1970s bring a surge of students to Westwood, completely transforming the North Village

Parked cars used to be an unusual sight in Westwood’s North Village.

Kids used to play baseball in the street without having to check over their shoulders for traffic.

People would walk their dogs, and the streets were lined with Spanish-style duplexes and triplexes, many of which were landscaped with shrubbery and ivy, said Shelley Taylor, a former North Village property owner.

Taylor lived in the same four-unit apartment on Kelton Avenue from age 6 to 16 after her parents purchased the building in 1956.

She recalls a very different North Village from the one seen today.

“You could always find a parking space,” Taylor said. “Life just seemed to be slower, and you knew your neighbors. It was much quieter.”

Taylor said the village’s original intent was to house families with one or two children and one car, which is also why parking is now scarce in the area.

Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, this was the North Village.

The village’s aesthetic remained relatively consistent since the 1940s, when the area consisted primarily of two-story apartment buildings and a row of fraternity houses, said Wolfgang Veith, a longtime resident.

Students rarely lived in the North Village. If they didn’t commute, students lived in a fraternity house or on campus in one of four existing residence halls ““ Dykstra, Sproul, Hedrick or Rieber.

Most of the residential area consisted of families and professionals ““ professors, doctors and local merchants, Taylor said.

With UCLA’s expansion, the North Village began to change in the 1970s.

At this point, housing was outstripped by the demand, said Steve Sann, chair of the Westwood Community Council.

If students didn’t want to commute, live in Greek housing or the Co-op, they had to find an apartment, he said.

Developers shifted from building the low-scale duplex buildings toward the larger multiunit apartment complexes that line the village’s streets today.

Taylor said the quaint, pre-World War II buildings began to disappear, with “big boxy buildings, with cottage cheese ceilings” taking their place.

The new buildings creeped right up to the sidewalk, which left little room for yards. They were intended to house students, Veith said.

Between 1980-1990, the Westwood Community Plan notes a 19.6 percent increase in Westwood’s population growth rate, up from 2.3 percent in the previous decade. The plan also indicates that more residents were spending less than one year at the same address.

When Taylor moved back into her childhood home on Kelton Avenue in the early ’90s, she painted the building green, taxi cab yellow and burgundy ““ “the color of a pansy.”

But the neighborhood had changed.

The families and professionals that once occupied the village had, for the most part, been supplanted by students.

With that, Taylor said she observed a new culture to the area, one where students would yell out of their windows to relieve stress during finals week. She added that she sometimes received comments from students about how the neighborhood was for them. At the end of each term, abandoned couches would line the village sidewalks.

With many landlords now living away from their buildings and tenants, basic wear and tear issues in the neighborhood became more prevalent, Taylor said.

“When you don’t have the people who own the buildings living there, they’re not there anymore to see this is broken and this needs repair,” Taylor said. “You had no one standing back (to see) this happening.”

Taylor moved from her building in 2004 to the state of Washington.

“I mourn the loss of what the neighborhood used to be,” she said.

With little vacant space left in the village, there is no more room for little gardens with fish ponds and fountains, she said.

“It literally was a village,” she said. “It was quaint.”