Sawtelle is an unincorporated region in Los Angeles County, California. It is bordered by the Los Angeles districts of West Los Angeles on the east and southeast, Westwood on the north, Brentwood on the northwest, and the city of Santa Monica on the southwest.

Almost completely surrounded by the city of Los Angeles, Sawtelle largely consists of federal government facilities including a Veterans Affairs hospital (with a large inpatient psychiatric facility), an enormous office building, a major post office, and the Los Angeles National Cemetery . Its name is often applied, in error, to the Los Angeles district of West Los Angeles.

History

The American Civil War produced many physically disabled veterans, and a perhaps even larger network of emotionally unstable ex-volunteers, leading to the creation of a network of veterans' homes (the precursor to today's Department of Veterans Affairs). The gentle Mediterranean climate of Southern California appealed greatly to the system's administrators. As a means of showing their appreciation for veterans' service to the Union (and, reportedly, an enticement to the War Department to build a naval base in Santa Monica Bay), area landowners Arcadia Bandini De Baker and Nevada Senator John P. Jones donated nearly 600 acres (2.4 km²) to the federal government for the construction of what would become the Pacific Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers. This parcel, dubbed Veterans Park, also included land for a veterans' cemetery.

The presence of so many disabled and indigent soldiers resulted in the area, by now commonly known as "Sawtelle" (after a prominent local family), becoming a hotbed of gambling, prostitution, and other vices. A Pacific Electric Railroad streetcar line connected the area to downtown Los Angeles in 1909, generating even more business for the budding red light district. However, its period as a den of inquity ended with the onset of Prohibition, which could actually be enforced in the federally-owned area. Annexation of the surrounding areas by the city of Los Angeles led to their steadily increasing development, creating a sense of law and order that transferred into once-rowdy Sawtelle.

The San Diego Freeway came through the area in the late 1950s, further separating the VA hospital from the cemetery and, with Wilshire Boulevard, dividing the area into four quadrants. In the early 1960s, the southeastern quadrant was selected as the site for a major new federal office building; seemingly within minutes of the facility's opening, its broad lawn was the site of numerous protests against the Vietnam War, consisting largely of students at nearby UCLA. The heavy traffic generated by the building began to cause severe congestion problems on Wilshire Boulevard, which was already strained to its limit by high-density development in Westwood and Brentwood that had been undertaken with the never-built Beverly Hills Freeway in mind. Traffic in Sawtelle had slowed to a crawl by 2004, when the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority took the drastic step of closing a lane in each direction to automobile traffic during rush hour on Wilshire, limiting the lanes to use by its new "Rapid" bus service.

Cultural references

In Neal Stephenson's breakthrough science-fiction novel, Snow Crash, he coined the name "Fedland" for the Sawtelle area, because in the novel it is one of the few bits of land still under the direct control of the United States government (the rest has been taken over by corporations). However, Stephenson's suggested name has never caught on outside of the community of science-fiction enthusiasts.

External links

Los Angeles National Cemetery

VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System