Why Sherman Way matters.
Sherman Way is a storied corridor where Canoga Park's Valley character meets an ambitious early suburban boulevard, Pacific Electric expansion and the agricultural towns that preceded the immense urbanization of the western San Fernando Valley.
Running through Canoga Park between West Hills and Reseda, the valley corridor follows an extended east-west line across Shoup Avenue, Topanga Canyon Boulevard, De Soto Avenue, Winnetka Avenue, Corbin Avenue and Reseda Boulevard before continuing toward Van Nuys. Western stretches carry broad commercial frontage through the flatter reaches of Canoga Park, where long blocks and deep parcels sit beneath distant views toward the Santa Susana Mountains. Traveling east brings successive residential districts into the street edge, with mature trees, apartment buildings, detached houses and neighborhood businesses forming distinct bands around major north-south intersections. The roadway maintains an unusually persistent linear scale across the Valley floor, allowing the surrounding mountains to remain visible beyond a street grid extending for miles in either direction. The result is a corridor whose broad proportions, sustained east-west alignment, changing commercial centers and expansive Valley sightlines preserve the physical scale of the development campaign that created it.
What defines Sherman Way.
Sherman Way is best known for beginning as the transportation centerpiece of the vast San Fernando Valley subdivision undertaken by the Los Angeles Suburban Homes Company after its investors acquired 47,500 acres from Isaac Van Nuys in 1909. The syndicate included Moses Hazeltine Sherman, Harry Chandler, Harrison Gray Otis, Hobart Johnstone Whitley and Otto F. Brant, with the major partners contributing $100,000 apiece to a campaign intended to subdivide much of the southern Valley. Existing roads presented a problem for prospective land sales, prompting the company board in 1910 to approve an oiled highway running across its holdings toward the future Owensmouth townsite. Sherman Way defeated the proposed name Auto Speedway in a board vote and honored Moses Sherman, the transit magnate whose electric railway interests became inseparable from the larger development strategy. Construction produced what promoters called the $500,000 Boulevard, an exceptionally broad paved road accompanied by Pacific Electric tracks that connected the newly created communities with Los Angeles through Cahuenga Pass. By 1912, electric cars were making the Van Nuys to Downtown trip in 45 minutes, and the paved roadway provided an equally conspicuous demonstration of automobile travel across a Valley still dominated by farms and open acreage. The original route was considerably larger than the street carrying the Sherman Way name now, following present-day Chandler Boulevard westward, turning north along present-day Van Nuys Boulevard and then proceeding west along the surviving Sherman Way toward Owensmouth. Road and railway consequently operated as a coordinated piece of real-estate infrastructure, making distant subdivisions accessible before the surrounding population existed to support them.
The boulevard soon acquired an elaborate civic appearance that reinforced the developers' attempt to present the emerging Valley towns as finished communities. Los Angeles County organized the Van Nuys Highway Lighting District on August 10, 1912, covering 52,000 acres and placing its first major lighting investment along the 16-mile Sherman Way route. The district raised $75,000 through its 1912 taxes, ultimately installing 484 three-light electroliers and 129 five-light electroliers manufactured by Los Angeles-based Llewellyn Iron Works. Five-light clusters marked the centers of Van Nuys, Marian and Owensmouth, creating an illuminated chain between communities that were still surrounded by agricultural land. Owensmouth itself had been founded on March 30, 1912, with the Janss Investment Company engaged to subdivide and sell property around the junction of Sherman Way and the Southern Pacific line. The town depended initially on a well drilled near Sherman Way and Deering Avenue, where a 50-horsepower gas engine powered a system delivering water by March 1911, years before Los Angeles Aqueduct water reached the district. Owensmouth joined Los Angeles in 1917 and became Canoga Park in 1930, and Pacific Electric service beyond Van Nuys Boulevard and Sherman Way ended in 1938 as automobiles assumed an increasing share of Valley transportation. The boulevard outlasted the original town names, ornamental railway landscape and Red Car service, preserving the principal western segment of a development system conceived before the San Fernando Valley became a continuous metropolitan district.
How Sherman Way fits.
Sherman Way works as the anchor for an outing connecting the estate of a pioneering petroleum geologist, a vast collection devoted to San Fernando Valley popular culture and an ambitious Japanese landscape built around the reuse of reclaimed water.
Begin at Orcutt Ranch Horticultural Center, the surviving estate of William Warren Orcutt, who purchased the property in 1917 after building an extraordinary career in California petroleum geology. Orcutt graduated from Stanford in 1895, joined Union Oil in 1899 and organized the West's first petroleum geology department two years later; his work at the La Brea Tar Pits also brought attention to prehistoric remains exposed in the asphalt deposits. The Spanish Colonial Revival and Mission Revival residence at his Valley property was completed 1926, incorporating glazed Mexican tiles and carved Philippine mahogany and walnut. Orcutt used the surrounding acreage as an experimental botanical garden, planting exotic specimens and a citrus orchard that survives as one of the last two remaining citrus orchards in the San Fernando Valley. The remaining 24 acres became Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument 31 in 1965, and the city purchased the property the following year. Continue to Valley Relics Museum, where the physical culture of the San Fernando Valley has been assembled across two airplane hangars through vintage neon signs, automobiles, photographs, postcards, yearbooks, Western clothing, BMX bicycles, restaurant ephemera and other objects spanning the region's commercial and popular history. Its holdings include a San Fernando Valley postcard collection exceeding 500 examples, preserving imagery of vanished motels, commercial streets and businesses that accompanied the Valley's twentieth-century growth. Conclude at The Japanese Garden, conceived by former Los Angeles city engineer Donald C. Tillman as a demonstration that reclaimed water could sustain an exceptionally delicate designed landscape. Landscape architect Koichi Kawana created the 6.5-acre SuihΕ-en as a Chisen-Kaiyushiki strolling garden modeled on estates developed for Japanese feudal lords during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Built between 1980 and 1983 and dedicated in 1984, the composition moves through a dry meditation garden into lakes, streams, waterfalls and a Shoin building, with treated water from the adjoining reclamation plant supplying its ponds and irrigation. The progression moves from Orcutt's scientific and horticultural experimentation through the preservation of the Valley's twentieth-century popular culture and culminates in Kawana and Tillman's fusion of landscape design with reclaimed water, connecting three distinct forms of invention that emerged from the San Fernando Valley's development.
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