About Hancock Park

Hancock Park is a centrally-located Los Angeles neighborhood most closely associated with Los Angeles in television and film. Lined with palm trees and the Hollywood Sign, which is clearly visible most days, it is an upper-middle-class neighborhood consisting primarily of single-family homes, with local real estate agencies specializing in the needs and demands of urban professionals, Hollywood stars and local millionaires, and celebrities.

Hancock Park is named for George Allan Hancock, a developer and philanthropist who envisioned the area as the ideal urban residential neighborhood. He also owned the area now known as the La Brea Tar Pits, which is now a tourist destination and a public park. Known for the large number of prehistoric animals which have been found trapped in the tar, most notably woolly mammoths and sabretooth tiger, it also has a natural history museum. Amateur archaeologists and local school groups routinely visit the pits, which are continually being excavated in pursuit of fossils.

Once home to Howard Hughes, Hancock Park is known for immense, lavish homes with massive back and front yards, impressive modern architecture, and a large number of rooms. Increased demand for a chance to live in the neighborhood has resulted in the replacement of some larger homes with smaller and more affordable ones, but the district remains almost exclusively composed of single family houses with one or two floors. Architects including Wallace Neff and Frank Lloyd Wright built in a variety of styles while preserving the essential character of the neighborhood — an upscale charm that survives to this day. Nearly every popular style of the 1920's can be found in Hancock Park, which makes it one of those magical L.A. places where movies that are set around the world can be filmed, all without leaving the 30-mile zone.

Hancock Park is served by Los Angeles High School and Fairfax High School as part of the Los Angeles Unified School District. In addition to a selection of public schools, Hancock Park is also home to Marlborough School, an elite private girls' school, Yavneh Hebrew Academy, an Orthodox Jewish school. Area residents are committed to a solid educational foundation for their residents, and so have sought both to fund the schools and the John C. Fremont Library as best as possible. The library is noted for its Italian and Spanish architecture in addition to its extensive book collection.