Westchester Triangle's Second Saturday Stroll: The Family Story
Walk down 87th Street on a Saturday afternoon and the block between Sepulveda and the old Triangle core does something most Westside shopping strips don't: it holds still. No scaffolding, no paper covering the windows of a space between tenants, no chain replacing a chain. At 6259 W. 87th St., The Book Jewel sells new and used books out of a building that used to be Karl's Toy Store. Next door at 6261 W. 87th, Tomat serves coffee and pastries starting at 8 a.m., then dinner. The two businesses share a wall, a family, and a reason for existing three feet apart from each other.
That's the detail most people miss when they call the Triangle "charming." It isn't charming by accident, and it isn't new money discovering an overlooked pocket of the Westside. It's the same family that has owned and shaped this stretch of Westchester since the 1940s, still deciding what goes where.
The lineage runs in a straight line if you know where to look.
Four generations, one three-block radius. The Westchester neighborhood has plenty of small businesses that aren't connected to this family at all, but the two that anchor the Triangle's current identity both are, and that's not incidental to how the district feels.
Restaurant openings next to bookstores happen all over Los Angeles without any particular meaning behind them. This one had a specific logic. Natalie Dial has said the pairing was deliberate, meant to create a working relationship between the two spaces rather than two unrelated tenants who happened to share a property line. Tomat's morning coffee and pastry service runs Tuesday through Sunday.
Dial grew up with a personal stake in the corner. Her grandparents came up in Westchester in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and the building that now houses Tomat was Karl's Toy Store in their era. When a family keeps rebuilding the same three blocks across decades, the result looks less like a retail strip and more like a running project, updated every generation but never handed off to someone with no history there.
The most visible expression of that project is the Second Saturday Stroll, a recurring community event that turns 87th Street into a block party centered on the Triangle's small businesses.
Last year's run followed a clear rhythm: three summer and fall dates, then a holiday edition to close the season.
| Date | Season |
|---|---|
| August 9, 2025 | Summer |
| September 13, 2025 | Late summer |
| October 11, 2025 | Fall |
| December 6, 2025 | Holiday edition |
Each stroll has featured live performances, interactive art, and food from businesses in and around the Triangle, with sponsorship split between the Drollinger Family Charitable Foundation, the Westchester Business Improvement District, the Westchester Streetscape Improvement Association, Loyola Marymount University, Councilwoman Traci Park's District 11 office, and the Westchester Family YMCA. The December edition doubled as a debut for new tree lighting along 87th Street, funded by two Triangle businesses, Triangle Wines and Dental Wellness Arts, and installed to make the block look, in the organizers' words, like a fairy tale setting for the season.
The Triangle also carries a visual signature that predates any single stroll: muralist David Russell's "Welcome to Westchester" piece, visible from the district and recognizable to anyone who has spent time in this part of the Westside. If you've walked the Triangle without knowing his name, you've still seen his work.
If the last two years are any guide, the Stroll returns to a similar late-summer-through-December cadence each year, but the exact dates shift, so the most reliable way to catch the next one is to check the current listing on Council District 11's event calendar rather than assume last year's schedule repeats exactly.
Westchester's commercial history isn't uniformly kind to the buildings in it. A mile of frontage away on Sepulveda Boulevard, at 8739 S. Sepulveda, sits a very different kind of local landmark: the building originally built as Milliron's Westchester in 1949, designed by Victor Gruen, the architect who would go on to design the country's first enclosed shopping mall. Its grand opening was treated as a showcase of postwar retail design. The Broadway took it over and closed its Westchester branch in 1990. Mervyn's followed, then Kohl's. As of the most recent public record, the building sits unoccupied.
That contrast matters more than a trivia footnote. A landmark building with a bigger architectural pedigree than anything in the Triangle has spent most of the last thirty-five years cycling through single large tenants who eventually leave, because the building was designed around the assumption that one department store could carry the whole space indefinitely. The Triangle was never built that way. It's a collection of small storefronts under one family's continuous ownership, unlike the large-tenant model described above. When Karl's Toy Store closed, the building didn't sit empty for years waiting for another single retailer big enough to fill it. It became a bookstore, then grew a restaurant next to it.
That's a defining feature of the Triangle, and it's a different story from the one people usually tell about small-business districts on the Westside, where turnover is often driven by rising rents pushing out longtime tenants in favor of national chains. Here the landlord and the tenant are frequently the same family.
The Triangle sits along 87th Street near Sepulveda, walkable from most of central Westchester. The Book Jewel is open six days a week, closed Mondays, with Sunday hours starting at 9:30 a.m. Tomat runs its cafe service Tuesday through Sunday mornings before shifting to dinner service later in the day. Between the two, a Saturday can run from a coffee and a browse through the fiction shelves to a full dinner without crossing a property line.
For the Stroll itself, the practical advice hasn't changed from year to year: it runs in the early evening, it's built around the small businesses on 87th Street rather than outside vendors, and it's worth checking the Neighborhood Council of Westchester/Playa's event listings closer to the date, since sponsors and exact timing have shifted slightly each season.
None of this requires anyone to be shopping for a house in Westchester to care about it. It's a neighborhood detail worth knowing whether you've lived three blocks from the Triangle for twenty years or three months, the kind of local knowledge that explains why a stretch of 87th Street feels different from a strip mall a mile away, even though both are technically just retail.
If you're curious about what else shapes daily life in Westchester, or you eventually want a longer conversation about the neighborhood from someone who tracks it closely, Debbie Weiss is easy to reach. Let's Connect.
Debbie is always available to talk about your real estate goals and help you get there. She loves what she does, connecting people and homes, so your call or text is always welcome.