New Page Title

San Fernando Valley, California

Industrial and Commercial Organization

| | | | | | | | | | | | | |

The Valley is home to numerous companies, the most well-known of which are involved in motion pictures, recording, and television production (including CBS Studio Center, NBC-Universal, The Walt Disney Company (and its ABC television network), and Warner Bros.). The Valley was previously known for stellar advances in aerospace technology by companies such as Lockheed, Rocketdyne, and Marquardt which helped put man on the moon and armed the modern military. Most of these enterprises have since disappeared or moved on to regions with friendlier political climates.

The Valley became the pioneering region for producing adult films in the 1970s and since then has been home to a multi-billion dollar pornography industry earning the moniker "San Pornando Valley" or "Pornography Capital of the World". The leading trade paper for that field (AVN Magazine) is based in the Northwest Valley, as are a majority of the nation's adult video and magazine distributors. It is a legal business as the vast majority of the producers strictly comply with minimum age statutes.

Lockheed became the Valley's biggest employer

Taking to the sky

Wide open spaces and clear skies also made the Valley a center of the nation's blossoming love of airplanes and the people who flew them. Small dirt airfields popped up and lasted a few years until the cash ran out. The 1920s and '30s also brought the opening of today's major airports, Burbank and Van Nuys, and the exploits of Amelia Earhart. She lived in Toluca Lake with her husband, the publisher George Palmer Putnam, and often flew above the Valley in planes made in Burbank by Lockheed.

The most glamorous airport of them all was Glendale's Grand Central Terminal, where the first airliners to fly between New York and L.A. would drop off the stars. It was there that tycoon Howard Hughes began his aircraft company. Hughes had also built and stocked two entire airfields, one at Balboa and Roscoe boulevards and the other in Chatsworth, for the filming of Hell's Angels, his cinematic paean to World War I aviators.

War clouds

World War II, which the United States joined after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, yanked the Valley into a new era. Farms gave way to airplane plants and to new homes by the thousands.

Lockheed erupted into one of the war effort's most prolific assemblers of bombers and fighters, becoming the Valley's biggest employer. As the men got drafted, the factory work was taken over by women and high school students. They worked under giant camouflage nets hung over the plant, shifts running nonstop.

Some 3,177 residents of Japanese descent were taken from their homes — mostly farms — and interned at camps away from the coast. So many Valley Japanese were at Manzanar that the camp had a baseball team called the San Fernando Aces. While they were away, crops were picked by housewives, prisoners of war and workers brought from Mexico.

In 1944, the Army opened Birmingham Hospital for war wounded on Vanowen Street in Van Nuys. The sprawling hospital held more than 1,000 maimed troops. That year, Bing Crosby's hit song "San Fernando Valley" — from a movie of the same name, starring Roy Rogers — made the Valley sound even more heavenly to GIs trapped overseas. The population swelled to 176,000 during the war.

Sonic booms and U2's

The Valley played a crucial role in the Cold War. No doubt many nuclear warheads pointed its way. Burbank Airport was home to Lockheed's secret Skunk Works, where the U2 spy plane and other war birds were hatched. Residents in the 1950s and '60s had to put up with sonic booms that shattered windows ands frazzled nerves, the product of test flights. The west Valley endured for more than a decade the roar and lit-up skyline of nighttime rocket tests at Rocketdyne's Santa Susana Field Lab, which also was used for experiments with nuclear reactors. Nike missile batteries were visible along Victory Boulevard and on Oat Mountain above Chatsworth.