Century City, Los Angeles
| Century City | |
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| Neighborhood of Los Angeles | |
Century City on January 25, 2009
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 Century City
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| Coordinates: 34°03′20″N 118°25′01″W / 34.05556°N 118.41694°W |
Century City is a 176-acre (71.2 ha) neighborhood and business district in Los Angeles' Westside. Outside of Downtown Los Angeles, Century City is one of the metropolitan area's most prominent employment centers, and its skyscrapers form a distinctive skyline on the Westside.
The district was developed on the former backlot of film studio 20th Century Fox, and its first building was opened in 1963. There are two private schools, but no public schools in the neighborhood. Important to the economy are the Westfield Century City shopping center, business towers, and Fox Studios.
According to the Mapping L.A. project of the Los Angeles Times, Century City is bordered on the northeast and east by Beverly Hills, on the southeast and south by Cheviot Hills, on the southwest and west by West Los Angeles and on the northwest by Westwood.
The land of Century City belonged to cowboy actor Tom Mix (1880-1940), who used it as a ranch. It later became a backlot of 20th Century Fox, which still has its headquarters just to the southwest.
In 1956, Spyros Skouras (1893-1971), who served as the President of 20th Century Fox from 1942-62, and his nephew-in-law Edmond Herrscher (died 1983), an attorney sometimes known as "the father of Century City," decided to repurpose the land for real estate development. The following year, in 1957, they commissioned a master-plan development from Welton Becket Associates, which was unveiled at a major press event on the "western" backlot later that year.
In 1961, after Fox suffered a string of expensive flops, culminating with the financial strain put on the studio by the very expensive production of Cleopatra, the film studio sold about 180 acres (0.73 km2) to developer William Zeckendorf and Aluminum Co. of America, also known as Alcoa, for US$300 million (US$2.4 billion in 2014's money). Herrscher had encouraged his uncle-in-law to borrow money instead, but once Skouras refused, he was out of the picture.
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