Why Oxnard Street matters.
Oxnard Street is a far-reaching corridor where Van Nuys' Valley-floor character meets an agricultural place-name, postwar industrial expansion and an east-west alignment crossing the Central San Fernando Valley from Warner Center toward North Hollywood.
Running through Van Nuys between Sherman Oaks and Valley Glen, the metropolitan corridor follows a long east-west line across the broad Valley floor, intersecting Sepulveda Boulevard, Van Nuys Boulevard, Woodman Avenue, Coldwater Canyon Avenue and Laurel Canyon Boulevard before approaching North Hollywood. Central stretches remain strikingly level, with long sightlines extending across a grid of low-rise commercial buildings, apartment properties, detached houses and industrial parcels toward mountains on both sides of the basin. Traveling east brings denser development around major intersections, where broad north-south arterials repeatedly interrupt the avenue's sustained horizontal course and produce substantial changes in frontage scale. Western reaches pass through increasingly residential sections before the street approaches the commercial and employment districts surrounding Warner Center. The result is a corridor whose long alignment, level topography, shifting building scale and repeated crossings of major Valley arterials reveal the immense dimensions of Central Los Angeles north of the Santa Monica Mountains.
What defines Oxnard Street.
Oxnard Street is best known for preserving the name of the sugar-beet industry that occupied an important place in San Fernando Valley agriculture during the early twentieth century. Henry Thomas Oxnard and his brothers developed the American Beet Sugar Company, and Henry established a refinery at Chino in 1891 before another refinery rose on Rancho Colonia in Ventura County in 1898. The settlement surrounding the second plant took the Oxnard name, creating the Ventura County place-name subsequently transferred to the Valley roadway. Los Angeles adopted Oxnard Street in 1916 during a period when several Valley roads received names associated with communities farther west, including Saticoy and Nordhoff. The connection was more substantial than a borrowed geographic label: 15,000 acres of sugar beets were under cultivation in the San Fernando Valley during that period, with crops shipped west to Oxnard for processing. The road consequently preserves a direct linguistic remnant of the agricultural economy that preceded the Valley's metropolitan expansion.
Development along the central section reveals how quickly that agricultural landscape changed after annexation, aqueduct water and suburban construction altered the Valley. Maps from 1923 show orchards and fields east of Oxnard near Van Nuys Boulevard, with an organ factory standing west of the intersection and only three houses occupying six lots around nearby Cedros Avenue. A City Water Department complex occupied a block near Van Nuys Boulevard by 1926, placing municipal water infrastructure beside land that had remained agricultural only a few years earlier. Pacific Cabinet and Radio Company and San Fernando Valley Water and Power facilities occupied adjoining blocks by 1938, marking the emergence of an industrial belt along the street. By 1955, businesses devoted to electronics, woodworking, refrigeration and cabinet production had filled the Oxnard blocks west of Cedros. Farther east, postwar residential construction produced districts such as Goodland-Alcove, where Ranch houses from the 1950s and 1960s occupy curving streets behind apartment buildings facing Oxnard, Coldwater Canyon Avenue and Goodland Avenue. The avenue consequently carries a compressed chronology of Central Valley growth, moving from cultivated acreage through utility and manufacturing expansion into the residential construction that remade the basin after World War II.
How Oxnard Street fits.
Oxnard Street works as the anchor for an outing connecting a community college created during the Valley's postwar population boom, Judith F. Baca's immense public artwork inside the Tujunga Wash and a collection devoted to preserving the commercial and popular culture of the San Fernando Valley.
Begin at Los Angeles Valley College, founded in 1949 in response to the rapid population growth reshaping the San Fernando Valley. The Los Angeles Board of Education chartered the institution that June, and classes began September 12 on the Van Nuys High School campus with 439 students, 23 faculty members, five bungalows and a library containing 150 volumes. An evening division followed in 1950, and the college moved in 1951 to its permanent 105-acre property, where 33 temporary bungalows initially accommodated the student body. Enrollment exceeded 2,300 by fall 1952, and successive building campaigns completed engineering, chemistry, physics, foreign-language, administration and library buildings by 1959, followed by music, theater arts and life-science facilities in 1961. Faculty members created the Athenaeum in 1954, bringing the Los Angeles Philharmonic and speakers including Eleanor Roosevelt, Clement Attlee, Margaret Mead and Louis Leakey to the campus. Continue to The Great Wall of Los Angeles, conceived by artist Judith F. Baca after the Army Corps of Engineers approached her in 1974 about creating a mural inside the Tujunga Flood Control Channel. Work began two years later, bringing artists, scholars, community participants and more than 400 young people and their families into a project extending across successive summers. The painted work extends 2,754 feet through the channel and traces California history through communities whose histories had received limited representation in conventional public commemoration. Baca coordinated the immense undertaking through SPARC, whose first public-art project became the mural, and its scale transformed utilitarian flood-control infrastructure into one of the most consequential works associated with the Los Angeles mural movement. The National Register of Historic Places recognizes the work for social history and art, with its period of significance spanning 1974 through 1984. Conclude at Valley Relics Museum, created from San Fernando Valley native Tommy Gelinas's effort to preserve objects disappearing as long-running businesses and entertainment venues closed across the region. The collection expanded into a physical museum in Chatsworth in 2013 before moving in 2018 to two aircraft hangars at Van Nuys Airport, placing decades of Valley popular culture within one of the region's principal aviation sites. Its holdings span vintage neon signs, automobiles, photographs, postcards, yearbooks, clothing, art and BMX bicycles, including commercial artifacts salvaged from businesses that once defined Valley streets. The progression moves from a college created to absorb the Valley's postwar population expansion through Baca's conversion of flood-control infrastructure into an immense work of public art and culminates in Gelinas's preservation of neon, automobiles and commercial artifacts from the metropolitan culture that followed.
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