Warner Dr, Mid-City West

This section of the Mid Wilshire West neighborhood is an ethnically and racially diverse upper-middle class neighborhood, within walking distance of the LA County Museum and the La Brea Tar Pits.

This is really a beautiful older neighborhood with just as much diversity when it comes to architectural styles as for races. One of the really nice aspects—beyond the well kept Mission Revivals and Ranch homes—is the high number of pointy roofed Tudors with wood beam ribbing. In addition, the leafy streets are clean, and though the lots for the homes are on the smallish side they are so well-kept that you hardly notice their small size. Many of the homes also have attractive details. Some of the Spanish Revival homes, for example, have round towers at their center front which mark them as in the style of Wallace Neff (a renown Los Angeles area architect whose style came to be known as California Style Homes). The neighborhood is sure to keep this look as well, because Carthay is part of Los Angeles Historic Preservation plan—thus, it is against the city regulations to “modernize” the housing here.

Carthay Square is mostly a quiet neighborhood in its residential area and because of this crime is about average for LA despite its location in the middle of higher crime areas. Mostly you just have to worry about the kinds of property crime that are common in all the relatively well-off neighborhoods in the area. Lots of car break-ins and that kind of thing, but virtually no violent crime (there hasn’t been a murder here in more than half a decade).

At the eastern edge of the neighborhood, along S. Fairfax Avenue, you find a number of Ethiopian Restaurants and boutiques. This is because the area here is also known as Little Ethiopia. If you want to experience the cuisine of Addis Ababa—this is the place to go.

The local public elementary school, Cathay Center Elementary is ranked fairly low when it comes to test scores, but much of this may have to do with the high number of non-native speakers that make up the school’s population. Independent evaluations of the teachers themselves at this school show that they have a fairly even mix of effective and ineffective teachers (and everything in between). For those parents that want more than mediocre for their kids, a number of private schools—mostly Jewish schools and some separated by gender—serve the area.

One of the exciting prospects for the area is the extension of the Metro Rail Purple Line to nearby Miracle Mile (and perhaps eventually to Santa Monica) which would make the area near Carthay Square even more of hub of activity.