Miracle Mile, Los Angeles, California
The Miracle Mile is an area in west-central Los Angeles, California, consisting of a roughly mile-long stretch of Wilshire Boulevard between Fairfax and La Brea Avenues and the surrounding streets. (It is often confused with the Magnificent Mile in Chicago.) It is bounded by Park La Brea on the north, Hancock Park on the east, Country Club Park on the southeast, Carthay Circle on the south, and the city of Beverly Hills on the west. In the early 1920s, Wilshire Boulevard west of Western Avenue was an unpaved farm road, running through dairy farms and bean fields. Visionary developer A.W. Ross saw potential for the area, however, and developed Wilshire as a commercial district to rival downtown Los Angeles. He acquired the Miracle Mile in 1920 for $54,000. He was ridiculed. Ross's insight was that the form and scale of his Wilshire strip should attract and serve automobile traffic rather than pedestrian shoppers. He applied this insight to the street itself, and the buildings lining both sides. Ross gave Wilshire various 'firsts': dedicated left turn lanes, the first timed traffic lights in the US, and he required his merchants to provide private automobile parking lots, all to aid traffic flow. The first major Miracle Mile retailer was Bullock's Wilshire in 1928, a building significant in architectural history because of its lavish porte-cochere main entrance -- in the back, by the parking lot. (Bullock's Wilshire even makes a guest appearance in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep.) Other retailers Desmonds, May Co., Coulter's, and Seibu soon followed. Ross required that all building facades along Wilshire be engineered to be best seen through a windshield. This meant larger, bolder, simpler signage; longer buildings in a larger scale oriented towards the boulevard; and architectural ornament and massing perceptible at 30 MPH instead of at walking speed. These simplified building forms were driven by practical reasons but contributed to the stylistic language of Art Deco and Streamlining. All of this was unprecedented, a huge success in commercial terms, and influential. Ross had invented the car-oriented urban form, what Reyner Banham called "the linear downtown" thereafter eagerly adopted all across the US, and certainly contributed to the Los Angeles reputation as a city dominated by the car. A sculptural bust of Ross stands at 5700 Wilshire, with the inscription, "A. W. Ross, founder and developer of the Miracle Mile. Vision to see, wisdom to know, courage to do." As newcomers and wealth poured into the fast-growing city, Ross' parcel--with its Art Deco department stores and office buildings on Wilshire, and elegant homes behind them on tree-lined streets--became one of the most desirable areas of the city. Acclaimed as "America's Champs-Elysees," this stretch of Wilshire near the La Brea Tar Pits received the name of "Miracle Mile" for its improbable rise to prominence. Although the rise of shopping malls and the development in the 1960s of high-rise financial and business districts in downtown and Century City lessened the Miracle Mile's importance as a retail and business center, it retained its vitality thanks to the addition of several museums. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and La Brea Tar Pits museums, among others, positioned "Museum Row" on the Miracle Mile as a rival to Exposition Park. Today, the district is one of the city's most vibrant, and a proposed westward extension of the MTA Red Line subway to Fairfax might well bring it even greater importance.
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