Westwood Village is presented as a once-charming shopping district reshaped by university growth and aggressive development. Its shift from low-rise neighborhood streets to a louder, more commercial landscape forms the setting for Alex Delaware’s dinner with Judy Manitow, where the Village’s contrasts are visible in the distance between its ordinary streets and Grun!’s elevated, expensive dining room.

Setting and Transformation

Westwood Village had once served a high-end residential area with a corresponding shopping district: curving streets lined with single-story brick buildings. By the time of the chapter, that character has given way to neon, chrome, weekend noise, and fast-food outlets. The contrast is not simply between old and new architecture; it is between a neighborhood-scale place and a district increasingly organized around traffic, consumption, and larger institutions.

The University dominates the Village’s northern end. Its growth spills beyond campus as it takes over vacant offices and builds parking lots. Student-oriented businesses—multiplex theaters, T-shirt shops, discount record stores, and clothing stores—reflect the demands of a large student population, while inexpensive fast food displaces the luxury dining that the earlier high-end district might have implied.

Development and Commercial Pressures

University expansion is only one force changing the Village. Developers pursue denser construction and greater returns from the land, with high-rises rising beyond the scale of the older buildings; the narrator also notes developers’ efforts to get past zoning restrictions through influence and bribery. Richard Doss is included among the people associated with this development-minded world, linking the district’s physical transformation to the novel’s characters and conflicts.

Some high-rise developers offer expensive restaurants as a concession to neighbors. Grun! is one such establishment, occupying the top floor of a black-glass building on the north end of Glendon. Its status-conscious setting and prices keep the middle class at a distance. The restaurant’s German celebrity chef also has a line of frozen dinners, an incongruity that makes its cultivated exclusivity feel inseparable from commercial branding.

Grun! and the Meeting with Judy

Alex Delaware lives near the Village but rarely ventures into its noisy center. To reach Grun!, he drives down Hilgard, passing sorority houses to the west and the University’s botanical garden to the east; the trip takes ten minutes. The route places institutional and residential landmarks beside the increasingly commercial district, before he pulls up between two Porsche Boxsters and enters the restaurant at half past eight.

Inside, the half-empty dining room and the elaborate performance of upscale service sharpen the setting’s artificiality. The waiters’ robotic recitation of daily specials recalls Alex’s earlier lunch there, when he encountered unlikely ethnic combinations, steep prices, and service that seemed rehearsed. He waits at a small corner table while Judy Manitow is delayed. Ten minutes later she arrives in a plum-colored knit suit, matching heels, and conspicuous jewelry, moving at a brisk pace. The meeting thus begins in a place whose polished luxury sits atop a district in upheaval: Westwood Village is both the backdrop to their encounter and a compact portrait of the competing interests remaking the neighborhood.