Lawrence C. Jorgensen

Reprinted from Valley Magazine, May, 1985

We saw a very pleasant and spacious valley. We descended to it and stopped close to a watering place, which is a large pool. Near it we found a village of heathen, very friendly and docile. We gave to this plain the name of Santa Catalina de Bononia de Los Encinos. It has on its hills and its valleys many live oak and walnuts. -Father Juan Crespi, 1769

In August, 1769, Father Juan Crespi recorded the above, giving the Valley its first non-Indian name. Crespi served as the spiritual advisor to the Portola group, which had just entered the Valley by coming over the Sepulveda Pass. Just as the giant oaks, for which the Valley was partially named, originate from little acorns, so too does the history of a major urban center begin from an apparently obscure event. From those friendly and docile Indians in 1769 to today's multi-storied bank buildings that line Ventura Boulevard, some 200 years have passed. What follows attempts to briefly chronicle some of the benchmarks of Valley history.

Indians of some kind have lived in this general area for thousands of years. Though the experts do not agree on exactly how many years, practically all of them agree that 8,000 to 10,000 years is the minimum for the continuous settlement of southern California. Close to 5,000 people apparently inhabited the San Fernando Valley in 1769, when it was "discovered" making it one of the more densely populated areas within California. At least two somewhat different groups of people comprised these 5,000. The majority, the Tongva, belonged to what is called the Southern California Shoshone. Another, and smaller group, were the Chumash, who kept mostly to the western and southwestern foothills. The Chumash, originally a marine or coastal people, with villages as far north as Point Conception and as far south as Maliwu, or Malibu, began spreading into the inland valleys at least 1,000 years ago. Apparently, the Tongva arrived in the Valley at a somewhat later date. These two groups traded, socialized, intermingled and intermarried. Among these Indians, no evidence exists of battles or of conquest. No legends survive to dramatize their coming, no myths later to become enshrined as history, to ennoble their seizure of land and power.

In locating their villages, both groups sought out a dependable water supply—a continuing San Fernando Valley problem. Some underground springs did percolate up to form pools and tule marshes on the floor of the Valley, such as at Encino, but most village sites were located higher up. The Shoshonean Tongva had several permanent villages primarily in the canyons and along the streams and wash beds of the eastern and northern edges of the Valley.

The Tongva language, as translated into Spanish and later into English, apparently added a gna ending to a word to indicate "the place of' or "the home of." Thus, we have left to us such familiar words as Kawengna and Tuhungna to indicate the names of the villages.

One large ancient village site lay at the foot of the Santa Susana Pass. Now known as the Chatsworth Cairn Site, the Indians used this place for ceremonial purposes. A short distance away, they established numerous settlements over extended periods of time. Regularly flowing water supported these settlements. In addition, a local sulfur spring percolated to the surface with water that was considered to contain important medicinal qualities. People from all of the neighboring villages, Chumash or Tongva were welcome to partake in the healing powers of these waters.

With a most plentiful and nutritious food supply available from the oak trees, from seeds of all kinds, as well as grasshoppers, rabbits and fish, Valley Indian life before the Spanish conquest could not have been easier, affording the Indians the opportunity for a rich and varied social and spiritual life.

Shortly after the founding of Los Angeles on September 4, 1781, Francisco Reyes, the alcalde or mayor of that newly established pueblo, acquired the right to raise cattle in the San Fernando Valley. Using local Indian labor, Reyes centered his cattle raising operation near a well-watered place close to the northern edge of the Valley. A few years later, the Franciscan padres chose Reyes' land as the site for a new mission, half way between the San Gabriel and the Ventura missions. For giving up his use of the land in the north of the Valley, Reyes received 4,460 acres --later known as the Encino Rancho, located along what became called the El Camino Real and much later, Ventura Boulevard.

On September 8, 1797, Father Fermin Lasuen, successor to the legendary Franciscan leader Junipero Serra, dedicated the San Fernando Mission. On that day, the priests baptized five Indian boys and five Indian girls. It was a beginning, and within twenty years, over 1,000 Indians lived and worked within the authority of the mission. At the height of its activity, the San Fernando Mission Indians created one of the most prosperous of all the California missions. The great number of cattle required that the Indians become expert vaqueros, or cowhands. Many others became skilled at farming, wine making, metal working and numerous additional crafts necessary to support and house the large community.

But the Valley's mission period lasted for less than 40 years, and even at that, the good years of mission life for the Indians were very few. As was true with most of the missions in California, the Valley Indians did not themselves prosper under mission control. Practically enslaved, subjected to diseases against which they had no immunities and required to live and work under conditions totally alien to them, their numbers steadily diminished. In fact, throughout California, the Indians survived the Spanish and Mexican periods in direct proportion to their distance from the well-intentioned missionaries and their missions.

In addition to becoming civilized and Christianized, the mission Indians were forced to work to support the many Spanish military garrisons, called presidios. The product of their forced labor also helped support the civilian towns, the pueblos, such as Los Angeles.

Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1822; and in the California province of the new Mexican republic, northern Californians struggled against southerners for control of the immense area. Among the prizes of these struggles, the mission lands loomed the largest. A few of the Valley's mission Indians received grants of land in the San Fernando Valley. Reyes' Rancho Encino and the 1,100-acre Escorpion Rancho, with its later headquarters at the "Leonis Adobe" in Calabasas, were two such grants. But these were exceptions; most of the surviving Indians remained wards of the mission.

Beginning in the 1830s, Californian officials started secularizing the missions. Secularization meant the confiscation and seizure of the vast and generally prosperous mission lands, though the buildings themselves were usually allowed to remain under the control of the Church. During this period of secularization, from 1834-1836, most of those Indians who still remained at the San Fernando Mission were evicted. Many sought employment in Los Angeles; some joined relatives and friends among those Indians still living free in the hills or in other valleys.

With the confiscation of the mission lands and the dispossession of the Indians, the struggle between northern and southern Californians intensified. As part of this struggle, the little known Battle of Cahuenga took place in February, 1845. Two armed groups of about 400 each met near Cahuenga Pass. One side had three small cannons; the other side, two. After shooting at each other for half a day, the casualties amounted to two horses killed on one side and a mule wounded on the other. Apparently that was enough. The northerners retired, and Pio Pico became the new governor of California, with Los Angeles as the new capital.

Before the year ended, Governor Pico arranged a nine-year lease of the San Fernando Mission lands to his brother Andres Pico, for $1200 a year. And thus began the short-lived era of the San Fernando Valley Dons.

In the following year, 1846, Don Eulogio de Cells, a Spaniard then living in Los Angeles, paid $14,000 for 121,319 acres of the former San Fernando Mission. With the exception of Encino and a few other small ranchos, title to the San Fernando Valley was finally in the hands of an individual. Andres Pico continued his lease arrangement, and in 1854 purchased a half interest in de Celis' Valley property.

In 1848, as a result of the Mexican-American War, California became part of the United States. In that same year, gold was discovered in northern California, and within one year, over 50,000 Americans poured into the territory. By 1850, the population of California exceeded 100,000, enough to qualify for statehood. The gold and the great population upsurge brought the first of the boom times for the southern California "cow counties."

In the San Fernando Valley, cattle could be bought for $15 a head, to be resold for as high as $48 in Sacramento or San Francisco. As the money from the cattle sales poured into the south, the local Dons' standard of living rose rapidly. And believing that this sudden prosperity would increase, so did their debts. Borrowing at high interest rates from eastern sources, on terms and at conditions they didn't understand, the Picos and others even mortgaged their estates. Heavy rains came in the early 1860s, causing the Valley to bloom with feed for the ever-expanding cattle herds. Needing more and more income to support their lifestyle and their indebtedness, the Valley Dons overstocked the Valley.

Within two years, as the dry cycle returned, the overgrazed Valley floor could no longer support the great number of cattle. A Los Angeles newspaper reported that "nothing can save what cattle remains on the desert California ranches." In that year, the county collected no taxes. Bankers and other businessmen stopped the extension of credit. Notes and other debts were called in. The era of the "old Dons" crashed to an end.

The next period of Valley history—the 1870s to 1905, belongs to both the wheat growers and the Yankees. As a superlative example of the first. Issac Lankershim, a German-Jewish immigrant, purchased most of the southern half of the San Fernando Valley from the heavily indebted Picos in 1869. To divide the Valley into southern and northern halves, they settled on a boundary line which today is Roscoe Boulevard. Lankershim, who was financially associated with several other northern Californians, including Levi Strauss, the Scholle brothers and the Sachs, paid $115,000 for the nearly 60,000 acres, a bit less than $2 an acre. He and his son-in-law, Issac Newton Van Nuys, turned almost the entire southern half of the Valley into one vast wheat field. Under the direction of the Lankershim and Van Nuys families, many millions of bushels of San Fernando wheat, usually milled in the family's own downtown Los Angeles grain mill, found their way into a worldwide market.

One exception to the vast Lankershim-Van Nuys wheat fields resulted when Isaac's son, J.B. Lankershim, created a townsite along the eastern edge of the two families' vast holdings in 1888. Then called Toluca, many small farms with their orchards of pears, peaches and other fruits bordered the road that ran from Cahuenga Pass north out toward the earlier established town of San Fernando. J. B. later changed the name of his subdivision to Lankershim. Many years later, the town's name changed to North Hollywood, but the street's name, that old road from Cahuenga Pass "out" to the city of San Fernando, remains Lankershim Boulevard.

Meanwhile out in the northern half of the former Indian and ex-mission part of the San Fernando Valley, similar financial conditions impacted its owner. The senior de Celis retained ownership of the northern half of the Valley when the Picos sold out their mortgaged southern half of the Valley to the Lankershim group in 1869. But a few years after his return to Spain, his son and heir, Eulogio F. de Celis, also faced forced foreclosure.

Charles Maclay first saw the San Fernando Valley in March of 1874. Standing at the top of Cahuenga Pass, he pronounced the valley laid out beneath him "a Garden of Eden." However, the Pennsylvania-born, former Methodist preacher turned California politician and state senator, was ready to get into real estate. Apparently tipped off by Leland Stanford, his long-time political leader and the former Governor of California, Maclay came to the Valley to buy land.

Stanford, as one of the "big four" who controlled and directed both the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads, obviously knew where and when his southward creeping Southern Pacific Railroad was going to enter the Los Angeles area. With a personal and unsecured loan from Stanford, Maclay bought out de Celis. While Pico and Andres Pico managed to reserve some 2,000 acres around the old mission for themselves, the remaining 56,000 passed into Yankee hands for $117,000, about $2 an acre. In order to repay Stanford's cash loan, Maclay invited two of his political colleagues and associates from northern California to join him in the San Fernando Valley venture. George K. Porter and his cousin, Benjamin F. Porter, agreed, and the northern half of the Valley was divided three more ways.

Choosing the land from the proposed Southern Pacific Railroad tracks eastward to the San Gabriel Mountains, Maclay immediately subdivided and placed 1,000 of his acres on the market. Naming the new town San Fernando--the Valley's first subdivision—he then awaited the arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Two years later, in 1876, the 6,940-foot San Fernando tunnel was completed, and the Southern Pacific Railroad entered the San Fernando Valley, right through the new town of San Fernando.

Benjamin Porter took the western one-third of the north half of the Valley, about 20,000 acres, and George Porter received an irregular section in between the other two. While all three engaged in agriculture, particularly wheat, real estate and townsite development seemed to attract Maclay the most.

By 1887, both the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe had completed direct lines from the east into Los Angeles. For a while, the competition for passengers drove down the price between Kansas City and Los Angeles to $25, then $15, and for a brief time to $1. Thousands of easterners came west, and with them came the climax of the great real estate boom of the 1880s.

During those boom years, hundreds of towns were subdivided, named and laid out on paper in Los Angeles County. Countless worthless farm and home sites were sold to the newly arriving easterners. Some promoters went so far as to hang oranges on Joshua trees and tell the inexperienced from back east that these were native California orange trees. But, even during this great boom, some warned of the impending problems and labeled the worst of the promoters and developers "Escrow Indians," for their skill at scalping the unsuspecting newcomers.

Even though the real estate boom of the 1880s ended with a bust, leaving many local banks and hundreds of the newly arrived broke, several significant changes occurred in the San Fernando Valley. During that boom, for example, J. B. Lankershim firmly established the town that, for a while, bore his family name. And Maclay, while continuing to promote his town of San Fernando, cleared and subdivided a nearby piece of land which he called Pacoima. This townsite also survived the bust. Perhaps it did because for a long time, it was a favorite Valley retreat for the city's wealthy.

One of the most successful products of the land boom continues to be Burbank. The New Hampshire dentist, David Burbank, combined and subdivided two old ranchos, the San Rafael and the El Providencia, into the nearly 9,000 acre city that still bears his name. Together with Maclay's City of San Fernando, Burbank continues to fight off Los Angeles' continuous attempts to cut off its water, as well as the more subtle pressures for annexation.

We learn the value of water when the well runs dry. – Benjamin Franklin

At the time of the establishment of the pueblo of Los Angeles in 1781, the city was granted exclusive ownership by the Spanish to the Los Angeles River. The surface waters of the Los Angeles River accumulate from the runoff from the mountains that surround and geographically mark off the San Fernando Valley. But of more significance, the Los Angeles River, as is true of most desert rivers, exists under the ground. Indeed, under the entire San Fernando Valley is a vast reservoir of underground water moving in a southeasterly direction, toward the Valley's narrow opening, called "The Narrows," between Burbank and Griffith Park at the south- eastern end of the Santa Monica Mountains.

That gigantic underground reservoir resulted from many thousands of years of accumulation of runoff from the surrounding mountains, as well as from the original geological happening that created the Valley itself. Since that underground water was once under pressure, pools often formed on the surface wherever a localized geologic condition permitted. The original marsh at Encino, the site of the Indian village that the Portola expedition encountered, was one such place. But there were several others scattered about the Valley floor.

As the old song reminds us, "It never rains in Southern California;" actually, that's not quite true. Those of us who have lived through the periodic flooding of the Valley can testify to that. What is true, however, is that the rainfall is very erratic from year to year and from decade to decade. The rainy season, when it happens, comes during the winter months.

Volumes upon volumes have already been written, are being written, about the historic and current purported need Southern California has for fresh water. As the San Fernando Valley became suburbanized and then urbanized, more and more of us have lost contact with some very elementary ecological restraints that nature itself has imposed upon this area.

One of the great and best kept secrets about the San Fernando Valley is that this place is actually a desert, or at best, a semi-desert region. But since many of us come from places elsewhere in the United States where water shortages never occurred, and since we have always planted trees, shrubs and lawns to conceal the desert, most of us have little knowledge or experience of the critical historic need for water in this area.

Farmers, as most of us, do not live by averages—we require a dependable water supply. Especially important to agriculture, water is needed in the spring and summer, not during the winter months. Therefore, in the absence of a dependable rainfall during these critical months, farmers have to turn to irrigation.

The early farmers in the Valley had a relatively easy time in digging wells necessary to irrigate their crops. In the 1870s, 40 feet was usually deep enough to reach the water that then gushed upward. These artesian wells provided farmers with a practically free resource, as no energy was required to lift the water from out of the ground and into irrigation ditches. At some places, like the Leonis Adobe in Calabasas, a 15-foot well was originally enough.

As the number of farmers, farms and wells increased, with water being taken out of the ground faster than the water was flowing into the ground, the naturally occurring pressure declined. Wind-driven pumps were then required to lift the water, and windmills came to the Valley. However, given the declining water table requiring deeper and deeper wells, along with the vagaries of the Valley's winds, it became increasingly difficult and costly to mine the groundwater with wind-powered pumps. Indeed, until the advent of the large electrically-driven pumps, powered by inexpensive oil-driven steam turbines, only farmers who specialized in high priced crops could afford to it irrigate their farms.

In 1881, the California Supreme Court declared that the original Spanish grant of the Los Angeles River—the surface water as well as the ground water—legally belonged to the City of Los Angeles; that no one else had the right to use it and that Los Angeles could not sell any of that water to those who lived outside the city. At the time of that decision, confirming the original Spanish grant, the San Fernando Valley was legally a part of Los Angeles.

However, in 1887, as part of the real estate boom of the 1880's, the Valley was separated from the city and became the independent township of San Fernando, and therefore, was not technically entitled to use either the surface waters or the ground waters of the Los Angeles River.

As is usually the case in regards to water as well as other essential resources, no one seems to care about it until a shortage develops. Consequently, the dry period of 1900-1905 — the same airy spell that prompted the city's leadership to cast their eyes north to the Owens Valley — prompted city lawsuits against over 200 Valley farmers u ho were pumping water out of the ground. The courts generally ruled in the city's favor, reaffirming that the underground reservoir was in fact part of the Los Angeles River and the exclusive possession of the City of Los Angeles.

In 1902, Los Angeles, with a population of about 200,000, took control of the privately-owned water company that supplied water under contract to the city. A Board of water Commissioners was established and the forerunner of the Department of Water and Power (DWP) came into existence. Two years later, the water board announced its plan to secure fresh water from the runoff on the eastern side of the Sierra Mountains in Owens Valley of Inyo County. Primarily planned and engineered by William Mulholland, the superintendent of the water Commission, the 233-mile-long aqueduct was completed in 1913. Built at a cost of about $24 million, the Owens Valley-Los Angeles Aqueduct remains an engineering feat unrivaled for its time and rarely since. Of particular importance to us today is that this aqueduct requires no pumping to carry and deliver that distant water to the San Fernando Valley.

Prompted by another dry cycle in the early 1920s, the Owens Valley-Los Angeles Aqueduct was extended farther north into Mono County. There, it traps and diverts water that normally runs off the Sierras into Mono Lake. Completed in 1940, the added water supply came just in time for the greatly increased demand of the war years and the phenomenal industrial and population growth of the post-war era. There was still another dry period in the early 1960s, and with the city's population booming, the city completed a second aqueduct into Owens Valley in 1970. This second Los Angeles Aqueduct not only collects and carries Sierra runoff, but it also enables the DWP to pump water out of the ground beneath Inyo County and add that supply into the southbound system.

The importance of William Mulholland's original accomplishment, together with later additions, cannot be overestimated. Nearly 100 percent of the water consumed in the San Fernando Valley, and about 80 percent of the water used in all of Los Angeles, comes from the eastern side of the Sierras through those two aqueducts. Even though the pumping of San Fernando ground water continues, it contributes only about 15 percent of the total water used in the city.

Mulholland Drive was officially dedicated and opened on December 27, 1924. At the dedication ceremony, William Mulholland cracked a bottle of Owens Valley Aqueduct water to symbolize the critical importance of water to the Valley and the city's existence as a growing metropolitan area. Among those present to honor Mulholland were Harry Chandler, publisher and son-in-law of Los Angeles Times founder Harrison Gray Otis; J.B. Lankershim, son of Isaac; and Alphonzo Bell, whose soon-to-be elite Bel-Air subdivision was being opened to access by this new highway.

Just 61 years ago, the city fathers turned out to fete the self-taught Irish immigrant whose genius, to a great extent, made possible the urban megapolis of Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley included. Today, however, almost everything about Mulholland, his reputation, the Owens Valley-Los Angeles Aqueduct, the development of the San Fernando Valley, and even the future of a dependable and healthy water supply are all bound and twisted together in one gigantic and complicated historical, political and ecological controversy.

The bringing of water to the San Fernando Valley in 1913 transformed the desert and made all subsequent suburban and urban development possible. In addition, it made tens of millions of dollars, perhaps hundreds of millions, for those insiders who were politically responsible for the construction—those who knew in advance about it and most importantly, those who knew where the aqueduct would terminate.

Lastly, this entire issue has spawned numerous legal, political, literary and academic careers, a continuing political dispute with the residents of both Inyo and Mono Counties, much state-wide cynicism toward both Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, and at least one movie: Chinatown. At one point in that movie, actor Jack Nicholson, playing a private detective and former L.A. police officer, observes that much of life is like Chinatown, where "you never really know what is going on." A lot of history is also like that, but some things are clearer than others.

We do know that prior to the public announcement of the proposed aqueduct's construction, several members of Los Angeles' economic and political elite formed a syndicate and purchased most of the still undeveloped, water poor and relatively inexpensive San Fernando Valley. Mulholland and his family did not participate in the immense profits that his aqueduct made possible. And even his fame as an engineering genius proved short-lived. In March of 1928, one of Mulholland's dams collapsed. Located in San Francisquito Canyon, 400 people living below the dam drowned, and millions of dollars in damage resulted. An official inquest adjudged Los Angeles liable and, therefore, Mulholland guilty. The public attitude toward him changed instantly and by the end of the decade, he was quoted as saying, "I envy the dead.''

The Los Angeles Suburban Homes Company purchased the 47,000 acres still owned and farmed by the Lankershim and Van Nuys interests in the south half of the Valley for $2.5 million. At about this same time, between 1900 and 1905, much of the still undeveloped northern half of the Valley was also purchased. All of these transactions involved essentially the same men. And all were associated in one way or the other with Moses Sherman of the Los Angeles Board of Water Commissioners.

The town of Van Nuys, established in 1911, was quickly followed by Marion (now Reseda), named for Harrison Otis' daughter and Harry Chandler's wife, and Owensmouth (now Canoga Park), so called because it was originally to be the terminal of the great aqueduct then under construction. Some small and old townsites and communities, such as San Fernando, Pacoima, Lankershim (now North Hollywood), Chatsworth, Burbank and a few others, existed in the Valley prior to the establishment of Van Nuys. Still, the creation of Van Nuys marked the end of the agricultural period of the Valley's history. Could suburbia be far behind?

The great Owens Valley-Los Angeles aqueduct began delivering water into the Valley in 1913. While the terminal's location changed from Owensmouth to a reservoir above the north side of the Valley, the water did come into the Valley as promised to those busily buying Valley acreage, lots and homesites. However, the City of Los Angeles had allegedly built this itself, for its current and future needs. The city did not intend to supply this water to towns and communities outside and beyond its limits. Nor could it legally do so even had it wished to. In addition, the growing Valley population could not tap into the groundwater. That water, as part of the Los Angeles River, also belonged to the city. Few of the newcomers had given any thought to the prospect of being shut out from the Aqueduct water, or from the groundwater. The solution then presented to those establishing homes and businesses was "no annexation, no water."

Thus, in March 1915, Valley voters representing about 107,000 acres voted to become part of Los Angeles. Actually, the total vote slightly exceeded 700, with 25 votes east against annexation. The following month's election in the city confirmed the annexation, and Valley independence came to an end. Now, the original promoters of the Aqueduct, the developers of the Valley, could honestly affirm that they had brought water to the city, even if the city had to expand to meet the water.

A few places in the Valley refused to participate in the annexation process and thus held out as independent towns—in particular Lankershim, San Fernando and Burbank. The town of Lankershim—later divided into North Hollywood, Studio City and Universal City—joined Los Angeles in 1923. The two cities of San Fernando and Burbank remain independent to this day. The two are also regularly in litigation with Los Angeles, fighting to keep the right to draw their water from out of the ground.

As part of their original agreement, each of the 30 members of the syndicate was entitled to reserve $150,000 in property for each $25,000 invested. Moses Sherman took 1,000 acres near and to the south of the present intersection of Ventura and Sepulveda Boulevards; consequently, we now have Sherman Oaks. Harrison Otis selected 550 acres in the vicinity of Ventura and Reseda Boulevards. Edgar Rice Burroughs, the famed author of the Tarzan series, later purchased much acreage; thus, the name Tarzana. Otis Brant, the head of the Title Insurance and Trust Company, picked some 850 acres toward the western end of the Valley where Topanga Canyon Road dropped down and crossed Ventura Boulevard. A short time later, Victor Girard purchased much of it. Still later, it was sold again, then subdivided and called Woodland Hills.

Other members of this group selected land in different places, each of which has its own story. For example, H.J. Whitley, the general manager of the entire operation, picked a spot just south of the newly established town of Van Nuys. And for many years, Whitley's Italian-style mansion looked out onto Van Nuys Boulevard, though for the later years it housed the old Praisewater Funeral Home.

To connect the three planned townsites of Van Nuys, Marion, and Owensmouth with the city, developers built a magnificent double-laned boulevard, bordered by palm trees, bushes and flowers of every description. Originally, the entire length was known as Sherman Way. From Lankershim Boulevard west, it is now Chandler Boulevard. Where it curves and runs through the middle of Van Nuys, it becomes part of Van Nuys Boulevard. And only after it once again curves west toward Owensmouth is it again Sherman Way. Up the middle of that dream boulevard, until the 1950's, ran the Pacific Electric commuter trains, the old Red Cars. Construction of the Southern Pacific-owned Pacific Electric line through the Valley, partially subsidized by the developers to promote the sale of their subdivisions, started at the same time as the syndicate began developing their holdings.

Shortly after the town of Van Nuys was first subdivided and lots sold, the Pacific Electric reached Van Nuys. At its best, the Pacific Electric ran 16 trains a day from Van Nuys to Hill Street in downtown Los Angeles. Starting at 5:38 in the morning, at a cost of 20 cents, the trip took one hour. Even toward the end of its era, in the late 1940's and early 1950's, a big night for many Valley young people involved taking the Red Car over the hill to Hollywood. Once it was gone, the teenagers turned to automobiles, to Bob's drive-in in Toluca Lake, and to "cruising" Van Nuys Boulevard.

Another sign of the rapidly changing times came with the closing of the Encino Rancho. Until 1945, the nearly 4,500 acre Encino Rancho remained a rural and rustic working ranch. In that year and the great Post-war Valley building boom about to take off, Clarence Brown bought out the Amestoy family and subdivided the old sheep ranch. The site of ancient Indian Villages, because of the year-round springs, this was also the first meeting place of the Spanish and the Valley Indians back in 1769.

In 1940, only about 200,000 people lived in the Valley. In 1943, Roy Rogers was the first to record the Gordon Jenkins song "San Fernando Valley," from a movie of the same name. Later that year, Bing Crosby's recording made both that song and the San Fernando Valley famous nationwide:

Oh! I'm packing my grip
And I'm leaving today,
'Cause I'm taking a trip
California way.
I'm gonna settle down and never more roam
And make the SAN FERNANDO VALLEY my home.

Well, whether it was the song, the clear air and beautiful weather, the old American desire to "move west,'' or the area's exceptionally low-cost housing, the end of the Second World War thrust the San Fernando Valley into a period of ever-increasing growth that, while slowing, still has not ceased. Consider that once housing construction resumed after the war, a veteran could purchase a new two- bedroom home in the Valley for $10 down and $50 a month. Regular gasoline at an economy Haines Brothers station sold for 10.9 cents a gallon, and a 1946 Ford Deluxe Sedan could be purchased for $1,131; a Cadillac, for just under $2,000.

By 1950, the Valley's population reached 400,000. The Valley pioneered the post-war baby boom, many of the children of which are today called the 'Yuppies:' The average new Valley home, in 1949, cost $9,000. By 1955, that same house could be resold for nearly $15,000. But even at that price, a household income only had to be $6,000 a year, not at all difficult, considering Valley incomes continued to hover above the national average.

By 1960, the average market value of a Valley home reached $18,850. During the 1970s, however, these costs and income patterns over the rest of the country began to reverse. Land and housing costs shot upward, while most incomes only crept. By the beginning of the 1980s, the average price of a home in the Valley reached $110,000.

Once upon a time, the Valley was not only free, but the Indians worked a mere two hours a day to support themselves. For a long time, Valley land sold for $1-2 an acre. Such is the progression of history, one that continues to alter the face of the San Fernando Valley. Perhaps recognizing and understanding the inevitableness of change is what studying history is all about; but as the times change, so must those who wish to endure.