From a Desert to a Sea of Suburbia

By DAVID COLKER

Dec. 19, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Perhaps the world’s most famous collection of suburbs, the San Fernando Valley is truly a child of the 20th century.

Born of an epic engineering feat, its growth was tied to some of the most romantic of American endeavors this century: aviation, movies, the automobile and space flight. At mid-century, it fulfilled the postwar dream of suburban life, then went through a sometimes reluctant transition to urbanism.

At the dawn of a new century, The Times set out to tell the story of how the Valley was built. Material was gathered from a wide range of sources including The Times’ library, personal accounts, economic studies, public records and books.

1900-1909 / Open Book

In 1904, Los Angeles water agency head William Mulholland and former Mayor Fred Eaton hatched a wildly ambitious plan to solve their fledgling city’s water crisis: an aqueduct to divert water to Los Angeles from the Owens River, 233 miles to the north.

Their plan--kept secret so land and water rights could be bought cheaply--was to provide water not only to L.A. but also to the unincorporated Valley, much of which was arid.

“Doubtless these lands if irrigated would soon become densely populated suburban additions to a Greater Los Angeles,” Mulholland had written three years earlier.

The aqueduct plan was still supposed to be secret when a syndicate of investors--including Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis and railroad magnate Henry Huntington--quietly optioned 16,000 acres north of what is now Roscoe Boulevard. The price: $35 an acre.

Some historians assert that syndicate members knew of the water plan. The investors denied collusion but the legend endured, becoming the basis of the 1974 movie “Chinatown.”

Backed by the syndicate, which controlled two Los Angeles newspapers, a $23-million bond measure to construct the aqueduct--described as biggest project of its kind since Roman times--was approved by voters in 1907.

As the decade ended, the only incorporated town in the area, Glendale, had a population of 2,700. San Fernando had 2,100, Lankershim (later renamed North Hollywood) 850 and Burbank 800.

1910-1919 / Sale of the Century

In 1910, posters advertised an auction of horses, mules and farm equipment from the vast Lankershim and Van Nuys ranches as the “Sale of the Century.”

But the real sale of the century was a land deal.

The 47,500 acres of Lankershim-Van Nuys ranchland, stretching across the southern half of the Valley, had been sold in 1909 at $53 an acre to a five-man group including Otis, his son-in-law Harry Chandler (later publisher of The Times) and trolley magnate Moses Sherman. Instead of wheat fields, the new owners envisioned subdivisions.

First to be carved out of the land was the community of Van Nuys. Developer William Whitsett bought half-interest in the town and threw a huge barbecue in 1911 to kick off lot sales. Everyone who had a telephone in Los Angeles was called and invited.

Whitsett reserved a part of the site for small-scale farmers, attracting them with ads that declared, “There’s Money in Poultry” in Van Nuys.

Soon thereafter, the Owensmouth subdivision (now Canoga Park), developed by the Janss Investment Co., opened with its own barbecue.

The major land holders put in Sherman Way, the first paved road to traverse the Valley, to connect their tracts. Later subdivisions arising from their land were Reseda, Sherman Oaks, Tarzana and Woodland Hills.

Streetcars helped spur development. In 1911, a line opened from Hollywood to Lankershim. Glendale, developing to the east on its own, had a line since 1904.

But nothing boosted the growth of the Valley more the gala event held Nov. 5, 1913. On a hillside north of San Fernando, 43,000 people gathered for the aqueduct opening. With military guns firing and fireworks bursting, the waters that changed the Valley forever began to flow.

For Valley communities, that water came at a price--their independence. The communities were told that to get the water, they must allow themselves to be annexed by Los Angeles.

In 1915, major sections of the Valley capitulated, helping L.A. more than double its size that year. Burbank, Glendale and San Fernando, with their own wells, remained independent.

The same year, Universal Studios opened. Public tours were given into the 1920s, when the presence of visitors caused noise problems during the production of talkies.

1920-1929 / Subdivision Mania

Subdivided lots were bought not only by prospective residents but by speculators seeking a share of the Southland’s already legendary real estate riches.

Not all guests at subdivision barbecues were interested in lots. “My grandfather was young and broke, so he couldn’t buy, but he could eat,” said David Lynn of Tarzana.

Burbank’s population increased to more than 16,500 by the end of the decade, as it made a quick transition from rural ways. City garbage pickup began in 1920; outhouses were banned in 1922.

Magnolia Park, established on Burbank’s western edge, had 3,500 houses within six years. When the city refused to pay for a street connecting the subdivision with the Cahuenga Pass, developer Earl L. White did it himself and called it Hollywood Way.

Industry drove the development of Burbank. First National Pictures (later Warner Bros.) bought a 78-acre site in 1926. Brothers Allan and Malcolm Loughead, founders of the Lockheed aircraft company, opened a manufacturing plant in 1928, and a year later famed aviation designer Jack Northrop built his historic Flying Wing airplane in his own plant nearby.

The Valley’s first commercial airport, Grand Central Air Terminal, opened in Glendale in 1929. Metropolitan Airport, later Van Nuys Airport, opened in 1928. Nearby, Amelia Earhart built one of the first lakeside homes in a subdivision carved from the Toluca Ranch.

Lankershim also grew, partly due to its proximity to Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles. In 1927, a commercial developer bought a 200-acre section of the town for filmmaking and called it Studio City. That same year, Lankershim borrowed the name of its famous neighbor and became North Hollywood.

Author Edgar Rice Burroughs bought 540 acres in the West Valley in 1919 and called it Tarzana Ranch after his most famous character. By 1924 he was ready to jump on the subdivision bandwagon. “Formerly we were way out in the country,” he wrote in a letter, “while now everything is rapidly moving in our direction.”

Farther west, Victor Girard arrived at what later became the intersection of Ventura and Topanga Canyon boulevards, and envisioned a town graced by Oriental-style buildings. He bought 3,000 acres and built a land office resembling a mosque. He put up false fronts of other exotic buildings, making his new town, named for himself, look like a giant stage set.

1930-1939 / Depression Downturn

The Depression slowed development to near standstill, but farming on irrigated land thrived in the north Valley. Dusty landscapes became crop fields and orchards. A billboard proclaimed that the Valley had a population of 1 million--white Leghorn chickens.

Farm workers from the Midwest poured into California, fighting for jobs in the Valley, where wages for laborers were an average $2 a day, compared with $1.26 nationally. Shantytowns arose along railroad tracks.

The movie business continued to thrive. Warner Bros. bought an additional 80 acres in 1936 and Walt Disney Productions moved to Burbank in 1938. Movie stars and executives bought large lots--Barbara Stanwyck and Zeppo Marx raised horses in Northridge and Harry Warner moved onto a section of the West Valley later called Warner Ridge. Al Jolson became honorary mayor of Encino.

Real estate began to bounce back mid-decade. In Burbank, a 100-home construction project began in 1934. By 1936, property values in the city exceeded pre-Depression levels.

Other ventures, including the dream that was Girard, foundered.

In another aviation milestone, United Airport (eventually called Burbank Airport) opened in 1930.

1940-49 / Boomtown

World War II forever wiped out the Valley’s image as an agricultural center.

Even before the war, Lockheed doubled in size to produce the airplane that became the workhorse of the Allied air campaign--the P-38 Lightning.

In March 1941, Lockheed and nearby airplane manufacturer Vega (they merged in 1942) had a combined work force of 25,800, more than any aviation employer in the country. By October, that work force had doubled.

But the “stucco spread” of new homes couldn’t keep up with new arrivals. In North Hollywood, huge eucalyptus trees planted in the 1870s were cleared to make way for offices and factories.

Some Valley outposts were still too remote for development. In Girard, where lots sold for as little as $200, residents changed the community name to Woodland Hills.

A few months after the Pearl Harbor bombing, 3,000 Japanese living in the Valley were ordered to internment camps. The farms many of them had operated were turned over to the federal government.

The 1943 Gordon Jenkins song “San Fernando Valley,” first recorded by Roy Rogers and made a hit by Bing Crosby, included a line about “cow country.” But RFD postal routes were rapidly disappearing. Industry jobs, made plentiful by the war, paid better than farm work.

By 1944, Lockheed had 94,000 workers in Burbank--nearly half of them women. Smaller defense industries dotted North Hollywood, and military clothing was made in San Fernando.

Lockheed bought Union Air Terminal. During the war years it became the nation’s busiest airport, even though it was covered by acres of netting and topped with fake houses and trees for wartime camouflage.

Within two years of the war’s end, Lockheed employment had fallen to 20,000, but the momentum of the Valley couldn’t be restrained. Explosive growth was occurring in what was to become the Valley’s most famous attribute: single-family homes.

Returning GIs, forced to grow up fast during the war, represented a new generation of Americans seeking suburbia as an ideal. Affordable ranch-style houses, with backyards large enough for swimming pools, were the desired alternative to urban apartments.

Less than a year after victory was declared, more than 10,000 lots were subdivided. In 1946, building permits totaled more than the previous four years combined. Business centers opened before roads to them could be paved.

General Motors opened a plant in Van Nuys in 1947. Also that year, North American Aviation established a 680-acre rocket test facility in the northwest Valley.

1950-59 / Glory Days

Backyard barbecues, swimming pools and two-car garages--things that once had seemed out of reach to the middle-class--became emblems of residential living in the Valley. At the decade’s end, columnist Art Seidenbaum wrote in The Times that the Valley had become the “major spawning place for what is now universally recognized as the ‘Southern California way of life.’ ”

With the East Valley filling up, developers moved north and west. By mid-decade, officials were processing subdivision maps at the rate of one per day in the West Valley.

Acres of citrus trees were mowed down in Granada Hills, Northridge, Woodland Hills and Chatsworth. “We grow houses, not orange groves around here,” said builder Richard Modiano in 1955.

Ground was broken in January 1956 for the Valley’s first four-year college, San Fernando Valley State (now Cal State Northridge).

NBC opened a major production facility in Burbank. By the end of the decade, three out of four prime-time TV shows were produced in Valley studios.

It was the age of aerospace. Rocketdyne Division of North American Aviation opened a 56-acre plant in Canoga Park, employing 1,700 in 1954. Lockheed established its own missile laboratory and began producing the U-2 spy plane at its super-secret Skunk Works unit inside the factory. The legendary unit later produced the SR-71 Blackbird and F-117 stealth fighter.

In 1955 the May Co. Center (now Laurel Plaza Shopping Center) opened in North Hollywood near the Valley Plaza, and together they represented the largest regional shopping center west of the Mississippi.

There were downsides to rapid growth. One of the chief icons of the “Southern California way of life” was the automobile, but the infrastructure lagged behind. In 1954 the Hollywood Freeway opened from North Hollywood to downtown and within a year was carrying 183,000 vehicles a day, almost twice what it was designed for. Bob Hope, a resident of Toluca Lake since 1938, famously called it the “biggest parking lot in the world.”

1960-69 / Rumblings of Change

As the population passed the million mark, the Valley was neither suburb nor city.

“The Valley is 1 million souls in search of a community,” said Pete Hustard, head of the Valley’s Associated Chambers of Commerce in 1966.

At the decade’s outset, more than 50% of all new buildings being erected in the Valley were apartments. In North Hollywood, the figure was 90%. “The day of the backyard barbecue is over,” said bank economist Conrad Hamison in 1965.

Not quite. Freeways opened new areas to development. In 1960 the Ventura Freeway was completed from North Hollywood westward to Calabasas. In 1963, the Golden State Freeway provided a link to northern areas, as did the Hollywood Freeway in 1968.

Corporations bought large tracts in Porter Ranch and Calabasas Park for development, and new communities popped up outside Valley boundaries. In 1967, Newhall Land & Farming Co. opened the planned community of Valencia. In the Conejo Valley to the west arose Westlake Village.

Even with all the new housing, minorities were often steered away. In 1964, the Burbank Human Relations Council charged there were no black residents in the city. A city official disputed this, saying Burbank had six black families.

Valley industry remained strong but not diverse. Business consultant Robert Diehl estimated that 69% of Valley industry was dependent on defense and aerospace programs. NASA alone had $602 million in contracts with Valley firms in 1964.

The first covered shopping mall in Los Angeles, Topanga Plaza, opened in Canoga Park in 1964. The retail zone along Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood became so dominated by shopping centers that numerous small businesses left. Some were replaced by strip clubs, pornography shops and X-rated movie theaters.

As the Valley increasingly became Hollywood’s main production center, new arrivals tended to move into apartments as well as homes. Many residents were single. The overwhelmingly family atmosphere of the Valley was starting to change.

1970-1979 / Shaken to the Core

The Valley was shaken both literally and emotionally this decade, perhaps the most turbulent in its history.

The Feb. 9, 1971, Sylmar quake caused 64 deaths and $553 million in damage, and destroyed two major hospitals.

Also in the early 1970s, panic struck aerospace workers as NASA contracts fell off sharply. Thousands of engineers and scientists were laid off.

In 1974 another key Valley industry, GM, eliminated a shift at its Van Nuys plant and laid off more than 20% of its work force.

New housing slowed, although high-end projects went forward in Encino, Porter Ranch and Bell Canyon. The Mormon church won approval to put a 595-unit mobile home park in Sylmar.

Commercial ventures fared much better. In 1973, developer Bob Voit announced that a $300-million office and industrial center would be built in Warner Center, a section of the former Warner Ranch in Woodland Hills.

More malls opened: Northridge Fashion Center in 1971 and Promenade Mall in Woodland Hills in 1974.

In several already developed, middle-class Valley neighborhoods, a new sense of activism arose as residents banded together to form homeowners associations. Although accused of racism and having a not-in-my-backyard mentality, the groups said they were simply striving to protect the quality of life in their neighborhoods.

In 1975, a group co-headed by then-retailer Hal Bernson formed to mount a campaign for the Valley to secede from Los Angeles. State legislation killed that effort, but the fire for independence was never fully extinguished.

Matters came to a head in 1976 when a state Supreme Court decision resulted in mandatory busing to integrate Los Angeles schools. The Valley became the center of furious protest against the action. The leader of anti-busing forces, Bobbi Fiedler of Encino, became a national figure.

Forced busing ended in 1981, but by then the Valley seemed to be losing much of its allure. New communities in the Santa Clarita and Conejo valleys offered more modern homes and small school districts.

1980-1989 / Melting Pot

“We all talk about ‘the Valley’ as if it was a homogeneous entity,” said RAND demographer Peter Morrison in the late 1980s, the decade that put an end to the Valley’s image as a lily-white outpost cut off from city life. “That is probably one of the biggest stereotypes to shatter. The Valley is now an incredible melting pot.”

The percentage of Latinos doubled in four of 14 city planning areas in the Valley in the 1980s, according to census figures, becoming the majority population in Arleta, Pacoima, Sun Valley and Sylmar. More affluent communities of Encino, Sherman Oaks, Tarzana and Woodland Hills remained as much as 86% white.

Two Valleys were emerging, with a widening gap between them in income and living conditions. Poorer areas were more prone to gang activity, drug trade and graffiti, but these problems also spilled into more affluent communities. “Who would have believed a few years ago that there would be gang graffiti in Woodland Hills?” asked Lt. Bill Gaida of the Los Angeles Police Department in 1989.

Property values skyrocketed, especially in well-heeled neighborhoods, making celebrities of brokers. In 1983 in Encino, the then-golden boy of real estate, Mike Glickman, 22, sold his first $1-million house. The average Valley home almost doubled in value in the ‘80s, to $268,000.

Homeowner associations furiously attacked any perceived threat to property values. A major target was skyscrapers along Ventura Boulevard, blocking views and creating congestion. The other commercial real estate phenomenon of the decade was the proliferation of mini-malls.

Slow-growth advocates grew more successful in halting or at least delaying new developments. One of the most famous was a campaign to declare a Studio City carwash a cultural monument to keep it from being replaced with a shopping center.

1990-1999 / Recession and Renewal

For most of the century, Valley property values went in just one direction--up. That changed in 1990, as a national recession smacked the Valley hard. Housing prices fell 25% to 33% in the Valley’s middle- to upper-middle-class neighborhoods between 1990 and 1993.

Longtime homeowners who had pegged their economic future to the value of their homes despaired. More recent buyers who had paid peak prices were bitter.

Matters were even worse in poorer areas because of rising unemployment. Welfare rolls more than doubled from 1991 to 1993, and by 1995, one in six Valley residents fell below the poverty line. The once unthinkable had happened: The Valley had a higher rate of poverty than the nation as a whole.

Neighborhoods scrambled to disassociate themselves with poorer areas in an attempt to curb hemorrhaging property values. A section of Canoga Park broke away to become West Hills--angering many not included in the new community. West Toluca Lake and Valley Village splintered away from North Hollywood. One of the best-known Valley communities, Sepulveda, became North Hills.

In 1990, most of Lockheed’s operations in Burbank moved to the company’s plants in the Antelope Valley and in Georgia. In 1992, the GM plant in Van Nuys closed.

The 1991 videotaped police beating of Rodney King took place in a field in Lake View Terrace, and although the 1992 riots following the acquittal of police officers mostly involved other areas of Los Angeles, Panorama City, North Hills and Pacoima were hit by fires and looting.

It seemed matters could hardly get worse when at 4:31 a.m. on Jan. 17, 1994, the earth rocked. The magnitude-6.7 Northridge quake resulted in 57 deaths, more than 12,000 injuries and $48 billion in damage, making it the most expensive disaster in U.S. history.

Out of the devastation came the seeds of the Valley’s recovery. About $25 billion in federal and insurance funds flowed into the area; construction and repairs generated jobs.

As the national economy improved, the Valley’s entertainment industry was among the first to benefit.

Universal Studios added major new attractions to its theme park and expanded its retail-oriented CityWalk. The Walt Disney Co., Warner Bros. and NBC launched major expansions in Burbank. And Hollywood’s newest studio, DreamWorks SKG, built a major animation campus in Glendale.

In the West Valley, Warner Center attracted more corporate tenants, while high-tech start-ups began to cluster along the Ventura Freeway corridor from Woodland Hills to Westlake Village.

In 1997, Valley housing prices finally turned around, rising for the first time since 1989. By last month, the median price was within 10% of the all-time high.

By decade’s end, a group of civic activists was pushing for secession from Los Angeles, which the Valley was forced to join almost 100 years ago to get the water it needed to grow. A new century will determine if it will still be part of the city that shepherded its phenomenal growth.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Sources

Here is a list of key books used in preparing the story of how the Valley was built:

The San Fernando Valley, Jackson Mayers

Material Dreams, Kevin Starr

The Owensmouth Baby, Catherine Mulholland

Rivers in the Desert, Margaret Leslie Davis

Los Angeles A to Z, Leonard & Dale Pitt

Universal City-North Hollywood, Tom Link

Glendale: A Pictorial History, E. Caswell Perry, Shirley Berger, Terri E. Jonisch

Burbank History, Jackson Mayers

Burbank: An Illustrated History, E. Caswell Perry