Wilshire Center, Los Angeles
Wilshire Center is a business improvement district and residential area in the Mid-Wilshire neighborhood of Central Los Angeles, California.
Wilshire Center is bounded by Third Street on the north, Alvarado Street on the east, San Marino Street on the south and Wilton Place on the west. Services provided by the business improvement district are limited to the area between Wilton Place, Hoover Street, Third Street and Eighth Street. As defined by the Los Angeles Department of City Planning, Wilshire Community Plan, adopted September 19, 2001, Wilshire Center “is generally bounded by 3rd Street on the north, 8th Street on the south, Hoover Street on the east, and Wilton Place on the west”, and Koreatown “is generally bounded by Eighth Street on the north, Twelfth Street on the south, Western Avenue on the west, and continues east towards Vermont Avenue.”
In 2001, Gary Russell, executive director of the Wilshire Center Improvement District, said: "Nobody called this Mid-Wilshire until some of the commercial real estate brokers started using that name somewhere around the 1980s," he said.
Wilshire Center is served by city buses, including several Rapid lines, and three subway stations along Wilshire Boulevard. The Metro Purple Line, which begins at Union Station in Downtown Los Angeles, has stations at Vermont, Normandie and Western Avenues, where it terminates (an extension of the Purple Line subway along Wilshire blvd to Westwood/UCLA has been approved and is scheduled to be completed in stages thru 2020) The Vermont station is also a stop on the Metro Red Line, which continues north through Hollywood to North Hollywood.
Wilshire Boulevard is named for Henry Gaylord Wilshire—a millionaire who in 1895 began developing a 35-acre (140,000 m2) parcel stretching westward from Westlake Park (MacArthur Park) for an elite residential subdivision. A socialist, Wilshire donated to the city a strip of land for a boulevard on the conditions that it would be named for him and ban public transit, railroad lines, and commercial or industrial trucking and freight trains.
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