White Oak Avenue, Los Angeles

Why you should experience White Oak Avenue in Los Angeles, California.

White Oak Avenue is a wooded corridor where Granada Hills's suburban character meets remnants of its agricultural past, immense Himalayan cedars and a streetscape carried into American film history.

Running through Granada Hills between Northridge and the northern foothills, the valley corridor follows a long north-south line from the Central San Fernando Valley toward San Fernando Mission Boulevard, crossing Nordhoff Street, Devonshire Street, Chatsworth Street and the Ronald Reagan Freeway before approaching the rising terrain beneath the Santa Susana Mountains. Southern stretches pass through the broad Valley grid of detached houses, apartment buildings and commercial intersections, with distant ridgelines remaining visible across the level basin. Traveling north brings a quieter residential scale as the roadway narrows and mature landscaping begins enclosing long sections of pavement beneath increasingly substantial tree cover. Near the historic center of Granada Hills, towering conifers create a cathedral-like canopy whose height and density radically alter the proportions of the street against the surrounding one-story houses. The result is a corridor whose extended Valley alignment, mountain backdrop, changing residential scale and extraordinary tree canopy preserve an unusually vivid transition from metropolitan Los Angeles into the agricultural landscape that preceded Granada Hills.

What you should know about White Oak Avenue.

White Oak Avenue is best known for passing directly through the former Sunshine Ranch, the agricultural property from which much of modern Granada Hills emerged. J. H. Moshier acquired land at the northern edge of the San Fernando Valley during the 1910s, developed a ranch with dairy barns and planted extensive citrus acreage across the foothill plain. Suburban Estates, a holding company associated with Edwards and Wiley, later acquired the property and subdivided its lower acreage as Tract 9317 in 1926. Another subdivision followed in 1927 as the developers divided part of the tract into smaller parcels, laid out the present street network and promoted the new community under the name Granada. More than fourteen miles of paved streets accompanied the development as the former ranch began changing into a residential settlement. A commercial center emerged at Chatsworth Street and White Oak Avenue around the two-story Granada Building, placing the corridor at one of the young community's principal intersections. Financial difficulties subsequently pushed Suburban Estates into receivership, and California Trust Company controlled the remaining tract until the last parcel sold in 1940. The community changed its name from Granada to Granada Hills in May 1942, distinguishing the rapidly developing Valley settlement as its former ranch acreage entered the postwar building era. Population rose from fewer than 5,000 residents 1950 to 50,000 a decade later, and housing tracts spread across land that had remained semi-agricultural only a generation earlier. White Oak Avenue retained the north-south line through that immense transition, linking the commercial center created during the subdivision era with neighborhoods built across the former citrus landscape.

One surviving element of Sunshine Ranch gave the northern avenue a cultural significance extending far outside the San Fernando Valley. Ranch superintendent John Orcutt planted deodar cedars along White Oak Avenue in the early 1930s, creating a three-quarter-mile allée between San Jose Street and San Fernando Mission Boulevard. The species, Cedrus deodara, originated in the Himalayas and matured into immense conifers whose branches eventually formed a continuous canopy above the roadway. Los Angeles designated the planting Historic-Cultural Monument 41 on August 3, 1966, placing an agricultural-era streetscape among the city's earliest protected historic resources. The official designation recognized 114 trees, though losses over subsequent decades reduced the surviving population. Hollywood added another chapter in 1981 when Steven Spielberg filmed part of the bicycle chase for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial along White Oak Avenue near Tulsa Street. Elliott and his companions race beneath the mature cedars before their bicycles lift into the air, turning the Granada Hills streetscape into the setting for one of the film's defining images. E.T. reached theaters in 1982 and transformed the ranch-era planting into a piece of internationally recognizable cinema geography without altering the residential street that produced the image. White Oak Avenue consequently carries an unusual sequence from citrus-ranch landscaping through municipal preservation into film history, with trees planted during Granada's infancy becoming the corridor's most enduring cultural artifact.

How to fold White Oak Avenue into your trip.

White Oak Avenue works as the anchor for a northern Valley sequence tracing the region from Mexican-era ranching through postwar architectural experimentation and into a former private ranch preserved as hundreds of acres of mountain parkland.

Begin at Andres Pico Adobe, whose earliest one-room section dates to 1834 on land associated with Mission San Fernando. Andrés Pico and Juan Manso received a nine-year lease on former mission lands in 1845, and Pico later purchased an undivided half-interest in much of the San Fernando Valley from Eulogio de Celis for $15,000 in 1854. Pico lived at the mission complex, and his adopted children Rómulo and Catarina occupied the adobe after marrying in the 1870s, adding a second story, kitchen, wings and other alterations. Archaeologist Mark Raymond Harrington, then curator at the Southwest Museum, acquired the deteriorated property during the 1930s and undertook an extensive restoration that uncovered earlier mission tiles beneath later wooden flooring. Los Angeles acquired the threatened property in 1965, preserving one of the oldest surviving residences in the city. Continue to Balboa Highlands, the Granada Hills tract Joseph Eichler developed from 1962 through 1964 as his only residential development in Los Angeles County. Architects A. Quincy Jones, Frederick Emmons and Claude Oakland brought the principles of California Modernism into a subdivision of just over 100 houses, using atrium entries, extensive glazing and flat, A-frame and sloping roof forms to reorganize the conventional postwar tract house around interior courtyards and connections with outdoor space. Eichler's approach grew from his years living in Frank Lloyd Wright's Bazett House in Hillsborough and his subsequent collaboration with architects committed to modern residential design. Balboa Highlands became the first postwar neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley to receive historic-district protection when Los Angeles adopted its preservation overlay in 2010, securing an unusually concentrated body of Eichler's Southern California work. Conclude at O'Melveny Park, whose 672 acres rise from the northern edge of Granada Hills into the Santa Susana Mountains. Attorney John O'Melveny purchased the property in 1941 and operated it as C. J. Ranch, using the land for citrus cultivation, cattle grazing and bulldog breeding. His father, Henry W. O'Melveny, had founded the law firm that became O'Melveny & Myers and joined the original California State Parks Commission in 1927. During the 1970s, John O'Melveny arranged for his half of the ranch to pass to Los Angeles as a donation and for the estate of his wife, Corinne, to sell its interest below market value. The property entered public ownership as parkland, preserving a substantial section of foothill terrain above the residential Valley. The progression moves from an adobe rooted in the Mexican-era San Fernando Valley through Eichler's experiment in mass-produced California Modernism and culminates in the preservation of O'Melveny's former ranch, connecting three radically different forms of settlement across nearly two centuries of northern Valley history.

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