Geography and Transportation
Carthay is bordered by the Miracle Mile District on the north, Picfair Village on the south, the City of Beverly Hills on the north-west, and the Fairfax District on the north-east. The district is roughly bounded by Wilshire Boulevard on the north, La Cienega Boulevard on the west, Pico Boulevard on the south, and Fairfax Avenue on the east. Principal thoroughfares through the district include San Vicente, Olympic, and Crescent Heights Boulevards.
Carthay comprises three neighborhoods: Carthay Circle, which lies to the north of Olympic Boulevard; South Carthay, which is south of Olympic and west of Crescent Heights Boulevard; and Carthay Square, to the south of Olympic and east of Crescent Heights.
History and the Neighborhood Today
"Carthay Center" was developed by J. Harvey McCarthy in 1922 as an upscale residential district along the San Vicente Boulevard line of the Pacific Electric Railway, and bounded by Wilshire Blvd. on the north, Fairfax Avenue on the east, Olympic Blvd. on the south and Schumacher Drive on the west. The development included the exquisite Carthay Circle movie theater, at Carrillo Drive and Commodore Sloat Drive, just south of San Vicente Blvd. The areas to the south of Olympic Boulevard remained undeveloped until 1933, when developer Spyros George Ponty built several hundred homes in two districts later named "South Carthay" and "Carthay Square."
One of Carthay Circle's most interesting features is its network of pedestrian pathways, which are marked and maintained as regular city streets by the city of Los Angeles.
The Carthay Circle Theater
The Carthay Circle Theater [was one of the most famous "picture palaces" of Hollywood's "Golden Age." It hosted the official premiere of Gone with the Wind, Marie Antoinette, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Fantasia, among other films. By the 1960s it was considered obsolete, overshadowed by multiplexes; its customer base had also been sapped by suburbanization. In 1970, it was demolished; two low-rise office buildings and a city park occupy its former site.
The Carthay Circle Theater was also showcased for the world premiere of "Marie Antoinette", which starred Tyrone Power. For this glamorous event, the gardens around the theater were restructured and enhanced to resemble the landscaping of Versailles. In the 1930s and '40s props from the sets of such premiered films as "The Good Earth", "Captains Courageous", "The Great Ziegfeld" and "Gone With the Wind" were displayed on the grassy median of McCarthy Vista, from Wilshire Boulevard south to San Vicente Boulevard. The premieres were red-carpet events, with the stars of the motion picture arriving in limousines at the entrance to the covered walkway to the theater south from San Vicente and cheered by hundreds of fans in bleachers there, accompanied by searchlights scanning the sky. Only the Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood also had such elaborate premieres in that era.
The Carthay Circle Theater will now live on as a replica to be constructed in the entry plaza of Disney's California Adventure in Anaheim.
Housing
Single-family houses are most prevalent in Carthay Circle and South Carthay, while two- and three-family houses prevail in Carthay Square. Mid-sized apartment buildings, mostly built in the 1930s, line the arterial peripheries of all three neighborhoods. Most of the houses, duplexes, and triplexes are built in the Spanish Colonial Revival style popular in the 1920s and 1930s. Strict enforcement of restrictive covenants by the area's homeowners associations meant that most of these remained standing into the 1980s, when South Carthay was designated for preservation in Los Angeles' Historic Preservation Overlay Zone program; Carthay Circle followed in the 1990s.
