North Hollywood, Los Angeles

Why you should experience North Hollywood in Los Angeles, California.

North Hollywood is a protean enclave where the southeastern San Fernando Valley's commercial character meets an agricultural town transformed by rail transportation, postwar metropolitan growth and a concentrated performing-arts center along Lankershim Boulevard.

Positioned between Valley Glen, Valley Village, and Toluca Lake, the neighborhood occupies the southeastern Valley floor where the broad Lankershim, Magnolia and Victory corridors cross a dense grid extending northward from the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. Low commercial blocks, 1920s houses, postwar apartment buildings and larger contemporary structures create pronounced changes in scale across terrain that remains substantially flatter than the neighboring communities approaching Cahuenga Pass. Lankershim Boulevard supplies the primary encounter through a long north-south spine whose closely spaced storefronts become increasingly concentrated around Magnolia Boulevard and the historic town center. Tujunga Avenue creates a secondary passage through quieter residential blocks before reaching the civic landscape surrounding North Hollywood Park and the neighborhood's surviving Spanish Colonial Revival library. The result is a neighborhood whose physical fabric retains successive layers of agricultural settlement, interwar suburbanization and metropolitan Los Angeles within one of the San Fernando Valley's most legible historic centers.

What you should know about North Hollywood.

North Hollywood is best known for evolving from the agricultural settlement of Toluca into Lankershim and finally into a major southeastern San Fernando Valley commercial center whose successive names corresponded with profound changes in transportation, agriculture and suburban growth. The San Fernando Farm Homestead Association, organized by Isaac Lankershim and his son-in-law Isaac Newton Van Nuys 1869, controlled the southern half of the Valley by 1871, and later subdivision opened portions of that immense holding to smaller farms. The Lankershim Ranch Land and Water Company established the townsite in 1887, followed in 1888 by sales of farms already planted with peaches, pears, apricots and walnuts whose deep roots exploited the high water table near Tujunga Wash. Agricultural production endured the collapse of the late-1880s land boom, and the Toluca Fruit Growers Association formed in 1894 as orchards became central to the local economy. Southern Pacific opened its Valley branch the following year, placing a freight stop at the settlement and connecting local fruit growers with markets beyond the Valley. The post office adopted Lankershim in 1896, ending a period when the depot and postal operation carried different place names, and the town formally followed with the Lankershim name in 1905. Los Angeles Suburban Homes Company, led by a syndicate that included Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler, acquired I. N. Van Nuys's remaining Lankershim ranch holdings in 1910 as suburban development began overtaking agriculture. Owens Valley Aqueduct water reached the Valley in 1913, Lankershim joined Los Angeles in 1923 and the community adopted North Hollywood in 1927 as developers deliberately connected its name with the glamour of the film center beyond Cahuenga Pass. North Hollywood Park followed in 1928, marking the former orchard settlement's consolidation into an increasingly urban commercial and residential center.

Bob Symonds pushed North Hollywood into a different phase after World War II when he conceived Valley Plaza as an automobile-centered regional shopping center serving the rapidly expanding San Fernando Valley. Architect Stiles O. Clements developed the master plan around expansive parking areas, retail buildings, a theater, bank and office building, departing decisively from the street-oriented commercial form that had shaped older Valley centers. Sears opened as an anchor in 1951 near Victory and Laurel Canyon boulevards, and additional construction extended across the complex through 1965. Honnold and Rex designed the Wells Fargo Tower in 1960, giving the predominantly low-rise shopping center a conspicuous vertical element amid its Mid-Century Modern retail buildings. A separate cultural concentration emerged farther south along Lankershim during the closing twentieth century as small live-performance venues gathered around the Magnolia intersection. The Television Academy selected that intersection for its permanent headquarters, broke ground on the complex in 1988 and moved there in May 1991 after ABC founder Leonard H. Goldenson supplied a $1 million grant toward its theater. Production designer Jan Scott conceived the Hall of Fame Plaza and its 27-foot Emmy statue, placing the institution's public face directly within the growing theatrical district. Small theaters multiplied along Lankershim during the early 1990s, and the NoHo Arts District became the cultural center of a community that had moved from orchards through automobile-oriented suburban commerce into a concentrated center for live performance and television institutions.

How to fold North Hollywood into your trip.

North Hollywood works as the anchor for an outing connecting a vast Chicana mural created with hundreds of young Angelenos, the adobe site associated with the end of fighting in California during the Mexican-American War and an aviation memorial whose architecture carries the Valley into the formative decades of flight.

Begin at The Great Wall of Los Angeles, Judith F. Baca's immense mural inside the Tujunga Wash, conceived during the 1970s as a visual history centered on California communities excluded from conventional historical representation. Baca directed 80 young people, ten artists and five historians during the summer of 1976 as the first 1,000 feet carried the composition from prehistoric California through 1910; crews returned in 1978, 1980, 1981 and 1983, adding 350 feet during each campaign and extending the work across successive decades. More than 400 young people and their families ultimately participated across six summers, turning the concrete flood channel into a half-mile work whose enormous scale joined public art with community production. Continue to Campo de Cahuenga, associated with the January 13, 1847 agreement between Andrés Pico and John C. Frémont that ended fighting in California during the Mexican-American War. Los Angeles acquired the property in 1923, and a later adobe-like museum dedicated in 1951 preserved the site near the historic passage through Cahuenga Pass; the city designated the property a Historic-Cultural Monument in 1964. Its position near the pass connects the southeastern Valley with a political turning point that preceded California statehood by three years. Conclude at Portal of the Folded Wings Shrine to Aviation, the 1924 memorial structure at Valhalla Memorial Park whose elaborate sculptural program was created by Federico Giorgi, the artist responsible for the immense Babylonian sets in D. W. Griffith's Intolerance. The rotunda later became a burial and memorial site for aviation pioneers, joining the architectural ambitions of 1920s Southern California with the extraordinary concentration of flight experimentation surrounding the eastern San Fernando Valley and neighboring Burbank. Its elaborate form gives early aviation history a physical counterpart to the region's nearby studios and former airfields, closing the route with another industry that reshaped Southern California during the twentieth century. The progression moves from Baca's grand reconstruction of California history through the site of an 1847 political turning point and culminates at a memorial devoted to aviation pioneers, connecting public art, state history and technological ambition across the southeastern San Fernando Valley.

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