History
Due to natural springs, one of the first inhabited areas of the San Fernando Valley was the land around what is now known as Los Encinos State Historic Park, at the corner of Balboa and Ventura Boulevards, which was inhabited by the Tongva Indians possibly for thousands of years. This five acre (2 hm²) park now includes the original nine-room De La Osa Adobe (built in 1849) and a reservoir shaped like a Spanish guitar that collects the spring water.
The Valley's first golf course opened at the corner of Ventura and Coldwater Canyon in 1922 (now this is site of the Sportsmens Lodge).
Also in 1922, around the area of Canoga Avenue south of Ventura Boulevard, Victor Girard purchased 2,886 acres (12 km²) of land and planted over 120,000 pepper, sycamore, and eucalyptus trees, later resulting in the appropriately named Woodland Hills.
In 1928, just a couple blocks east of Laurel Canyon, Mack Sennett created his 38 acre (15.4 hm²) Keystone Studios, which produced silent movies with stars such as Fatty Arbuckle, W.C. Fields, Stan Laurel, and the Keystone Kops. After talkies, Keystone became Republic Pictures, and then in 1963 CBS Studio Center. Although closed to the public, this complex, which is located only a few blocks away from Ventura Boulevard, probably makes more TV sitcoms than any other studio.
Read more about this topic: Ventura Boulevard
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“He wrote in prison, not a History of the World, like Raleigh, but an American book which I think will live longer than that. I do not know of such words, uttered under such circumstances, and so copiously withal, in Roman or English or any history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Like their personal lives, women’s history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.”
—Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)