Drive west along San Vicente Boulevard at dusk, past the coral trees standing in the green median, and you reach a quieter corner of the Westside where the Persians in Brentwood have built one of Los Angeles’s most discreet enclaves. There are no neon signs in Farsi here, no rows of kebab houses. There is only the soft confidence of a community that arrived with means, chose privacy over visibility, and folded itself into one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in the city.
The Place
Brentwood sits in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, west of the 405 and north of Santa Monica, within the 90049 ZIP code. It began as farmland on the old Rancho San Vicente y Santa Monica, was annexed by Los Angeles on 14 June 1916, and grew slowly until the postwar decades turned its canyons and flats into one of the city’s most expensive addresses.
Its spine is San Vicente Boulevard, a four-lane road split by a wide landscaped median planted with roughly 120 coral trees. That median, the western stretch between 26th Street and Brigham Avenue, was designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 1976, replacing what had once been a Pacific Electric trolley track.
By the 2000 census Brentwood counted about 31,000 residents, and more than a fifth of them were foreign-born. Of those born abroad, the single largest origin was Iran, at 27.2 per cent, a figure that quietly explains why this leafy district matters to the story of Persian Los Angeles.
How It Became Persian
The Iranian presence on the Westside did not begin with a refugee crisis. It began with money, education, and a long-standing pull westward, then was transformed almost overnight by revolution.
Before 1979: a quiet vanguard
Iranians were among the very first immigrant groups to settle in Beverly Hills, Bel-Air, and Brentwood. In the years before the revolution, the people arriving were not fleeing anything. They were the children of well-off Tehran families sent to study at UCLA, businessmen with import ties to California, and professionals drawn to the same things that drew everyone else to Brentwood: good schools, big lots, and proximity to the ocean.
That early wave mattered later. When the larger exodus came, the new arrivals were not strangers landing in an empty place. They had cousins, classmates, and family friends already settled on the streets between Sunset and San Vicente.
1979: revolution and exile
The 1979 Iranian Revolution turned a trickle into one of the wealthiest migration waves the United States has ever received. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians left, and metropolitan Los Angeles absorbed the largest concentration of them anywhere outside Iran, with estimates of 500,000 to 600,000 Iranian Americans and their descendants across the region.
This was a flight of the professional and propertied classes. Among the arrivals were bankers, doctors, lawyers, and merchants who had held real standing in Tehran and Isfahan. Many had foresight enough to move assets ahead of the upheaval, and they looked for neighbourhoods that matched the lives they had left. Brentwood, Bel-Air, and Beverly Hills fit precisely.
The Jewish thread
A large share of the exodus was Iranian Jewish. Persian Jews left Iran in tens of thousands after 1979, and by 2008 the Los Angeles area held the largest Persian Jewish population in the country, around 50,000. Many concentrated on the Westside, where they could keep faith, language, and family close together.
The community’s religious life clustered just east and south of Brentwood rather than inside it. Nessah Synagogue, founded in 1980 by Rabbi David Shofet and the Iranian Jews of Los Angeles, became the spiritual anchor of Persian Jewish life and settled permanently at 142 South Rexford Drive in Beverly Hills in 2002. The Iranian American Jewish Federation built its own centre at 1317 North Crescent Heights Boulevard. Brentwood families drove a few minutes to both.
Living near, not in, Tehrangeles
The visible heart of Persian commercial life grew on Westwood Boulevard south of Wilshire, the strip that became known as Tehrangeles. By 1990 a sociologist studying the community called it the only true central location for Iranians in a city where they were otherwise scattered.
Brentwood’s role was different. It was where you lived, not where you shopped for saffron or sat in a Persian cafe. The neighbourhood offered the schools and the privacy; the Persian community in Westwood, a short drive south, offered the bakeries, bookshops, and restaurants. The two functioned as one extended world split across a few miles of the Westside, much the way the larger Tehrangeles district tied the whole region together.
The Landmarks
San Vicente Boulevard coral trees, between 26th Street and Brigham Avenue. The boulevard’s planted median is Brentwood’s signature image and a designated city monument since 1976. For Persian families who settled on the streets feeding into it, the coral trees became the daily backdrop of school runs, evening walks, and weekend errands, an unshowy emblem of having arrived.
Brentwood Country Mart, 225 26th Street. Opened on 18 November 1948 in a red-board building designed by architect Rowland Crawford, the Mart is the neighbourhood’s communal heart. Its courtyard, fire pit, Sunday farmers market, and the chicken counter Reddi Chick, running since 1979, are where Brentwood gathers, Persian and non-Persian alike, on weekend mornings.
Brentwood School, San Vicente Boulevard. The independent K-12 day school, with about 1,200 students across two campuses four blocks apart, is one of the main reasons affluent families compete for Brentwood addresses. Like much of the Westside’s professional class, many Persian families measured the neighbourhood partly by access to schools like this one.
Nessah Synagogue, 142 South Rexford Drive, Beverly Hills. Founded in 1980 and settled at its current home in 2002, Nessah upholds Iranian Jewish tradition according to Sephardic practice. Though just outside Brentwood, it is the religious centre of gravity for Persian Jewish families across the Westside, including many who live north of San Vicente.
Iranian American Jewish Federation, 1317 North Crescent Heights Boulevard, West Hollywood. The federation has long served as the organising body of Iranian Jewish Los Angeles, hosting weddings, celebrations, and communal events. For Brentwood’s Persian Jewish residents it is the institutional thread connecting private family life to a wider diaspora.
West Los Angeles VA Medical Center, off San Vicente and Wilshire. The veterans facility whose 1880s founding gave rise to the neighbourhood is now undergoing a billion-dollar redevelopment. It is a reminder that Brentwood’s prestige rests on more than a century of layered history into which the Persian arrivals are only the most recent chapter.
Westwood Boulevard, south of Wilshire. A few minutes from Brentwood’s southern edge, this is Tehrangeles proper, the commercial spine of Iranian Los Angeles since the 1980s. Brentwood Persians treat it as their high street for groceries, sweets, and the food of home.
Where They Came From
Most of Brentwood’s Persians trace their roots to Tehran, with families also coming from Isfahan, Shiraz, and the other cities where Iran’s professional and mercantile classes had concentrated. They were doctors, lawyers, financiers, jewellers, and traders, people whose standing in Iran translated quickly into the property markets and professions of the Westside.
The Jewish families among them carried a heritage stretching back more than two and a half millennia in Persia, one of the oldest continuous Jewish communities on earth. By 1990 Iranian Jews in Los Angeles had concentrated in apparel and jewellery, while Iranian Muslims moved into construction and real estate, the businesses that would later shape the look of neighbourhoods well beyond Brentwood.
What linked them was not a single village or province but a class and a moment: educated, urban Iranians who left a country in upheaval and chose, almost in unison, the same handful of Westside neighbourhoods. That same instinct seeded other affluent Persian enclaves across Southern California, from the Persian families of Calabasas to the Iranian community in Newport Coast.
Brentwood Today
Brentwood remains one of Los Angeles’s wealthiest neighbourhoods, with median home values well above two million dollars and a household income in the 90049 ZIP code that runs into six figures. The Persian families who settled here in the 1980s have raised a generation of American-born children, many now professionals themselves, and the community has matured rather than expanded into anything resembling a visible enclave.
That invisibility is deliberate and characteristic. Unlike Westwood, where the signage and storefronts announce the community, Brentwood keeps its Persianness behind hedges and gates. The synagogue is in Beverly Hills, the bakery is in Westwood, the family is in Brentwood. The neighbourhood was never meant to be a cultural showcase. It was meant to be home.
What persists is the network: the family driving to Nessah on a Saturday, the standing weekend table at a Westwood restaurant, the children at Brentwood School and the cousins in the Valley. The Persians in Brentwood did not build a district. They built a life, distributed across a few square miles of the Westside, with this quiet, coral-lined neighbourhood at its centre. The same pattern of dispersal and connection echoes in the Persian community of Sherman Oaks across the hill, and as far afield as the Iranian families of Plano, Texas.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are there really many Persians in Brentwood, Los Angeles?
Yes. By the 2000 census more than a fifth of Brentwood residents were foreign-born, and Iran was the single largest country of origin among them at 27.2 per cent. The Persians in Brentwood form a significant share of the neighbourhood’s immigrant population, even though they keep a low public profile.
When did Iranians first move to Brentwood?
Iranians were among the earliest immigrant groups to settle in Brentwood, Bel-Air, and Beverly Hills, with a professional and student vanguard arriving before 1979. The large wave followed the 1979 Iranian Revolution, when hundreds of thousands of Iranians fled to the United States and many of the wealthiest settled on the Westside.
Why did Persian families choose Brentwood specifically?
Brentwood offered everything the educated, propertied arrivals were looking for: large homes, strong private schools such as Brentwood School, safety, and proximity to the ocean and to the existing Persian community in Westwood. It matched the urban, upper-class lives many Iranian families had left behind in Tehran.
Where do Brentwood’s Persians worship and shop?
Most religious and commercial life sits just outside Brentwood. Persian Jewish families worship at Nessah Synagogue in Beverly Hills, and the community’s main commercial strip is Westwood Boulevard south of Wilshire, the district known as Tehrangeles, a short drive from Brentwood’s southern edge.
Are the Persians in Brentwood mostly Jewish?
A large share of Iranian Los Angeles, and of the Westside Persian population in particular, is Jewish; by 2008 the region held around 50,000 Persian Jews, the largest such community in the country. Brentwood’s Persian residents also include Muslims, Baha’is, Zoroastrians, and Christians, reflecting the religious diversity of the wider Iranian diaspora.
Is Brentwood part of Tehrangeles?
Not exactly. Tehrangeles refers to the commercial heart of Iranian Los Angeles along Westwood Boulevard. Brentwood is a residential neighbourhood a few minutes away where many Persian families live, so it is best understood as part of the wider Persian Westside that orbits Tehrangeles rather than the district itself.
If your family’s story passed through Brentwood, or any of the places Persians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the streets of Tehran and the synagogues of Isfahan, to a house on a coral-lined street off San Vicente, to wherever you are now.