Before annexation North Hollywood was once part of the vast landholdings of the
Mission San Fernando Rey de España, which was confiscated by the government during the Mexican period of rule. A group of investors assembled as the San Fernando Farm Homestead Association purchased the southern half of the
Rancho Ex-Mission San Fernando. The leading investor was
Isaac Lankershim, a Northern California stockman and grain farmer, who was impressed by the Valley's wild oats and proposed to raise sheep on the property. In 1873, Isaac Lankershim's son and future son-in-law,
James Boon Lankershim and
Isaac Newton Van Nuys, moved to the San Fernando Valley and took over management of the property. Van Nuys thought the property could profitably grow wheat using the
dryland farming technique developed on the
Great Plains and leased land from the Association to test his theories. In time, the Lankershim property, under its third name, the Los Angeles Farming and Milling Company, would become the world's largest wheat-growing empire. In October 1887, J.B. Lankershim and eight other developers organized the Lankershim Ranch Land and Water Company, purchasing north of the Cahuenga Pass from the Lankershim Farming and Milling Company. Lankershim established a townsite which the residents named Toluca along the old road from
Cahuenga Pass to
San Fernando. On April 1, 1888, they offered ready-made small farms for sale, already planted with deep-rooted deciduous fruit and nut trees—mostly peaches, pears, apricots, and walnuts—that could survive the rainless summers of the Valley by relying on the high
water table along the
Tujunga Wash rather than surface irrigation. The land boom of the 1880s went bust by the 1890s, but despite another brutal drought cycle in the late 1890s, the fruit and nut farmers remained solvent. The Toluca Fruit Growers Association was formed in 1894. The next year the Southern Pacific opened a branch line slanting northwest across the Valley to
Chatsworth. The Chatsworth Limited made one freight stop a day at Toluca, though the depot bore the new name of Lankershim. With the post office across the street being called Toluca, controversy over the town's name continued, and the local ranchers used to quip, "Ship the merchandise to Lankershim, but bill it to Toluca." In 1896, under pressure from Lankershim, the post office at Toluca was renamed "Lankershim" after his father, although the new name of the town would not be officially recognized until 1905. By 1903, the area was known as "The Home of the Peach". In 1912, the area's major employer, the Bonner Fruit Company, was canning over a million tons of peaches, apricots, and other fruits. When the
Los Angeles Aqueduct opened in 1913, Valley farmers offered to buy the surplus water, but the federal legislation that enabled the construction of the aqueduct prohibited Los Angeles from selling the water outside of the city limits. At first, resistance to the real-estate development and downtown business interests of Los Angeles remained strong enough to keep the small farmers unified in opposition to annexation. However, the fruit packing company interests were taken over by the Los Angeles interests. The two conspired to decrease prices and mitigate the farmers' profit margins, making their continued existence tenuous. When droughts hit the valley again, rather than face foreclosure, the most vulnerable farmers agreed to mortgage their holdings to the fruit packing company and banks in Los Angeles for the immediate future and vote on annexation.
Annexation to Los Angeles West Lankershim agreed to be annexed to the City of Los Angeles in 1919. Lankershim proper and non-proper joined in 1923. Much of the promised water delivery was withheld, and many of the ranchers one by one had their holding foreclosed or transferred to the packing companies. In turn, these were bought up by the real-estate developers and by the late 1920s a massive effort was underway to market the area to prospective home owners throughout the country. As part of this effort, in 1927, in an effort to capitalize on the glamour and proximity of Hollywood, Lankershim was renamed "North Hollywood". There were also branches of the large
Harris & Frank clothing chain at 5236 Lankershim that opened in 1950,
J. J. Newberry five and dime at 5321, and
Safeway at 5356. In the late 1940s and 1950s the area saw the first department-store-anchored, auto-oriented shopping center in the Valley:
Valley Plaza, covering both a development at Laurel Canyon at Victory boulevards but also a loose collection of other retail stores south along Laurel Canyon to Oxnard, including a branch of the
May Co., the second-largest suburban department store branch in the U.S. at the time. In the mid-1950s Valley Plaza claimed to be the largest shopping center on the
West Coast of the United States and the third-largest in the country. The May Co. at the south end of the Valley Plaza shopping district built its own attached, enclosed mall,
Laurel Plaza, opening in 1968. The last department of Valley Plaza's anchors,
Sears, closed in 2019 as department store-anchored shopping centers lost favor. As of 2020, much of the Valley Plaza retail space is either empty, portion is now a middle school, and the Laurel Plaza site is under construction to become the NoHo West
mixed-use development, which includes retail. , built in 1959 in a
Spanish Colonial Revival style.
1950s–present By the late 1950s, many of the original owners were aging, and their children were moving to other areas. School integration in the subsequent years,
blockbusting, and subsequent ethnic turmoil encouraged many remaining families to move out, who in turn were replaced with black and Hispanic families moving from
Central and
South Los Angeles. By the 1990s, the demographic changes had almost completely transformed the region. The
North Hollywood shootout occurred in 1997, leaving 12
Los Angeles Police Department officers and eight civilians injured and the two armed robbers dead.
21st century . The opening of
North Hollywood station in 2000, establishment and success of the
NoHo Arts District in the old "downtown", and repurposing of disused lots such as
Laurel Plaza into NoHo West, has revitalized the heart of North Hollywood. Since 2000, the community has been developing and undergoing many changes, thanks in large part to the formation of the 743-acre North Hollywood Development District and the subsequent NoHo Commons projects. In 2015, Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood was part of the first San Fernando Valley
CicLAvia, an event sponsored by the
Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority in which major roads are temporarily closed to motorized vehicle traffic and used for recreational
human-powered transport.{{cite news ==Geography==