Sternberg home">Hard to believe today, but where a typical faceless Northridge subdivision stands at 10000 Tampa Avenue used to be one of the Valley's most celebrated architectural works. The home was designed in 1935 for director Josef von Sternberg by modernist Richard Neutra. All-steel and glass with rounded edges and a moat, it drew raves for Neutra and also...

Jazz guitarist Joe Pass apparently had prominent Valley roots, teaching out of his Northridge garage and playing memorable sets at Donte's when the defunct club was hopping on Lankershim Boulevard. Come On, Feel the Nuys says the Donte's sessions can be heard on two CD sets, "The Joe Pass Trio Live at Donte's" and "Resonance." There's a Donte's entry at...

Bob Timmermann, who writes the respected baseball blog The Griddle, attended Kennedy High in Granada Hills and commits to the Web its history as a powerhouse and producer of major league talent. The Angels' Garrett Anderson played for Kennedy, which has won the Los Angeles city championship seven times since the school opened in 1971. Kennedy is part of a...

The July 26, 1959 accident at an experimental nuclear reactor above Chatsworth was only a partial meltdown. And while the full extent of radioactive releases wasn't known for many years, there were news reports about the mishap within a month. Still, it's always good to see the past events at the old Rocketdyne Santa Susana Field Laboratory get more attention....

Places to live were in extremely short supply immediately after World War II. Converted barracks were used to house returning GIs and their families at the Basilone Homes on Glenoaks Boulevard beneath Hansen Dam; at the Rodger Young Village at Griffith Park (where the zoo is now located), Quonset huts accommodated families. This 1945 scene shows the trailers offered to...

In today's Los Angeles Times, writer Bill Shaikin catches up with Jose Canseco, the 1988 Most Valuable Player in the American League who now lives in Encino. He hit 462 home runs in the major leagues, plus three in the World Series, and played seventeen seasons. These days, when he isn't talking about steroids in baseball, the 41-year-old Canseco swings...

Wild (or at least feral) rabbits that chew up backyard lawns and gardens are riling up folks in Tarzana and Woodland Hills. Daily News garden columnist Joshua Siskin ran some letters Saturday from homeowners who consider the intruders to be pests. "No amount of Liquid Fence (a deer and rabbit repellent), hot pepper spray or even our 100-pound German shepherd...

A theme I intend to develop here someday is big things that were proposed for the Valley but for assorted reasons never happened. Disneyland, Los Angeles International Airport and a stadium lead the list, but freeways are close behind. The east-west Whitnall Freeway across the center of the Valley would have destroyed my family's Northridge neighborhood. Now a new blog...

This is the week in 1944, West magazine tells us, when Bing Crosby's song San Fernando Valley reached number one on the national hit parade. The magazine pairs the observation with a snippet of dialogue about the Valley from Robert Towne's script for Chinatown. Sample: CROSS: . . . you know when we first came out here, he figured that...

Clocks at Olive View hospital in Sylmar stopped at 6:01 am on Feb. 9, 1971. That's when the Valley was shaken awake by a 6.6-magnitude earthquake that began under the mountains behind Sylmar. When the shaking stopped sixty seconds later, parts of that hospital and the San Fernando Valley Veterans Hospital (also in Sylmar) had fallen, the lower dam at...

As part of the website's redesign, all of the articles that used to appear on the History and Lore page of America's Suburb.com have been reposted as separate entries. This makes it easier to add new pieces on Valley history and to find both the old and the new in one place. Everything here that fits in the history category...

Descendants and fans of Edgar Rice Burroughs keep a close eye on the author's former property south of Ventura in Tarzana—the community that Burroughs gave birth to and anointed with the name of his ranch. The ERBzine has a bunch of photographs online of the ranch as it looked in Burroughs' day (in the 1920s and 30s) and its more...

Here in Van Nuys is not solely about the Valley, but it's by a Van Nuys resident and right now includes a nice photo of the Cahuenga Pass freeway when the Pacific Electric Red Car tracks were in the center. He in turn links to an interesting website that, in historical photos and words, follows the PE route from downtown's...

Hi,   Thought you might be interested in the lyrics of a recording, sung by Lonnie Donegan, which became a big hit in the UK in 1957. I don't know if it was a hit in the U.S.  Last Train to San Fernando  It's the last train to San Fernando The last train to San Fernando And if you...

Airplanes and the pilots who flew them are a big part of Valley lore. Amelia Earhart, the aviation pioneer who disappeared in 1937, made her home on Valley Spring Lane in Toluca Lake and her base at United Field, the original name of Burbank Airport. Earhart and flyers such as Pancho Barnes, Waldo Waterman and the future tycoon Howard Hughes...

In 1885, a new amusement park opened beside the Los Angeles River near Griffith Park -- an ostrich farm. Sunday visitors from Los Angeles came part of the way by trolley then boarded horse-drawn carriages to complete the trip. On Sept. 24, 1888, the Los Angeles Ostrich Farm Railway began steam-engine service to the park. It became the second railroad...

Sylvia Durando is a former Hollywood stunt double and owner of horses. In her family archives she turned up this Arrow Studios photograph of the 1930 ceremony opening the Sepulveda Boulevard tunnel beneath Mulholland Drive, creating what became called Sepulveda Pass. Until then, you had to take one of the winding canyons between the Valley and the Westside. Once...

Meaghan Murphy at the blog Sick Candy owns a souvenir matchbook from Monkey Island, the 1930s and '40s amusement that was in Cahuenga Pass, near the site of the Hanna-Barbera building on Cahuenga Boulevard West. She writes at her blog, "I love the idea that not too long ago, there were a '1000 monkeys running loose' near my house." She...

The Daily News' Dennis McCarthy wrote a nice column about a little Valley baseball history. He recounts the story of a cow pasture on the 13000 block of Addison Street in Van Nuys that was turned into a field where neighborhood kids such as Don Drysdale played their first organized ball: A "paradise for boys," Valley Times sports columnist Claude...

Little bit of an unintended theme here, but I just saw this photo of Dodgers' Hall of Fame pitcher Don Drysdale as a teenager at Van Nuys High in a new book called Play by Play: A Century of L.A. Sports Photography by David Davis. It was published in October 2004 by Angel City Press. A free exhibit of the...

On the list of big plans for the Valley that thankfully never got built are things like Los Angeles International Airport (discussed for west from Balboa Blvd. and Saticoy Street), the Whitnall Freeway across the center of the Valley and a professional sports stadium in Sepulveda Basin. The Beverly-San Fernando Hotel makes my personal list. It would have sat at...

How Leesdale became Victory Blvd. Diana Lipari emailed a question: Originally when the town of Van Nuys was plotted in 1911, what is now Victory Boulevard was called "7th Avenue." Sometime circa 1916, "7th Avenue" changed to "Leesdale." In the mid-1920's, "Leesdale" was changed to Victory Boulevard in honor of the the returning soldiers from World War 1. I have...

Former child actor John Eimen has a web page where he describes his experiences on more than two dozen 1950s and 60s TV series such as "Leave It To Beaver," "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Twilight Zone." He starred as Cadet Monk in the series "McKeever and the Colonel," but he realized he didn't have what it takes to be an...

I was reading a traveler's guide book from 1940 called Know Your Los Angeles by Bert Van Tuyle and found recommendations for some long-gone Valley restaurants. Before the freeways, Ventura Boulevard was part of the coast route through California, U.S. highway 101. Many of these places probably served highway motorists. Ching How, 11348 Ventura: "Chop suey...very good and reasonable...."  Edward's...

The history of the Valley does not exist outside the context of Los Angeles. The two locales grew up as neighbors for more than a century before they were united in 1915. The website L.A. Observed reports on a cool find at the Library of Congress website: 29 seconds of historic Thomas Edison motion picture footage shot in downtown L.A....

Came across this construction photo of the Budweiser brewery in Van Nuys. It ran on Dec. 17, 1953 in the Los Angeles Herald-Tribune, as the plant on Roscoe Boulevard neared completion. The photo, with more information, is found in the Los Angeles Public Library online photo collection....

Real estate ads in 1923 declared Fernangeles "Southern California's Newest City...Where San Fernando Road meets Lankershim Boulevard." Residence lots listed for $600 to $900, business lots $750 to $3200. The name suggested a San Fernando Valley country atmosphere, but with proximity to Los Angeles. Located on a busy north-south state highway, the ads claimed that Fernangeles would succeed because "one...

The swimming resort and getaway popular in the 1920s and '30s has been added to Gone But Not Forgotten. Roy L. Glover's establishment was on 500 acres of live oak, grasslands and hills at the west end of Chatsworth Reservoir. Big crowds gathered for Fourth of July bronco-riding and barbecues, and for Easter egg hunts. At Christmas, Glover gave away...

The deadliest air crash in the Valley's history gave many people their first look at an unusual cult that lived in Box Canyon, near Chatsworth. The Standard Airlines C-46 was circling on approach to Burbank after a flight from New York when it crashed in Santa Susana Pass on July 12, 1949. Thirty-five people died at the scene near today's...

Space aliens in Big Tujunga Canyon? Possibly, according to two young women who reported a strange encounter. They said they were sleeping in an isolated cabin on March 22, 1953, when lights suddenly illuminated the canyon and surrounded their house. For a while, time seemed to stand still. As they finally fled, one said later that she saw the filmy...

After his service in World War II, director John Ford wished to honor thirteen colleagues who did not return from overseas service in the Naval Field Photographic Reserve. The unit, which Ford commanded, was made up mostly of cinematographers, actors and writers such as Garson Kanin and Budd Schulberg who traveled the world chronicling the war on film. Many others,...

The most extensive private art collection in the Valley -- as well as one of its most architecturally celebrated homes -- belonged to an eminence of the 1930s movie colony. Josef von Sternberg, the Austrian-born director of such films as The Blue Angel and Shanghai Express, owned a ranch in citrus country between Northridge and Chatsworth with a house fashioned...

On the night of December 2, 1959, the notorious L.A. gangster Mickey Cohen witnessed a hit on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks -- and he may have ordered it. Somebody put a bullet between the eyes of Jack (the Enforcer) Whalen, said by police to be the Valley's biggest bookie at the time. The Valley had the reputation for being...

Residents south of Ventura Boulevard and east of Topanga Canyon enjoy some of the shadiest streets in the Valley. They can thank a land huckster named Victor Girard, who had the trees planted in the 1920s in a desperate bid to lure buyers to his real estate scheme. Girard named the community after himself and placed ads all over Los...

Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, the first American ever canonized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church, lived and performed some of her holy work in the Verdugo Mountains above Burbank, at a "preventorium" she started for poor girls. Mother Cabrini was born in Italy in 1850 and orphaned at age 13. She traveled to America to serve her own...

Prohibition took hold in 1920 with the Volstead Act and had an impact in the Valley, shutting down vineyards in the Roscoe area (now Sun Valley) and promoting the bootlegging of illicit liquor. A large still for making applejack was busted in Lankershim in 1921, and another major still was discovered later in a peach orchard along Sherman Way near...

Two celebrated movie sex symbols of the 1940s and '50s began storied romances while they were students a few years apart at Van Nuys High School. Before Howard Hughes cast her as Rio in the "sex western" The Outlaw, Jane Russell grew up a self-described tomboy, roaming her family's La Posada ranch on Sherman Way near Woodman Avenue. At Van...

In The Dreyfuss Affair: A Love Story, novelist Peter Lefcourt gives the Valley a major league baseball team and a stadium in the Sepulveda Basin. It's pure farce. But long before the Dodgets came to L.A., the big leagues came to Burbank for a few weeks each spring. The St. Louis Browns, the worst team in the American League, came...

Tiburcio Vasquez was one of early California's most notorious bandits. He and his gang robbed stagecoaches and stole horses and made themselves unpopular for 23 years until his capture and hanging in 1875. Rugged canyons and high rocks surrounding the Valley were his favorite hideouts. He sometimes made his getaways riding through Big Tujunga Canyon and squatted around Castle Rock...

As a teenager in 1950s Pacoima, Richard Valenzuela joined a garage band called The Silhouettes and began to pack dance halls with his exuberant vocals and guitar playing. He drew the notice of Del-Fi Records, which signed him and gave him a less Chicano sounding stage name: Ritchie Valens. Barely 16, Valens first single, "Come On, Let's Go," soared on...

The Beatles first performance in Los Angeles caused a frenzy that ran for several days. Fearing wild fans, officials barred the band from using Burbank Airport. The Fab Four stayed in a private home since no hotel could stand the onslaught of fans. Hours before their first sold-out concert at Hollywood Bowl the evening of August 23, 1964, Beatlemania hit...

In the heat of the Cold War, the Valley was a patriotic bastion. Pro-America parades and loyalty rallies were common, and for a time in the 1950s volunteer lookouts served two-hour shifts watching for enemy aircraft in an observation tower at Balboa Blvd. and Vanowen St. Fears spiked when the Soviet Union beat America into space by launching the...

On February 9, 1971 the Sylmar or San Fernando quake -- it is known by both names -- killed more people than the Northridge temblor almost 23 years later. In some ways, the earlier event was more spectacular. Shaking and straining lasted for 60 seconds and left visible ground fractures along a 12-mile surface scar. It rumbled beneath the San...

On July 26, 1959, an experimental nuclear reactor in the Simi Hills just to the west of Canoga Park and Chatsworth suffered a partial meltdown of its core. Ten of 43 fuel assemblies were damaged, and in the rush to contain the emergency a considerable amount of radioactive gas was released into the air. Scientists, residents and anti-nuclear activists still...

This rare view (right) of the San Fernando Valley Veteran's Hospital in Sylmar in the 1920s appears in the on-line collection of the California State University, Northridge Digital Library. CSUN's Oviatt Library has amassed the most accessible collection of Valley history images, including the mission photo above. Fans of Valley history should enjoy perusing the site. Dozens of Web links...

Members of the Van Nuys High class of '66 have put up a web page about cruising Van Nuys Boulevard in their day....

Here's a condensed version of the Valley's 230-year story, leaving a lot out for simplicity. It begins before 1769, when the first Spaniards walked upon a village of native Tonga beside a gentle river......