Why you should experience Lankershim Boulevard in Los Angeles, California.
Lankershim Boulevard is a storied corridor where North Hollywood's Valley character meets nineteenth-century agricultural settlement, interurban expansion and a commercial spine that carried a farming town into metropolitan Los Angeles.
Running through North Hollywood between Studio City and Sun Valley, the northbound corridor follows the eastern San Fernando Valley floor from the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains across Riverside Drive, Camarillo Street, Magnolia Boulevard, Chandler Boulevard, Burbank Boulevard, Oxnard Street and Sherman Way before continuing toward the northeastern Valley. South of Magnolia, the roadway emerges from constricted terrain near the mountains into a dense commercial district where shallow storefronts, theaters, offices and apartment buildings occupy closely divided parcels along a broad linear street. Around Chandler, the boulevard crosses former railroad alignments at the historic center of North Hollywood, where larger blocks and transportation infrastructure interrupt the finer commercial grain extending along adjacent streets. Farther north, building density progressively loosens into longer automobile-oriented parcels, low industrial properties and residential side streets as the flat Valley floor opens toward Sun Valley. The result is a corridor whose mountain approach, compact town center and long northern extension preserve the spatial development of a route that preceded urban North Hollywood and subsequently became its principal commercial avenue.
What you should know about Lankershim Boulevard.
Lankershim Boulevard is best known for inheriting an old road through a farming settlement created from one of the largest agricultural enterprises in the nineteenth-century San Fernando Valley. Isaac Lankershim and his partners acquired 59,500 acres from Pío Pico in 1869, bringing an immense portion of the southern Valley under a single agricultural enterprise. Wheat replaced the group's original sheep operation and proved highly successful, with Isaac Newton Van Nuys joining his father-in-law Lankershim in managing the property. James Boon Lankershim subsequently took a larger role after his father's death in 1882 and subdivided 12,000 acres on the eastern side of the ranch for smaller agricultural holdings. The Lankershim Ranch Land and Water Company organized the townsite of Toluca during the late 1880s and offered planted farms containing peaches, pears, apricots and walnuts. The Southern Pacific opened a branch through the community in 1895, connecting its fruit and nut growers with distant markets and placing a depot beside the future boulevard at Chandler. Toluca adopted the Lankershim name during the following decade, and the principal road through town received the Lankershim Boulevard name 1911. Annexation brought Lankershim into Los Angeles in 1923. Residents adopted North Hollywood in 1927 as orchards and agricultural parcels were rapidly giving way to houses and commercial construction, leaving the boulevard named for the family whose wheat empire had preceded the town itself.
Electric transportation produced a separate phase of growth as the Valley became increasingly connected with Central Los Angeles. Pacific Electric service reached the district through Cahuenga Pass during the early twentieth century and made the town center around Chandler and Lankershim a major transfer and commercial point. Water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct arrived in the Valley in 1913, accelerating the conversion of former agricultural holdings after the Los Angeles Suburban Homes Company acquired large remaining portions of the Lankershim ranch. Commercial construction spread outward along Lankershim, Magnolia and Tujunga boulevards during the 1920s, and North Hollywood Park opened in 1928 as the surrounding district developed into a civic and business center. Automobile ownership altered that pattern during the following two decades, producing drive-oriented commercial buildings, Streamline Moderne storefronts and service properties along Lankershim. Construction of the Hollywood Freeway during the late 1940s radically altered the boulevard's southern approach, where Pacific Electric tracks and surface traffic had previously shared the narrow passage toward Hollywood. Red Cars continued through the changing transportation landscape until December 1952, after which rail infrastructure through the pass disappeared and freeway lanes occupied much of its former path. The boulevard entered the postwar era as the commercial main street of a district transformed within two generations from orchards and railroad shipping into a dense automobile-oriented section of Los Angeles.
How to fold Lankershim Boulevard into your trip.
Lankershim Boulevard works as the anchor for an outing connecting one of America's formative motion-picture campuses, a Streamline Moderne building created for a municipal utility and a surviving 1920s theater from North Hollywood's first major commercial expansion.
Begin at Universal Studios Lot, where Carl Laemmle began assembling 230 acres of ranch property in 1912 after creating the Universal Film Manufacturing Company from a coalition of production companies. Westerns were soon being filmed on the former Oak Crest Ranch, and construction of a permanent production complex began in 1914. Universal City formally opened on March 15, 1915 with two major stages, administrative buildings facing Lankershim, a laboratory, theater, costume and dressing rooms, production shops, animal facilities and enormous water reservoirs supporting the self-contained operation. Laemmle admitted the public to observation stands where filmmaking unfolded below, establishing an early studio-tour practice alongside active production. The property continued expanding through successive ownership periods, with production buildings, stages and backlot areas spreading across hundreds of acres behind the Lankershim frontage. Continue to Lankershim Arts Center, built 1939 at 5108 Lankershim Boulevard for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Theater architect Charles S. Lee designed the building in the Streamline Moderne mode, giving the municipal facility the horizontal emphasis and curved forms associated with North Hollywood's rapid prewar commercial growth. Los Angeles designated the property Historic-Cultural Monument 232 in 1980. The Department of Cultural Affairs subsequently converted the former utility building into a performing-arts center supporting theater, dance, music and other creative work, placing a civic arts institution inside a surviving example of the boulevard's late-1930s architecture. Conclude at El Portal Theatre, constructed at 5269 Lankershim Boulevard in 1926 as North Hollywood entered its decisive transition from agricultural town to suburban commercial center. The house opened for vaudeville and silent films before sound cinema changed theatrical exhibition during the following years. Its position near the growing town center made the theater part of the entertainment district developing around Lankershim and Magnolia. The building survived the Depression, decades of changing film exhibition and the 1994 Northridge earthquake, then underwent a substantial reconstruction before reopening in 2000 as a three-theater performing-arts complex. The progression moves from Laemmle's self-contained motion-picture city through Lee's Streamline Moderne municipal building and culminates in a 1926 vaudeville and cinema house returned to live performance, connecting film production, civic architecture and theatrical culture along Lankershim Boulevard.
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