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The San Fernando Valley or, simply, The Valley, is an urbanized valley in southern California.
The San Fernando Valley is bounded by the Santa Susana Mountains to the northwest, The Simi Hills to the west, the Santa Monica Mountains to the south, the Verdugo Hills to the east, and the San Gabriel Mountains to the northeast. Most of the San Fernando Valley is within the City of Los Angeles, California, although several smaller cities are within the Valley as well; Burbank and Glendale are in the southeast corner of the Valley, Hidden Hills and Calabasas are in the southwest corner, and San Fernando, which is completely surrounded by the City of Los Angeles, is in the north Valley. Mulholland Drive, which runs along the ridgeline of the Santa Monica Mountains, marks the boundary between the Valley and the communities of Hollywood and Los Angeles' westside.
Valley communities within the City of Los Angeles include Arleta, Canoga Park, Chatsworth, Encino, Granada Hills, North Hollywood, Northridge, Pacoima, Studio City, Sherman Oaks, Sun Valley, Sylmar, Tujunga, Tarzana, Van Nuys, Winnetka and Woodland Hills. Los Angeles' administrative center for the Valley is in Van Nuys. The Valley community of Northridge was the epicenter of a large 1994 earthquake and is home to California State University Northridge.
The Valley is home to numerous industries the most well-known of which include those involved in motion pictures, recording, and television production (including CBS Studio Center, NBC, Universal Studios, Walt Disney Pictures, and Warner Brothers Studios). The Valley is also home to a multi-million dollar pornography industry.
The Valley shares Los Angeles's dry, sunny weather, but is usually hotter and has more smog.
The Valley's first known inhabitants were the Native American Tongva, later called Gabrieleno. The Mission San Fernando Rey de España was founded September 8, 1797 by Spanish Padre Fermin Francisco de Lasuén, and most of the Valley's land was granted to the Mission. The Tongva were attached to the Mission, and mostly forced to abandon their villages and religion to live and work at the Mission. The Valley, together with the rest of California, was part of the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Spain, and the El Camino Real, the road connecting California's Spanish missions, ran through the Valley, approximately along the route of Ventura Boulevard. California became part of Mexico upon its independence from Spain in 1821, and the former Mission lands were granted to Mexican families. California became part of the United States in 1848.
During the Spanish, Mexican, and early American periods, the Valley was lightly populated, and its main occupations were dry wheat farming and ranching. Because of the lack of water in the summer, more intensive forms of agriculture weren't feasible. All of that changed in 1913, when the City of Los Angeles built the Los Angeles Aqueduct to bring water from the Owens Valley. The Valley, although mostly rural, was annexed to the city of Los Angeles, and the irrigation water provided by the aqueduct allowed the Valley to become one of the most productive agricutural regions in the world, with orchards, including citrus, and truck farming.
The agricultural boom ended as the Valley urbanized. The southeast and central portion of the Valley was developed as streetcar suburbs after 1920, and subdivision of the valley's farms and orchards into housing tracts accelerated after the end of the Second World War. Most of the Valley floor, including the west Valley and north Valley, was developed in the 1950-1960 period. After 1960, the construction industry began to use larger earthmoving equipment that facilitated tract home development on hillsides, and subdivisions began to climb higher into the Santa Susana, Santa Monica, and Verdugo Mountains and the Simi Hills. The enormous Porter Ranch development on the southern slopes of the Santa Susana Mountains is the Valley's largest hillside development, and further phases of the development are under construction or planned.
Before the 1960s, it was the unspoken custom of Valley realtors not to sell homes to African-Americans, then living mostly in the Los Angeles basin. After the Civil Rights movement took hold, this custom faded.
Although the Valley is part of Los Angeles, its development pattern is almost exclusively suburban, and the automobile is the dominant mode of transport. Several freeways criss-cross the Valley. Despite the dominance of the automobile, the Valley has two subway stations, in Universal City and North Hollywood, which opened in 2000 as an extension of the Metro Red Line Subway connecting the Valley to Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles. An east-west Bus Rapid Transit line is under construction in mid-2004, which will connect the North Hollywood Metro station to Warner Center in the west Valley. Two commuter rail lines connect the Valley to downtown Los Angeles, and an express bus line operates on Ventura Boulevard, with more express bus lines being planned for other routes across the Valley.
In the past decade, many large tracts of undeveloped or ranch lands in the mountains surrounding the Valley have been acquired for parkland. The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and its affiliated agencies have purchased or otherwise acquired many of these lands, which are maintained as parkland by the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, California State Parks, or local parks districts. In 2003 the Ahmanson Ranch, a 2,983 acre (12 km²) property in Ventura County at the west end of the Valley, was purchased by the State of California, and dedicated as the Upper Las Virgenes Canyon Open Space Preserve on April 10, 2004.
In 2002, Los Angeles residents defeated a proposal under which the Valley would have seceded from the City of Los Angeles. Opponents claimed that secession was motivated by racist and class-based factors, despite the fact that the ethnic composition of the Valley does not much differ from the rest of the city (other than having a somewhat smaller African-American population), and the Valley suffers from the same problems of poverty, crime, drug and gang activity as the rest of the city. Ultimately, the economics of forming a new city defeated the proposal.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Valley Girl (1983), Safe (1995) Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), Punch-Drunk Love (2002), Two Days In The Valley (1996), The Karate Kid (1984), and its sequels were all filmed and set in the Valley. (See also: List of movies set in Los Angeles). The alleged lifestyles of Valley teens in the 1980s, and their alleged slang (Valspeak), were satirized in the Moon Unit Zappa (daughter of Frank Zappa) song "Valley Girl" (Example: "Like, grody to the max!") Bing Crosby had a #1 hit in 1944 called "The San Fernando Valley" written by Gordon Jenkins.
Glossary of Valspeak
| Valspeak | English |
| Airhead | An intellectual lightweight (e.g. a Valley Girl). |
| Awesome | Not quite "tubular" |
| Barf bag | Jerk |
| Fer sure! | Certainly. |
| Gag me with a spoon! | That's disgusting. |
| Gnarly | Good |
| Grody | Disgusting (e.g. "grody to the max") |
| I'm so sure! | I don't believe you. |
| Joanie | Unhip girl (from the Joanie Cunningham character on Happy Days) |
| Like, Omigod! | I'm surprised. |
| Psych! | Just kidding |
| Rad | Very cool |
| Sketchy | Bad |
| To the max | More of the previous adjective (e.g. "grody to the max") |
| Totally | Completely |
| Tubular | Awesomely cool |
| UVs | Sunshine. ("I'm heading down to the beach to get some UVs.") |
| Val | Valley Girl |
| Veg (out) | To rest. |
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