What’s Changing in Culver City’s Hayden Tract

I drove down Eastham Drive this week and pulled over to get a picture, because the construction there says something about a corner of Culver City most people drive past without knowing its name. The buildings look almost like lofts, but what’s going up on the east side of the street is creative office space, not housing. It’s one more chapter for a stretch of the city that has never looked like the rest of Culver City, and probably never will.

Where the Hayden Tract actually is

The Hayden Tract sits just east of Downtown Culver City, around Hayden Avenue, Eastham Drive and Higuera Street. It’s a few blocks from downtown’s restaurants and entertainment, with the Helms Bakery District to the north, Metro E Line stations on both sides of it, and the Ballona Creek Bike Path close by. Small area, but there’s a lot going on in it once you know where to look.

From movie studios to creative offices

Culver City got its old nickname, “Heart of Screenland,” from the movie studios that built the city. That industry is still here, but the businesses that have moved into the Hayden Tract now span media, design and technology too. The tract itself started as an industrial area in the 1940s, and it became known decades later for turning old warehouses into buildings that don’t look like anything else in the city.

Architect Eric Owen Moss did a lot of that work, with developers Frederick and Laurie Samitaur Smith. Between them they built Stealth, Umbrella and Beehive, buildings you’ll either love or want to argue about, but they give this corner of Culver City a character nowhere else in the city has.

Then there’s (W)rapper, the tower near Jefferson and National wrapped in bands of steel you can spot from the train. It’s not my favorite building in the group, but it gets a reaction every time. Moss designed that one too, though it sits across the city line in Los Angeles, so it’s a neighbor to the Hayden Tract, not technically part of it.

What’s actually going in on Eastham Drive

At 3592-3620 Eastham Drive, three industrial buildings are being converted into creative office space, with two new second-floor additions planned. A warehouse at 3550 Hayden Avenue went through a similar renovation nearby.

The Eastham project is the one I pulled over for. It’s an older industrial block getting a new use, which is the same move the Hayden Tract has been making for eighty years. Take what’s already there and figure out what else it can be.

It’s not all office space

Hayden Avenue already has Destroyer and Vespertine, chef Jordan Kahn’s two restaurants tucked into the tract’s converted warehouse buildings, along with dance studios, pottery studios and other creative businesses that have made a home in these spaces over the years. Apple has offices in there too, The Willows Community School sits right in the middle of it, and Smashbox Studios has been shooting film and photography out of the tract for years. A restaurant next to a school next to a pottery studio next to a tech office, that mix is part of what makes this pocket of Culver City feel different from anywhere else in the city.

Why I’m paying attention to it

More office space here could mean more people around during the day for the restaurants and businesses nearby. If you’re looking at a home on the residential streets around the tract, being close to jobs, downtown and the Metro E Line is part of what you’re buying into. I wouldn’t tell you new offices are going to raise home values on their own. Nobody knows that yet.

What I’m watching is whether the streets and connections around all this interesting architecture end up as compelling as the buildings themselves. The city has a draft plan for the Hayden Tract looking at housing, public space and better connections through the area, but that’s still a plan, not something you can use today.

 

Want more of what’s changing in Culver City? I wrote about the new retail coming to Culver Commons at Washington and Centinela.

 

About Nicole Strober

Nicole Strober is a Realtor® with Compass and a native Angeleno. Her core focus is Culver City, Beverlywood, Cheviot Hills, West Adams, Baldwin Hills, Ladera Heights and surrounding Westside neighborhoods, with additional transactions across Los Angeles including Highland Park, the San Fernando Valley, Burbank, and South LA. Under her brand, Strober Homes, she helps buyers and sellers navigate the Los Angeles real estate market with a strategic and hands-on approach, taking time to understand what matters most to each client and guiding them through the process from beginning to end.

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