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Often times when City Hall designates a new sub-community within Los Angeles and puts up one of those blue identifier signs, the name is inauthentic and doesn't end up being widely used. This one, I think, makes sense. The City Council, per LA Weekly's Dennis Romero, has given it's OK to to the new name of Sawtelle Japantown. This name will apply to the area on either side of Sawtelle Boulevard in West LA that has had a concentrated Japanese American community for several generations now. For awhile some have used Little Osaka for the stretch of Asian restaurants between Santa Monica and Olympic boulevards, but it never really caught on — too random and artificial, I suspect. The city's new name for the area, which grew out of a community petition, recognizes the interesting history of the Sawtelle district. And the boundaries don't overreach. Romero's story says they are using Santa Monica Boulevard, Pico, the 405 freeway and the Santa Monica city boundary along Centinela Avenue as the edges of the new community. That keeps the Japantown designation just to areas that have been historically associated with Japanese Americans and immigrants. The LA Times Mapping Project, for instance, applies the Sawtelle community name to a wider area that is more commonly recognized as West Los Angeles.
The boundaries are a little squishy over there due to the tangled but interesting history of the area. Sawtelle used to be an independent incorporated city, one of several cities later annexed into the Los Angeles giant. Sawtelle was a wild place created at the bottom end of the large National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers and Sailors, opened in the late 1880s for Civil War vets. The few thousand residents of the home — predecessor of the Veterans Affairs campus and hospital there now — would spend their pension checks outside the gates in Sawtelle's saloons and gambling clubs. The main street of Sawtelle was Oregon Avenue — now called Santa Monica Boulevard — served by a streetcar that connected the little city to Los Angeles. The city's main intersection was today's Santa Monica and Sawtelle boulevards, where the Nuart theater is located. Evidence of old rooming houses is still visible along Sawtelle Boulevard. University High School on Barrington Avenue was originally opened in 1924 to serve the children of Sawtelle and was called at different times Sawtelle High School and Warren G. Harding High. Gone is another interesting element of old Sawtelle: a stretch of cottages where widows from across the country would settle temporarily in hopes of meeting and marrying a war veteran with a pension.
In 1922, Los Angeles swallowed up the city of Sawtelle, in part over water. The community centered along Santa Monica Boulevard became known as West Los Angeles, a name that has largely stuck — though sometimes gets applied to the whole Westside region of LA. The police and courts complex a few blocks from the Nuart is called the West Los Angeles Civic Center. The West Los Angeles Neighborhood Council defines its area as the swath between Wilshire Boulevard and the 10 freeway, the 405 freeway and the Santa Monica city line — pretty close to the original boundaries of the city of Sawtelle. One of the quirks of the LA Times Mapping Project is that it relocates West LA entirely east of the 405 freeway, while the neighborhood council, history and local tradition put West LA west of the 405. Go figure.
The section of old Sawtelle south of Santa Monica Boulevard began attracting Japanese immigrants, shops, nurseries and churches early on. Some of them remain. As the restaurant district along Sawtelle Boulevard has become more popular, applying the Japantown name feels appropriate. (Even though there are Korean and Chinese eateries on the street too.) It's good they kept Sawtelle in the name. I haven't seen any Sawtelle Japantown blue signs yet, but they should be coming. From the LA Weekly story:
Ted Tanaka of the Sawtelle Japantown Association, which has been campaigning for the name since last year, says the change is about recognizing the area's history as a hub for Japanese-Americans.
"It's a broad-based, historical commemoration of our ancestors settling Sawtelle 100 years ago," said the 76-year-old Tanaka, who told us he was born and raised in the community. "It's in recognition of the fact that they were some of the first settlers to Sawtelle Boulevard. My dad was one of those who came to Fourth Street, or Sawtelle Boulevard, when it was a dirt road."
The Sawtelle history and its interplay with the Soldier's Home have fascinated me for along time. The Soldier's Home is also why there is a large national cemetery on Sepulveda Boulevard, started in 1889 when the first veteran died — a resident named Abner Prather who had fought for the Union.
From my book, "Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles," published by Angel City Press in 2005:
Sawtelle’s original 1896 streets were named for Civil War battle sites (today’s Stoner Avenue was Vicksburg, Colby Avenue was Gettysburg) and for the states from which the men hailed. Oregon Avenue, the main street through town, later became Santa Monica Boulevard. The town and the old soldiers also developed the kind of mutual relationship commonly found around military bases.
In 1904 the Times visited Sawtelle and found three gambling halls and a house of prostitution situated close by the home’s gates.Pension days, when the men got paid in cash, were especially tawdry occasions. As much as $80,000 in cash would be dispensed each month, “and with wolfish eagerness, a horde of thugs, gamblers, prostitutes and sellers of evil liquors lay in wait at the very gates of the Soldier’s Home,” the paper reported. Men often staggered back to the grounds drunk and robbed of their money after sprees in Sawtelle’s cheap taverns.Sawtelle also gained an unusual reputation as a place where women of any age could move and expect to be married shortly. The home was filled with lonely men flush with pension cash who were happy to find companionship. Sawtelle recorded more unions involving a spouse over 60 than anywhere in the country, The Times reported. Thirty grandchildren attended one wedding. Of course, as the old warriors passed on, widows were left behind. In 1915, the count of men who had died at the home since it opened (3,790) surpassed the 3,338 living members. A “widow’s row” of cottages built and operated by the Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic sprouted west of the Soldiers’ Home grounds on the dirt lane that ran three miles down to the ocean bluffs. This lane, Nevada Avenue, later became Wilshire Boulevard.
The Soldier's Home, Sawtelle and the city of Santa Monica were all developed on a former rancho that was controlled by John P. Jones, for 30 years a U.S. Senator from Nevada. He founded Santa Monica and used his clout to establish the Soldier's Home, which in turn provided buyers for lots in Sawtelle and customers for the town's business establishments. Like a lot of things around LA, it was all a big real estate scheme.
