The boulevard, then and now
250 years on one street.
A mission trail, a stagecoach stop, a trout farm, a movie lot, a mall with its own hit single, and the restaurants that outlived all of it. 13 stops, oldest first. Every one is sourced.
1700s
Before it was a boulevard, it was the road.
Ventura Blvd follows the line of El Camino Real, the trail that strung the Spanish missions together. That makes it one of the oldest roads in the Valley. Every bell you see on a hooked post marks the route.
1849
An adobe by a spring in Encino.
Vicente de la Osa built a nine-room adobe beside a natural spring at Rancho Los Encinos, and travelers on the road stopped there for the night. From 1858 it was a Butterfield stage stop. The adobe, the spring and the pond are still there, just off the boulevard at Los Encinos State Historic Park.
Still hereSource: California Office of Historic Preservation
1880s
People drove out here to catch trout.
The ponds in Studio City drew anglers as early as the 1880s. By the 1910s they were Hollywood Trout Farms, and by the 1940s the Sportsmen's Lodge, where the Valley went for weddings and prime rib. The event center came down in 2020; the hotel stayed.
Gone, not forgottenSource: Los Angeles Conservancy
1919
Tarzan buys a ranch.
Edgar Rice Burroughs bought the old Otis ranch in the hills south of the boulevard and named it Tarzana, after the character that made him rich. The ranch failed, he subdivided it, and in 1928 residents voted to keep the name for the town.
1927
A movie lot names a neighborhood.
Mack Sennett broke ground on a studio at Ventura and Radford, and the farmland around it became Studio City. The lot is still shooting, as Radford Studio Center. The same year, Moses Sherman's syndicate was carving up Sherman Oaks next door.
Still hereSource: Studio City, Wikipedia
1948
Du-par's, 70 years of pancakes.
Du-par's opened at 12036 Ventura Blvd in 1948 and poured coffee until New Year's Day 2018. The corner is a Sephora now. If you ate a short stack there at 2am, you were part of the boulevard.
Gone, not forgottenSource: Martin Turnbull, Du-par's Studio City
1950s
This was the 101.
Until the Ventura Freeway opened alongside it, the boulevard was US Route 101, the main road from Los Angeles to Ventura. Every car heading up the coast came down this street. The freeway took the through traffic. The boulevard kept the restaurants.
1956
Casa Vega turns the lights down.
The Vega family, who had run a restaurant on Olvera Street, opened Casa Vega in Sherman Oaks in 1956. The James Beard Foundation named it one of America's Classics in 2022, and in 2026 the city named the corner of Ventura and Fulton Vega Square. Same booths. Still open.
Still hereSource: Los Angeles Magazine
1957
Art buys a ten-foot-wide deli.
Art Ginsburg bought a 28-seat Studio City eatery with $3,000 and his family's recipes on June 22, 1957. A fire after the 1994 Northridge quake closed it for nine months. It came back bigger, and his kids run it today.
1982
The Galleria goes to the movies.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High shot its mall scenes overnight, 9pm to 9am, at the Sherman Oaks Galleria at Ventura and Sepulveda. That summer Moon Zappa's Galleria slang became Valley Girl, her father Frank's only Top 40 hit. The indoor mall closed in 1999; the name lives on the open-air center that replaced it.
Gone, not forgottenSource: AFI Catalog, Fast Times at Ridgemont High
1982
Billie Jean, written on fire.
Michael Jackson wrote in Moonwalk that he was riding the Ventura Freeway, the 101 that shadows the boulevard, so deep in Billie Jean that he didn't notice the Rolls-Royce was on fire until a kid on a motorcycle flagged him down. They got out, the car didn't, and the song kept going in his head.
1989
Free Fallin' puts the street in a chorus.
Tom Petty's biggest song is a map of the Valley: a long day in Reseda, a glide over Mulholland, the 101, and the Valley's vampires heading west down Ventura Boulevard. Decades later people still sing the boulevard's name at the top of their lungs.
Now
16.5 miles. One tap.
From Valley Circle in Woodland Hills to Lankershim in Studio City, where it turns into Cahuenga and climbs the pass to Hollywood. Five neighborhoods, a few hundred places to eat, and one red button that picks for you.
Still here
The old-timers.
Places on the blvd by the year they opened. Tap one to go.