Sepulveda Boulevard's Odd Bargain: Westchester Saved the Diner and Let the Landmark Go Dark

Drive south on Sepulveda through Westchester and you pass two buildings that tell opposite stories about what this neighborhood decides is worth keeping.

Near La Tijera, the old Kohl's sits dark, its parking lot empty enough that skateboarders have started using the loading dock ramps. A mile or so south, past Manchester, steel framing climbs eight stories into the air around a low, unassuming building that still serves fried chicken to a line of regulars most Sunday mornings. One of these buildings is architecturally significant enough to have won a national design award. The other is a diner. Guess which one is being torn down to make way for apartments, and which one just lost its last tenant with no plan in sight.

If you've driven this stretch and wondered what's actually happening, here's the story behind both.

A Building Ahead of Its Time, Now Just Empty

The vacant box at 8739 S. Sepulveda Blvd was not always a Kohl's. It opened in 1949 as Milliron's, the first suburban branch of a downtown Los Angeles department store chain, and it was designed by Victor Gruen, the architect who would go on to invent the American enclosed shopping mall with Minnesota's Southdale Center a few years later. Milliron's was where he worked out a lot of the ideas that made Southdale possible: integrated parking, a single-story footprint built to feel taller and more substantial than it was, and a rooftop lot for 300 cars reached by dramatic curved ramps. The design won an Honor Award for Architectural Merit from the AIA's Southern California chapter in 1949, then a national AIA Honor Award in 1951.

None of that history saved it from becoming just another big-box vacancy. The Broadway took over the site in 1950 and ran it as The Broadway-Westchester until 1990. Mervyn's moved in after that, gutted much of the original interior, and sealed off the rooftop parking ramps. Kohl's later took over the site. As of January 2026, the building sits unoccupied again, and there is no announced redevelopment plan.

The detail that matters here is not that Westchester lost a department store. Big-box tenants come and go everywhere. It's that this particular building was never listed on the National Register of Historic Places, despite the architectural pedigree, which means nothing legally obligates anyone to save its facade, its bones, or its use. Its fate right now is entirely a market question, and the market has not yet answered it.

A Mile South, an Eight-Story Building Is Rising Around a Fried Chicken Counter

At 6501 S. Sepulveda Blvd, next to Centinela, a very different bet is being made. Fairfield Residential has broken ground on an eight-story, 362-unit apartment building designed by Carrier Johnson + Culture, with construction visibly underway as of February 2026. The project sits on what used to be a strip mall's worth of surface parking and small commercial space. But the plan does not touch the roughly 7,000-square-foot restaurant building next door: Dinah's Family Restaurant, open on that corner for more than six decades, is being preserved and restored in place, with the new tower literally cantilevered over the back half of it to make room.

The city's own planning approval language explains why a developer would go to that trouble for a diner rather than just clearing the lot. Los Angeles City Planning's environmental filing on the project describes the existing Dinah's building as "a recognized historic resource that is potentially eligible for listing," even though, like Milliron's, it has never been formally designated. Fairfield is getting a 50 percent density bonus and other zoning incentives to build bigger than the site would otherwise allow, in exchange for setting aside 41 units as very low-income affordable housing. Keeping Dinah's open through construction, and restoring its original signage and appearance once the alterations from past decades are stripped away, functions as a piece of the community goodwill that makes the incentive package work.

Here's a quick side-by-side of what's actually happening at each address:

Neither building carries formal legal protection. That's what makes the contrast worth noticing. One got a redevelopment plan that wraps a new apartment tower around it. The other got nothing, at least not yet.

Why One Got Saved and the Other Didn't

The honest answer isn't sentiment. It's incentive structure. Dinah's sits on a parcel a developer wanted badly enough to design around, and keeping a beloved, decades-old restaurant open through construction reads as a public amenity that makes the density bonus application look better to the city and to future renters. The project's own boosters have described the parking as intentionally generous and unbundled, so renters who don't own cars aren't subsidizing those who do, a detail that signals this is a building being engineered for a specific kind of tenant, not just maximum square footage.

Milliron's, by contrast, is a big rectangular box that anyone redeveloping would have to gut regardless of what it once was. There's no restaurant inside it drawing a loyal Sunday crowd, no obvious reason for a new owner to design around its history rather than through it. Being architecturally significant turned out to matter less than being small, beloved, and inconvenient to remove cleanly.

What Else Is Rising Along the Same Stretch

Sepulveda isn't the only corridor in motion. A few blocks over, Redtail Crossing, a 102-unit supportive housing project from Community Corp. of Santa Monica, is under construction at 8333 Airport Blvd, and the Los Angeles City Council has upheld approval of a 441-unit mixed-use project from Cityview at 6136 W. Manchester Ave. Between the Dinah's tower, Redtail Crossing, and the Cityview project, Westchester is adding well over 800 new housing units within a fairly tight radius, on top of several apartment buildings from Sandstone Properties and Hanover Company that have already gone up nearby in recent years.

What the Corridor Still Sounds Like on a Sunday

None of this construction has quieted the parts of Westchester that make it feel like a neighborhood rather than a stretch of arterial road. The Westchester Certified Farmers' Market still runs every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 6200 W. 87th St, in the small commercial pocket locals call the downtown Triangle, with live music and a kids' area alongside the produce stalls. Every Fourth of July, the LAX Coastal Chamber of Commerce still runs its parade down Loyola Boulevard from Westchester Park to Loyola Marymount University. Aliki's still serves Greek food at prices that haven't caught up to the rest of the Westside, and Shokudo still has a line for udon on a Friday night.

That's the part of the story that's easy to miss if you only look at the construction cranes. The neighborhood isn't being replaced. It's being renegotiated, building by building, corner by corner, and the outcomes so far have less to do with what deserves to survive on architectural merit and more to do with who's willing to design around what's already there.

Next time you're stopped at the light at Sepulveda and La Tijera, take a look at the old Kohl's sign, still bolted to a building that once won a national design award. Then head a mile south and see what's rising around Dinah's. Both are true statements about Westchester right now, and neither one is the whole picture.

If you're keeping an eye on how this corridor keeps changing, or you're curious what any of it means for property values or timing nearby, Terry Ballentine has been watching Westside blocks like this one for a long time. Reach out anytime for a free home valuation or just to talk through what you're seeing on your own street.