The street is gone now, a Brigadoon of a boulevard.

Ventura Boulevard, turnpike of the trendy and avenue of the urbane, went too far.

Literally.

Once upon a time there was this little tendril of the avenue Way Out West in Agoura.

Or maybe there wasn’t. Its history is murky.

Only a select band of refuse-truck drivers or map fanatics knew about it.

To the casual observer from the central Valley, The Boulevard appears to peter out at Woodlake Avenue in Woodland Hills, just an avocado’s throw from the city limits. The cognoscenti of the Western rim know that it blooms again briefly for about four blocks in Calabasas. That appeared to be about all she wrote for the Great Suburban Way.

But not according to Thomas Bros. Maps.

The Thomas Bros. map book is the bible for anyone who must forage in unknown parts of the Los Angeles area for a living. Salesmen, cops, firefighters, pizza messengers, missionaries, reporters--all depend on the thick rectangular book to guide them through the mysteries of the megalopolis.

According to Page 100-A, there is a short stretch of Ventura Boulevard, only half a block or so, sitting in lonely splendor in the far marches of the Santa Monica Mountains.

It appears as if the boulevard went underground, as the Los Angeles River did in some San Fernando Valley neighborhoods before the Army Corps of Engineers discovered the alchemy that turns money and water into concrete. Then, like the river before it was caged, the boulevard just sort of pops up again five miles away.

Off the appropriately named Lost Hills Road, it lies coiled. It appears poised for an armored strike into Ventura County, thrusting toward what ought, by right of nomenclature imperialism, to be its home turf. Today Sherman Oaks, tomorrow Oxnard and the ice-free harbors of the Pacific! Lebensraum fur der yogurt shoppe! Mini-malls uber alles!

But you can call off Der Tag. The street is gone now, a Brigadoon of a boulevard. Or quite possibly it never existed.

The authorities conflict, but this much they agree on: There is no such street, at least not now. The Post Office, Thomas Bros. executives, civil servants in the bowels of the city and county bureaucracies charged with designating streets, all concede there is no such place.

“We can’t find any trace of the thing,” said Jean Granucci, spokeswoman for the county Department of Public Works, the agency which should have named the street. “In our records, it just doesn’t exist and never did.”

And no, said a Thomas Bros. spokeswoman, it is not a “bug,” one of the deliberate mistakes the map maker inserts to trap competitors who might copy Thomas Bros. maps and sell them as their own.

There were no boutiques on that faraway boulevard, no record stores catering to spiky-haired pseudo-barbarians.

No sidewalk cafes out there in the dusty, tan hills where honest hombres still saddle their palominos, where developers are still benefactors of civilization who provide comfortable alternatives to living in burrows. No couture shops offering dresses designed for 6-foot-tall, 12-year-old courtesans, which may explain why they are never seen anywhere on actual female bodies.

Just the dump.

The Calabasas Land Fill is the dump’s official name. Which is odd, because the landfill is not in Calabasas, but Agoura. Perhaps Agourans are too proud to have land filled. Maybe they have it capped and polished.

There are two versions of how the little street came to be. The first goes like this:

Once upon a time, the landfill’s headquarters office was in a trailer parked on that spot. Because the trailer was roughly in line with Ventura Boulevard, it adopted an address on that street. Or there may have been several “Ventura Boulevard” addresses in that area, which were obliterated by construction of the Ventura Freeway.

Then the mobile office was towed to a new site. That left westernmost Ventura Boulevard--the tip of the lance that originates back in Studio City, where Cahuenga Boulevard banks down from the pass and gathers speed in a cluster of snack shacks, body shops and hard-case motels--up the hill without a tenant.

So the dump did what it does best. It dumped on Ventura Boulevard. The landfill filled it with land.

The second version, told by other dump and county workers, is this:

The headquarters trailer was never parked there and had nothing to do with it. The land was not filled in and the “street” still exists. It’s a set of ruts worn by trucks going to and from a water tank.

Somehow, the theory goes, a map maker working with aerial photos of the site spied the track, came across the Ventura Boulevard address the dump office once used, put two and two together and got five.

The county’s map makers insist they would never do anything like that.

At any rate, it’s too late now for a historical monument, or even a quick visit on a Sunday afternoon for a picnic.

If it ever existed, Ventura Boulevard West is now deep underground with the Chumash hearths and the whale skeletons, the giant sloth femurs and the oil the Gettys and Dohenys missed. It has been consigned to the sleep of centuries until archeologists of some distant age find it rising from the earth.

Adios Boulevard-by-the-border. Sayonara streetling-to-the-sea.