Brief history of The SFV
Here is a brief history of The San Fernando Valley
Valleywood
Another reason the Valley became famous was the arrival of movie makers. They 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 around 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. Ronald Reagan was one of the actors who lived the life of a San Fernando Valley rancher.
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.
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 1920s and '30s also brought the opening of today's major airports, Burbank and Van Nuys, and the exploits of Amelia Earhart. She lived in Toluca Lake with her husband, the publisher George Palmer Putnam, and often flew above the Valley in pl,anes made in Burbank by Lockheed.
The most glamorous airport of them all was Glendale's Grand Central Terminal, where the first airliners to fly between New York and L.A. would drop off the stars. It was there that tycoon Howard Hughes began his aircraft company. Hughes had also built and stocked two entire airfields, one at Balboa and Roscoe boulevards and the other in Chatsworth, for the filming of Hell's Angels, his cinematic paean to World War I aviators.
War clouds
World War II, which the United States joined after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, 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 factory 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.
Suburbia explodes
After the war the Valley became the nation's fastest growing region. Magazines and radio programs hyped it 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. 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 hold. Families lived in their backyards and drove everywhere except into Los Angeles, where the Valley suburbanites rarely ventured. The San Fernando Valley became the nation's leading symbol of suburbia, as well as the swimming pool and sports car capital of the country and, eventually, the home of the minimall. Vestiges of the ranching culture began to be squeezed into smaller corners of the Valley, as suburban homeowners objected to tractor dust and waking to the crowing of roosters.
Sonic booms and U2's
The Valley played a crucial role in 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 up with sonic booms that shattered windows ands frazzled nerves, the product of test flights. The west Valley endured for more than a decade the roar and lit-up skyline of nighttime rocket tests at Rocketdyne's Santa Susana Field Lab, which also was used for experiments with nuclear reactors. Nike missile batteries were visible along Victory Boulevard and on Oat Mountain above Chatsworth.
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. But there also were complaints about noise and hazards of military operations. Cold War activity 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 prompting calls for a new hospital and an end to Air Force flights over the Valley.
The Sixties brought protests against the Vietnam War and more evidence that the Valley was changing. Late in 1968, black students upset at their campus treatment forcibly occupied the administration building at San Fernando Valley State College (later renamed Cal State University, Northridge.) The following summer, two months before the more famous Woodstock, tens of thousands of rock and roll fans descended on Devonshire Downs for the raucous Newport '69 festival. In August, youthful killers led by Charles Manson ventured out of the Chatsworth hills on a terror spree aimed at inciting race riots.
Car culture
With its spread out spaces and lack of other transit options, the Valley grew up with the automobile. Everyone drove to work and to shop, creating extended traffic jams on streets that often began as dirt farm lanes. At one time, eight drive-in theaters ran shows 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. Even churches met in the drive-ins.
Youth culture was especially tied to cars. The center of it all was the southern end of Van Nuys Boulevard. There, hundreds of cruisers gathered to show off their customized wheels and to hang out. On Club Night, every Wednesday, it could take an hour to drive a few miles through Van Nuys and Sherman Oaks. Community backlash and a police crackdown in the 1980s ended the tradition that dated to the 1930s. "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," a letter to the editor mourned in the L.A. Times.
Thinking big
More than a million people lived in the Valley at the end of the 1960s, the great majority of them white and proudly suburban. As the 21st century began, the population had grown to 1.7 million and represented one of the most diverse mixes of ethnicity and nationality found in the United States. Residents of Hispanic heritage became the largest segment, with substantial communities — immigrants and native born alike — who identify themselves as Korean, Armenian, Thai and Indian.
Being from the Valley is an identity all its own, as well, and in 2002 a vote was held across Los Angeles to decide whether the city's portion of the Valley should secede to form the nation's sixth-largest municipality. The proposal lost, but within the Valley itself a narrow majority voted to break away. Keith Richman, a Republican state Assemblyman, was "elected" as the phantom mayor of the city that was not to be.
This information was obtained from the site of "The Valley Observed"
