Van Nuys, Los Angeles - History

History

Lot sales began at the new town of Van Nuys on February 22, 1911. The area is named after Isaac Van Nuys, who was of Dutch descent and a participant in a ranching enterprise called the San Fernando Homestead Association, a group that purchased most of the southern San Fernando Valley (south of present-day Roscoe Blvd.) in 1869 to grow grain and run sheep. Van Nuys split this huge acreage with his senior partner, Isaac Lankershim, getting the east area (present-day Lankershim Blvd. crossed his section). Van Nuys also built the first wood frame house in the San Fernando Valley in 1872.

The City of Los Angeles and William Mulholland were building the Owens River aqueduct, starting in 1905 and to be finished in 1913. The San Fernando Valley was where the water was headed first, and speculators were out to buy the Van Nuys Ranch and subdivide it into 3 cities, Van Nuys, Marian (now Reseda), and Owensmouth (now Canoga Park) and start land sales just as the aqueduct was finished. Isaac Van Nuys took his money, left nothing but his name on the town, and returned to his Los Angeles elite—with an office building built from the proceeds remaining downtown with his name.

Speculators, organized into the Los Angeles Suburban Home Association, including Harry Chandler and Harrison Gray Otis of the Los Angeles Times, Moses Sherman, a streetcar line owner, and Hobart Johnstone Whitley, a real estate promoter with ties as far back as the "Land Run of 1889" (the Great Oklahoma Land Rush), bought Mr. Van Nuys out and prepared to "sell" the San Fernando Valley.

From the grand opening and barbecue, Washington's Birthday 1911, Van Nuys was sold as "The Town That Started Right," plotted with set-asides for a high school and commitments to build important buildings "first," including the Bank of Van Nuys, changed but still standing on the southwest corner of Van Nuys Blvd. and Sylvan Street, to give a sense that the vacant lots sold, with little more than stakes and ribbons flapping in the breeze, would bloom into a city. A major artery with a Pacific Electric "Red Car" line between the traffic was built all the way from Hollywood, over Cahuenga Pass, through Lankershim (now North Hollywood) out Chandler Blvd., turning right into Van Nuys on Van Nuys Blvd. and then turning to the west on Sherman Way to extend to the other "new cities" on the Van Nuys Ranch, Marian (now Reseda) and Owensmouth (now Canoga Park). Big selling points by H.J. Whitley in 1911 were to take the Pacific Electric interurban and be downtown in an hour or drive the paved road alongside—("no speed limit" if your Model A could go 35 mph) all season.

The unlimited Owens River aqueduct water allowed oranges, orchards, and sugar beets to be available when the young Van Nuys voted to join the greater City of Los Angeles in 1915.

However, the so-called "Town That Started Right" was built on Tyrone Wash, two blocks east of Van Nuys Blvd, and would flood at the drop of a hat. Pontoon bridges were parked behind Van Nuys Elementary School, ready for a rainy day on Tyrone Avenue.

Two pioneers to be noted: Hobart Johnstone Whitley, promoter extraordinaire, one of the "Boomers" who built towns in a day after the 1889 "Oklahoma Land Rush," who drew the designs for some 150 towns with a stick in the dust, including the San Fernando Valley cities of Van Nuys, Reseda, and Canoga Park, and founder of Hollywood, just over the hill. Whitley also had a huge home along his ceremonial boulevard, the "first house" you saw as you turned from Chandler Blvd. onto Van Nuys Blvd.

William P. Whitsett bought a half-interest in the Van Nuys townsite and remained as real estate salesman and town booster. His influence grew till he was Chairman of the Metropolitan Water District, where he helped oversee the second great aqueduct that boosted Los Angeles's position, the Colorado River Aqueduct to Los Angeles in the 1930s. A life finished off by his building an 8-story bank building, tallest in the Valley, the Valley Federal building, currently the Phoenix Building, on Van Nuys Blvd. just north of Vanowen Street.

Written accounts in the 1910s and 1920s gave much of the credit to H.J. Whitley, but Whitsett's long residence in town and political savvy toward building the Colorado River aqueduct gave him more "historical credit" for the San Fernando Valley's progress.

Van Nuys developed slowly. Currently remaining is a fine collection of 1920s and 1930s churches and California-style bungalows, which now make up a "historic preservation overlay zone" (2004) generally east of the 1914 Van Nuys High School. By the end of World War II, when the GI's were demobilized and many came west, Van Nuys and the San Fernando Valley lived through a tremendous boom.

Dr. Seuss opined on what made the typical Van Nuys resident in a bit of poetry parodying "The Organization Man" of the 1950s.

If you "cross" all your "T's" and "dot" all your "I's"—

You can get a job in "IT" (information technology)

And you can live in Van Nuys..."

In that same sense, the Van Nuys of the 1990s has suffered the criticism of another humorist, Sandra Tsing Loh, in her book, A Year In Van Nuys.

Van Nuys is in the heart of the San Fernando Valley and home to about 100,000 people; the main thoroughfare, Van Nuys Boulevard, is noted for its car dealerships, its "Auto Row". It also functions similar to a "county seat" for the Valley, with its Government Center (Erwin Street Mall) containing a branch of the Los Angeles County Superior Court, Van Nuys police station, the Van Nuys offices for Los Angeles City Hall, Van Nuys State Office Building and a branch of the Los Angeles Public Library.

The 1945 General Motors Van Nuys Assembly Plant, a major manufacturing facility for General Motors's Chevrolet division along with aerospace and defense plants in neighboring cities led to a prosperity which inspired many to call the San Fernando Valley "America's suburb" (as in Kevin Roderick's book). Neighboring Panorama City sprung up - a thousand tract homes and 1950s mall, all on the promise of GM's new factory.

"America's suburb" had its own cultural institution—Wednesday night "cruising" on Van Nuys Blvd. If George Lucas and his movie American Graffiti were supposedly about Lucas's own Modesto teenage life, San Fernando Valley teenagers would disagree. Thousands of teenagers and their rebuilt 1940s and 1950s cars would flood Van Nuys Blvd. every Wednesday night, for years a "rite of passage" for any Valley teenager. By the 1980s, times had changed, and the LAPD stopped the tradition.

At the same time, Valley car culture and middle class jobs left when General Motors closed its assembly plant in 1992. When General Motors left, and the GM plant was dismantled in 1998, all that remained was a "big box store mall" called The Plant.

Like many central San Fernando Valley neighborhoods, Van Nuys was a middle-class neighborhood as late as the 1970s, but the demographics of some sections in Van Nuys have changed considerably since then.

In late 2004, the San Fernando Valley's first historic preservation overlay district was established in an area of early 20th-century bungalows east of Van Nuys High School (founded 1914). According to the November 23, 2004, 'Los Angeles Times', "The neighborhood has become a melting pot of ethnic groups and home styles. Nearby stand such historic buildings as Van Nuys High School (1914), the Spanish colonial "old Van Nuys library (1927), the WPA-funded Van Nuys City Hall (a miniature 1/3 size copy of the downtown City Hall) and the 12th Church of Christ, Scientist (1932)."