West Hollywood

West Hollywood became its own city on November 29, 1984: a band of mostly flat streets between Beverly Hills and Hollywood, below the hills. The Sunset Strip runs along its northern edge and Santa Monica Boulevard through its middle, while design showrooms along Melrose Avenue, marketed as the Avenues of Art and Design, gather around the Pacific Design Center — Cesar Pelli’s blue building of 1975, known as the Blue Whale.

Apartment buildings from the 1920s, in Spanish Revival and Art Deco styles, line Fountain Avenue, Harper Avenue and Havenhurst Drive, and small residential pockets such as the Norma Triangle sit a few blocks deep. On Kings Road, the Schindler House — Rudolph Schindler’s concrete tilt-slab house, finished in 1922 — is open to visitors through the MAK Center. Among the city’s parks are Plummer Park and West Hollywood Park.