You may have noticed: there’s no university here. But developer Benjamin Walter Marks (1883-1946) sure tried to make one happen. In 1919, Marks began planning an enormous subdivision called Woodland Heights, which he announced to the public in 1920. Within this 5,000 acre city-within-a-city, Marks envisioned not only an 85 acre hillside campus – home to the brand-new UCLA, he hoped – but also a country club, hotel, amphitheaters, an “aircraft depot”, a military academy for boys, a finishing school for girls, a 20 acre civic center at today’s McCambridge Park, and hundreds of homes. University Avenue was conceived as a wide, park-lined concourse through the development. But long story short, even after rebranding the site Benmar Hills in 1923, Marks failed to impress the UC Regents, and UCLA moved from its original location (see Normal Avenue) to Westwood in 1929. University Avenue – and the scholarly streets around it (see Amherst and Andover) – remain as souvenirs of Ben Marks’s broken dream. And then there’s Uclan Drive.
Find it on the map:
