‘We don’t stop to think there was another life here.’ : CSUN Offers a Glimpse of Early Days

Once upon a time, there was a San Fernando Valley without freeways, housing tracts and shopping malls.

If that’s a hard image to conjure up these days, a trip to the “Early Images of the San Fernando Valley” exhibit on display through Sept. 30 at Cal State Northridge serves as a reminder that the past is not so distant.

More than 100 photographs, maps, post cards and pamphlets tracing the Valley’s rapid development, from mission center to agricultural hub to booming suburb, have been collected for the exhibit, which opens today in the lobby of the Oviatt Library.

“We go day to day, running up and down the freeways and we’re not aware of what was going on in the Valley,” said Bobbette Fleschler, exhibit curator and president of the San Fernando Valley Historical Society. “We don’t stop to think there was another life here.”

Another life, indeed. Arrowheads and stone tools are reminders that just 200 years ago the Valley was inhabited by peaceful Indians who collected acorns, dug roots and hunted small animals. They called their home Achois Comihabit --Land of Illusive Dreams.

Dreams, some illusive and some real, are reflected in the rest of the exhibit, arranged chronologically from American Indian artifacts to the founding of the university in 1956. A rendering of the Virgin of Guadalupe that hung in the San Fernando Mission recalls the rancho era and early Spanish settlers.

The 20th Century, referred to in the exhibit as the “Selling of the Valley,” brought an unprecedented breed of boosterism made possible by water acquired through annexation to Los Angeles.

A 1920 advertisement describing the scenic community of Lankershim, now Universal City, uses the exaggerated language of the era:

“Nature . . . graced the banks of the brook, which skirts the property, with verdure and foliage whose beauty and charm is an unending joy. And then in the riot of her most gorgeous and delicate tints, she budded and blossomed the young orchard which covers the entire tract. You want to live here--your children want to grow up here.”

Despite the boom of development, the Valley was also home to the utopian “Back to the Land Movement,” which hailed rural living as the panacea for the country’s ills during the 1920s and ‘30s. Magazines and photos trace the story of Charles Weeks, who persuaded more than 500 families to develop high-yielding, one-acre farms devoted to “intensive agriculture and intensive human culture.”

A display devoted to the citrus industry shows the colorful crate labels of the time. The estimated 20,000 acres of the Valley devoted to the cultivation of citrus fruits gave way to housing tracts and freeways after World War II.

“People came West to get a piece of their own land and fulfill a dream,” said Fleschler. “I think the history of the Valley reflects a lot of that. It was like a microcosm.”