Security Guard in Westchester, CA

Westchester began the 20th century as an agricultural area, growing a wide variety of crops in the dry, farming-friendly climate. The rapid development of the aerospace industry near Mines Field (as the Los Angeles Airport was then known), the move of then Loyola University to the area in 1928, and population growth in Los Angeles as a whole created a demand for housing in the area. Westchester was built with the intention of housing members of the working class. Westchester hosted the cross country part of the eventing equestrian event for the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

In the late 1930s, real estate magnate Fritz Burns and his partner Fred W. Marlow developed a tract of inexpensive prefabricated single-family homes on the site of a former hog farm at the intersection of Manchester and Sepulveda Boulevards. This community, dubbed “Westchester”, grew as the aerospace industry boomed in World War II and afterward. A Los Angeles Times article in 1989 described the development as “a raw suburb”, “created willy-nilly in the 1940s”.

The area was predominantly residential. When the area had 30,000 residents, it was still lacking a police station, fire station, or hospital. It lacked a barber shop even by 1949.