San Vicente Boulevard is an east-west street in Santa Monica and Brentwood, in the Westside region of Los Angeles, California.
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Route
The boulevard is the northernmost major street in Santa Monica, and runs through downtown Brentwood, Los Angeles. It begins from Palisades Park at the intersection with Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, inland through Brentwood and past the Sawtelle Veterans Home campus, to end at its intersection with Wilshire Boulevard in West Los Angeles. South of the intersection it is renamed Federal Avenue. near the Veteran Administration and at the entrance of Westwood.
Intersections with Ocean Avenue and 7th Street in Santa Monica lead down to Santa Monica Canyon and on to the Pacific Coast Highway. The intersection with 26th Street (north) connects with Sunset Boulevard and Mandeville Canyon. For most of its length, it runs generally parallel and south of Sunset Boulevard and north of Montana Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard.
San Vicente is useful as a thoroughfare due to its lack of traffic lights, except 7th and 26th Streets, until downtown Brentwood at the intersection with Bundy Drive.
The Santa Monica Transit Big Blue Bus Line 4 runs along the entire length of San Vicente Boulevard, enroute from downtown Santa Monica to West Los Angeles.
Features
San Vicente Boulevard is four lanes wide with a large landscaped median along its entire length, planted with ~120 large Coral trees (Erythrina caffra), along its center. Those in the western section within Los Angeles, between 26th Street and Bringham Avenue, are a designated Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument. The median is popular with joggers.
Other features along the boulevard include The Brentwood Country Mart at 26th and San Vicente, and the private Brentwood Country Club and golf course.
The Santa Monica and Brentwood neighborhoods north of San Vicente Boulevard often have larger properties with distinctive residences.
History
The Mezzaluna Trattoria, formerly located at 11750 San Vicente Boulevard, was involved in one of Los Angeles' most notorious murders: the O. J. Simpson murder case. Nicole Brown Simpson was a frequent patron and had eaten there with her family on the last night of her life. Her friend Ronald Goldman, a waiter at the restaurant, was also murdered at Brown's condominium that night, when he had stopped by to return the eyeglasses Brown's mother had left behind at the restaurant.
15 months later, Goldman's friend and fellow Mezzaluna Trattoria waiter, Michael Nigg, was murdered in Hollywood, in a crime F. Lee Bailey described as "fishy". In separate books, Bailey and the authors of Killing Time: The First Full Investigation Into the Unsolved Murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman (1996), Donald Freed and Raymond P. Briggs, have noted that the restaurant was the nexus of drug trafficking in Brentwood, and Nigg and Goldman were not the only Mezzaluna waiters who had fallen victim to foul play around that time: two others were missing, and a third had his car destroyed by fire in Corona del Mar during 1994.
The restaurant's patronage suffered in the wake of the murders and the lengthy O.J. Simpson murder trial, and the establishment closed in 1997. The building now under new ownership, currently houses a Peets Coffee & Tea shop.