Wilshire "Condo Canyon"
A mile of residential high-rises down one boulevard — the Westside's wall of towers.
Key facts
- The high-rises lining Wilshire Boulevard here — the Wilshire Corridor — are nicknamed "Condo Canyon" (and "Millionaire's Mile"): a run of tall residential towers overlooking this stretch of Wilshire.
- The corridor holds 30-plus residential high-rises; apartments dominated the boulevard until the 1960s–70s, when condominium towers took over.
- The towers rise under the Wilshire–Westwood Scenic Corridor Specific Plan, which zones this strip for high-density (High Multiple Family) residential — the first of them, Wilshire Terrace (1958) and The Comstock (1961), set the pattern.
- This is narrated as the Westside's signature concentration of residential high-rises, not as "the densest" or "the only" such strip — the Condo Canyon nickname is sourced, the superlative is not.
Narration transcript
Look left, east down Wilshire Boulevard, and you'll see something you don't see much anywhere else in low-rise Los Angeles: a solid wall of residential towers, marching off toward Beverly Hills. Locals call it the Condo Canyon — also, less kindly, Millionaire's Mile. It's a long run of tall apartment and condominium buildings, more than thirty of them, stacked up along a single boulevard in a city famous for refusing to build up.
How did that happen in the land of the backyard? Zoning. This one corridor got carved out, decades ago, as a strip where height was allowed — so while the rest of the Westside stayed low, the money here went vertical. The first towers went up in the late 1950s and early '60s, and once the pattern was set, developers kept filling in the line. The result is this canyon of glass: full-floor condos with views straight down the boulevard to the ocean, hovering over one of the few streets in LA that was ever told it could reach for the sky.