican ranchos that comprised original land grant settlements in the Los Angeles area. The history of the rancho survives in San Vicente Boulevard, which bisects the northern and southern portions of Brentwood and borders the northern landscape of the Brentwood Country Club and which retains a sense of the community's pastoral beginnings by means of its being planted with "coral trees after 1950, the official trees of the City of Los Angeles."2 The trees that have become major natural (if not naturally occurring) decorative elements of San Vicente Boulevard have also become what might be called Brentwood's principal landmarks, or at any rate the marks of the community's st...