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Spaniards arrive
On the afternoon of August 5, 1769, an expedition of Spaniards crossed the Santa Monica Mountains and found, to their great surprise, a broad valley of tall grass and stately oaks, or encinos, and a gentle river lined with reeds.
Since it was the feast day of St. Catherine of Bononia, they named the valley El Valle de Santa Catalina de Bononia de los Encinos.
Gaspar de Portola, a captain in the Spanish army, led the expedition of 64 men and 100 mules. Their path through the mountains took the canyon known today as Sepulveda Pass. At a spring in the area of today's Encino they met a society of native people:
"Two large villages of very fine, well-behaved and very friendly heathens who must have amounted to about 200 souls, men, women and children. They offered us their seeds in baskets..." the expedition's diarist, Fray Juan Crespi, wrote.
The native Tongva, as they came to be called, used the nga sound to denote place names, as in Topanga, Tujunga and Cahuenga. The settlement at today's Encino might have been known as Siutcanga though little of the Tongva's lore survives. Also in the Valley were settlements of Chumash.
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Mission San Fernando, Rey de Espana
Ranchos San Rafael and Portesuelo soon appeared, at the southeastern corner of El Valle de los Encinos. Across the basin, the rancho of Francisco Reyes, a mixed-race settler who had served as the alcalde, or mayor, of el pueblo de Los Angeles, drew the notice of priests looking to build a new mission. They obtained the land and founded Mission San Fernando, Rey de Espana, in 1797.
The 17th of California's 21 Franciscan missions, it was named for the sainted king of Castile and Leon who vanquished the Moors in 1248. San Fernando Rey's adobe church and long arched convento were the first substantial structures on the Valley floor, all of which the padres claimed as the mission's domain.
The priests sought to "civilize" the native Indians and work the land. As the 18th century ended, 541 Indians lived at San Fernando Rey and did the heavy work: making adobe bricks, planting crops, tending livestock. They were subject to floggings and other harsh discipline if they tried to leave.
By 1826 there were 56,000 longhorn cattle with the mission brand and 1,500 horses foraging on the Valley floor. San Fernando Rey was famed for the artistry of its silversmiths, its abundant olives and fine wine.
The end of Spanish rule over Mexico also led to the end of the mission's institutional role. Indian baptisms and marriages halted in 1834 as the mission came under control of a secular mayordomo or overseer.
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The Brothers Pico
Two battles joined on the Valley floor between troops loyal to Mexico and Californio rebels forced the ouster of governors of the province.
The first skirmish, fought in 1831 with lances, sabers and pistols, led to two deaths and the exile of Gov. Victoria back to Mexico. In 1845, a cannon battle along the L.A. River somewhere in the area of today's Studio City on the Valley floor in 1845 removed Gov. Micheltorena and replaced him with Pio Pico, a native Californio.
As governor, Pico granted land at Encino and El Escorpion (today's Bell Canyon) for private ranchos and leased the rest of the Valley to his youngest brother, Andres. As war with the U.S. neared, Gov. Pico sold the vast Valley acreage for cash to Eugolio de Celis, a Spaniard living in Los Angeles.
Andres Pico became a Californio hero of the Mexican-American war and signed the Capitulation of Cahuenga at Rancho Cahuenga, near today's Universal City. Under American rule, he lived in style at Mission San Fernando Rey and served in the state Legislature and as a general in the state militia despite never learning English.
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Dividing it up
The Picos later regained ownership interests in the Valley. In debt and needing cash, Pio Pico in 1869 sold his half-share to a group of investors led by Isaac Lankershim, a Northern California farmer. The price: $2 an acre.
To complete the deal, the Valley was split in two. Lankershim got the south half and planted the world's largest wheat-growing empire. Work crews with teams of horses did all the ploughing and harvesting on the hot, dusty plain. If it rained, the wheat grow. In drought, the crop failed.
The northern half of the Valley was also sold, in 1874, and split three ways. The land closest to the San Gabriel Mountains was held by Charles Maclay, who founded the town of San Fernando. Railroad tracks laid across the Valley from Los Angeles by Maclay's secret benefactor, Leland Stanford, gave San Fernando a boost.
West of Maclay's land was that of George K. Porter, who ranched and sold off parcels of land. West of Aliso Canyon, in line with today's Zelzah Avenue, belonged to his cousin Benjamin Porter. It's on this land -- owned by his heirs until the 1960s -- where the present-day Porter Ranch community is built.
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Boom towns
In the 1880s and '90s, more towns opened. Burbank, Glendale, Pacoima, Calabasas and Chatsworth Park were added to the map. Some names didn't last: Dundee, Monte Vista, Oat Hills.
The town of Toluca, later called Lankershim and then North Hollywood, came to life on the eastern reach of the Lankershim wheat empire. Blessed with deep loam and ground water, it was great for peach growing and prospered.
The Valley began to attract more interest in the greater world and a few more settlers. An Italian immigrant, C.J. Rinaldi, cultivated orange groves west of San Fernando, which built a high school. The Southern Pacific built a line diagonally across the valley from Burbank to Chatsworth that became the coastal route up California. Automobiles showed up in 1898.
By the start of the 20th century, the Valley was still scantly populated: fewer than 3,000 people on a plain of more than 200 square miles. That would soon change.
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Divided again
In the biggest land deal in Los Angeles history, subdividers led by Times bosses Harrision Gray Otis and Harry Chandler paid $53 an acre for 47,500 acres in the south half of the Valley in 1909. They planned not to farm but to sell lots and build more towns.
First came Van Nuys, then Marian (today's Reseda), then Owensmouth (today's Canoga Park and West Hills). All were linked to Los Angeles by Pacific Electric Red Cars and to each other by a wide, tree-lined highway named Sherman Way. In other areas, the towns of Zelzah and Roscoe (today's Northridge and Sun Valley, respectively), Sunland and Tujunga appeared.
Amenities like newspapers and baseball teams helped to make life in the Valley feel less remote. In 1912, the Valley's first airfield opened on a corner of Griffith Park.
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Watering the plain
Nothing altered the Valley's future like the opening on Nov. 5, 1913 of an aqueduct between the Eastern Sierra's Owens Valley and a reservoir west of San Fernando. The waterway designed by William Mulholland transformed a parched region into an irrigated greenbelt.
Mainly, it ensured Los Angeles a steady water supply. To partake of the bounty the new towns of the Valley voted in 1915 to join the city of Los Angeles. The vote for annexation was a lopsided 681-25.
The water not only let towns flourish -- and made fortunes for the subdividers whose land exploded in value -- it let a thousand farms bloom. Instead of wheat and cattle that depended on the vagaries of the weather, the Valley began to grow beets and lima beans, oranges and walnuts, grapes and tomatoes.
The Valley's image changed as the landscape turned lush and verdant. It became a lure and by 1920 had swelled to 21,000 residents.
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Valleywood
Another reason the Valley became a famous place was the arrival of movie makers who adored the varied terrain, historic ruins and predictably sunny weather. Cinema legends D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille discovered the Valley and shot many early movies there, then bought ranch getaways in the canyons.
Around studios like Universal, Warner Brothers and Republic, a movie colony grew. Stars like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby golfed and gagged in Toluca Lake, while Clark Gable and Al Jolson made Encino ritzy. In the west Valley were the stars who favored the ranch life: James Cagney, Barbara Stanwyck, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz among others.
The presence of all these celebrities and the stories they told about living the good life sold an image of the Valley as a sort of paradise. National magazines helped feed the myth and the Valley continued to lure more people.
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Taking to the sky
Wide open spaces and clear skies also made the Valley a center of the nation's blossoming love of airplanes and the people who flew them. Small dirt airfields popped up and lasted a few years until the cash ran out.
The Twenties and Thirties brought the opening of today's major airports, Burbank and Van Nuys, and the exploits of Amelia Earhart, the Valley's most famous aviator. She lived in Toluca Lake with her husband, the publisher George Palmer Putnam, and set records in planes made in Burbank by Lockheed.
The most glamorous airport of them all was Glendale's Grand Central Terminal, where the first airliners from between New York and L.A. would drop off the stars. It was there that tycoon Howard Hughes began his aircraft company.
Soon came Lockheed, the Burbank aircraft giant which due to World War II became the Valley's largest private employer.
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War clouds
World War II yanked the Valley into a new era. Farms gave way to airplane plants and to new homes by the thousands.
Lockheed erupted into one of the war effort's most prolific assemblers of bombers and fighters, becoming the Valley's biggest employer. As the men got drafted, the work was taken over by women and high school students. They worked under giant camouflage nets hung over the plant, shifts running nonstop.
Some 3,177 residents of Japanese descent were taken from their homes -- mostly farms -- and interned at camps away from the coast. So many Valley Japanese were at Manzanar that the camp had a baseball team called the San Fernando Aces. While they were away, crops were picked by housewives, prisoners of war and workers brought from Mexico.
In 1944, the Army opened Birmingham Hospital for war wounded on Vanowen Street in Van Nuys. The sprawling hospital held more than 1,000 maimed troops. That year, Bing Crosby's hit song "San Fernando Valley" -- from a movie of the same name, starring Roy Rogers -- made the Valley sound even more heavenly to GIs trapped overseas.
The population swelled to 176,000 during the war.
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Suburbia explodes
The Valley swiftly became the fastest growing place in the nation after the war. Magazines and radio programs hyped the Valley as the place to be, although the Atlantic Monthly scoffed that "every piece of land that nourishes four walnut trees is called a ranch" by shameless land brokers.
Real estate became the business to be in. The population doubled by 1950, and again by 1960, and passed through a million before the decade ended. Tract after tract of mostly uninspired homes rose quickly across the plain of the Valley, racing outward faster than the streets and sewers and fire stations could keep up.
Along the way, a new American lifestyle took root. People lived in their backyards and drove everywhere. The Valley became the nation's leading symbol of suburbia, the swimming pool and sports car capital, the home of the minimall.
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Sonic booms and U2s
The Valley played a crucial part in the American response to the Cold War. No doubt many nuclear warheads pointed its way. Burbank Airport was home to Lockheed's secret Skunk Works, where the U2 spy plane and other war birds were hatched.
Residents in the 1950s and 60s had to put with sonic booms that shattered windows ands frazzled nerves, the product of test flights overhead. The west Valley endured for more than a decade the groan and vibration of rocket tests at Rocketdyne's Santa Susana Field Lab. The nation's first and biggest space rockets first got fired in the hills above Chatsworth.
The Cold War took its most severe local toll on January 31, 1957 when an F-89 fighter jet collided at 25,000 feet with a new airliner on its final check-out flight. Debris fell on Pacoima Junior High, killing three boys on the athletic field and six crewmen.
As a rule, the Valley wore its patriotism openly. There were loyalty parades and volunteer sky watchers who kept an eye out for enemy aircraft.
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Car culture
The Valley grew up with the automobile. At one time, eight drive-in theaters ran nightly at dusk. They were the Pickwick, Victory, San Val and Laurel in the East Valley, the Sepulveda, Van Nuys, Reseda and Canoga in the west.
Youth culture was especially tied to cars. The center of it all was Van Nuys Boulevard. There, cruisers met to show off and hang out. On Club Night, every Wednesday, it could take an hour to drive a few miles through Van Nuys.
"If it was not for that lighted stretch of concrete in the San Fernando Valley, I would not be married to the lovely lady sitting next to me," read a Times Letter to the Editor mourning the end of Cruise Night in the Eighties.
Courtesy of http://www.americassuburb.com |
