Tag Archives: Lankershim Ranch

“An Early Map of the San Fernando Valley”

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This map (undated: 1910?) makes clear how the “Old Spanish Grants” in the San Fernando Valley got broken down into subdivisions. The names “Lankershim” and “MacLay” and “Porter” ignore the fact that the original Castillian grant, of lands (but not waters) to be controlled (but not owned) by the Mission, was on behalf of the Tongva and Tataviam people of the Valley. This map shows how the Californios skipped over the Indians, but asserted Mission land rights for themselves, only to sell them to various Yankees at bankruptcy prices.

N.B.: The land that became Valley Village lies between the deathly fingers of the pre-concretized Tujunga Wash, and the hungry snake of the pre-concretized Los Angeles River. The confluence explains why there was no development here, except for orchards, until 1949. This part of North Hollywood was just too flood-prone. until after construction of Hansen Dam.

(Valley Village, by the way, was the district that put the peaches in the City of Lankershim’s epithet, “Land of the Peach.” Before 1940, the orchards here were frequently inundated by Tujunga floods.)

Pico House, the old grand hotel on the Los Angeles Plaza. Though it appears beautifully renovated on the outside, it seems that in the late eighties or early nineties, the interior re-modeling they did was such a disaster, that the Parks Dept. simply padlocked the door, painted up the exterior, and walked away whistling….as if a great desecration hadn’t been committed upon their watch.  

How awful could it be, that we can’t even see inside?  I imagine saloon frescoes ripped out, and drywall put in; elegant stairs with curved bannisters replaced by steel-pole access ramps; plasterwork pulverized to fit cottage-cheese acoustical tiles; Victorian fixtures thrown away; Persian rugs and redwood floors junked for teal-and-pink “Santa Fe” wall-to-wall carpeting…

Pico’s own casa on the Plaza was just across the alley to the left. The hotel lot originally held the large adobe casa of the Carrillo family. (The families were tempestuous, and had occasionally tempestuous relations. It can’t have been easy to live next door to the Picos, or the Carrillos, or indeed, in early LA at all.)  
Col. Ord, in his 1850 survey of Los Angeles, took the front left corner of the Carrillo adobe, thus, the pillar at the far right in this picture of Pico House, as the center of the Ciudad.  

In 1869, Pico finally got the money to buy out his neighbors’ town house when he sold his half of the San Fernando Valley to Isaac Lankershim. Just as in Monopoly, Pico’s bid to concentrate capital by putting a Hotel on the Plaza’s prime corner, upped the pace of the game of LA Wheel Estate considerably.

(Interestingly, in this case, it virtually closed off the Plaza to further development – if it was expensive to be on the Plaza, land just to the south was much cheaper. The historic Pueblo thus might have been  both doomed, and saved, by Pico House.)