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West Adams is a neighborhood southwest of downtown Los Angeles, California. It is generally considered a part of South Los Angeles. It is bordered by Pico-Union and Koreatown on the north, South Central on the east, North University Park on the south, and Jefferson Park on the south and west. Its principal thoroughfares are Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Crenshaw Boulevards, Arlington, Western, Vermont, and Normandie Avenues, and Hoover and Figueroa Streets. The district is served by the Santa Monica and Harbor freeways.
West Adams is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, with most of its buildings erected between 1880 and 1910. It was once the wealthiest district in the city, with its Victorian mansions and sturdy Craftsman bungalows home to downtown businessmen and professors at nearby USC. Two of the most spectacular churches in the city, St. John's Episcopal and Saint Vincent de Paul (Roman Catholic), are found in the district, near the famous Art Deco headquarters of the Automobile Club of Southern California. The athletes' village for the 1932 and 1984 Olympic Games is in the district as well. An enormous neon image of Felix the Cat towers over the intersection of Figueroa and Jefferson as the mascot of famous Felix Chevrolet. The Angelus Rosedale Cemetery is the final resting place of many local residents, including prominent persons from Los Angeles history.
The development of the West Side and Hollywood, beginning in the 1920s, siphoned away much of West Adams' upper-class population, and the construction of the Santa Monica and Harbor Freeways obliterated much of the neighborhood. The Harbor Freeway's route was selected in large part as a barrier to prevent South Central's blacks from moving west, but after the 1948 overturn of segregationist covenants and the 1965 Watts riots, most of the district's white residents moved to other parts of the city, and the area became a largely middle-class black neighborhood. The area was a favorite amongst black celebrities in the 1940s and 1950s ; its inhabitants included Hattie McDaniel, Joe Louis and Little Richard. The story repeated itself a quarter-century later: while the 1992 Los Angeles Riots largely spared West Adams' historic buildings, significant portions of its black population decamped for the suburbs of the Antelope Valley and Inland Empire. An increasingly large portion of the district's population is now of Mexican origin, but the area's architecture and proximity to USC have brought a number of upper-middle-class whites as well.
The area's belated designation by the city as a historic district in the late 1990s increased property values, while the Southern California real estate boom of the early 2000s has brought new prosperity to the district. The projected 2009 opening of the long-delayed MTA light rail line to Culver City and Santa Monica, the route of which will pass through West Adams, will bring even greater importance to West Adams.
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