West of Beverly Hills, north of Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood is one of LA's more user-friendly neighborhoods, a grouping of low-slung redbrick buildings that went up in the late 1920s around Broxton Avenue, along with the nearby campus of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Known then as "Westwood Village," it's an area that is easily explored on foot, and one very much shaped by the proximity of the university campus, the lifeblood of the area. Once LA's prime movie-going district, Westwood Village has lost some of its cinematic eminence due to a 1980s gang scare and a real lack of parking, but remains the most densely packed movie-theater district in the country, and its 1931 Westwood Village Theater , 961 Broxton Ave, is still often used for premieres or special "sneak" previews to gauge audience reactions.

South of Westwood, Wilshire Boulevard exploded in the 1970s with oil-rich highrise developments; now modest detached houses sit next to twenty-story condominium towers in which penthouse apartments with private heliports sell for upwards of $20 million. Inside one such tower, on the corner with Westwood Boulevard, is the UCLA Hammer Museum (Tues-Sat 11am-7pm, Thurs closes at 9pm, Sun 11am-5pm; $4.50, free Thurs 6-9pm; ), amassed over seven decades by Armand Hammer, the flamboyant boss of Occidental Petroleum, and now administered by the university. The works by Rembrandt and Rubens are less stunning than those at LACMA, but Van Gogh's intense and radiant Hospital at Saint Rémy is a jewel.

Outside the museum, behind the tiny Avco cinema, Hammer's marble tomb in Westwood Memorial Park , 1218 Glendon Ave, stands near the lipstick-covered plaque that marks the resting place of Marilyn Monroe .

Westwood

• Westwood

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