North Faring Road

Harvard-Westlake’s middle school campus is addressed here; therein lies the source – and the mystery – of the North Faring name. (You’ll note that there’s neither a South Faring Road nor a regular old Faring Road.) Harvard-Westlake was once two separate institutions: the Harvard School, a boys’ military academy founded in 1900, and the Westlake School for Girls, founded in 1904. (They merged in 1991.) This was Westlake’s third location. Its first was on Alvarado Street in the once-tony Westlake neighborhood, where the school obtained its moniker. It was relocated to Westmoreland Avenue in 1917; five years later, a news article mentioned its outdoor sports and events area: “North Faring Fields”. This means that Westlake had adopted the North Faring name long before 1925, when its founders and principals Frederica de Laguna (c. 1859-1942) and Jessica Smith Vance (c. 1867-1939) purchased land in Holmby Hills for their permanent campus and christened North Faring Road upon it. So where did “North Faring” come from? I found absolutely zero feasible inspirations amongst people and places. Perhaps it was a line from a poem or some other private joke between de Laguna and Vance, who met in 1901 when both joined the English faculty at USC and were living together by 1902. Whether they were romantic partners as well as business partners, I can only speculate.