VENTURA BOULEVARD: IN EXILE ON AMERICA'S MAIN STREET
Ventura Boulevard: In Exile on America’s Main Street
Ventura Boulevard at 18 miles is the longest contiguous street of commercial businesses in America. Ventura Boulevard begins near Calabasas in Woodland Hills and travels east through Tarzana, Encino, and Sherman Oaks before intersecting with Lankershim Boulevard in Studio City, where it becomes Cahuenga Boulevard and winds through Cahuenga Pass into Hollywood.
It has always been the most concentrated location for small businesses and shops in the Valley, which features pockets of housing, mini-malls, and shops, along with a wide assortment of businesses, schools, and other establishments.
Ventura Boulevard has long served as a test kitchen for corporations exploring new franchises and as a rule, if it works three times on Ventura, it will work anywhere in the US.
How you pronounce Ventura when you speak it aloud immediately identifies you as a native Southern Californian or an outsider. A Midwesterner, myself, I say “Ven-SHOO-ra” while natives say Ven-TOO-ra” giving me away as soon as I open my mouth.
I was a film and tv location scout and photographer from 1995-2000 and often worked for a small film production company on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City. Working on tv and film productions we found and permitted film locations up and down the boulevard.
Celebrated architects and social critics Denise Scott Brown and Robert Ventura once celebrated America’s vernacular architecture in “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture” a case study of 1970s Las Vegas. I believe today’s Ventura Boulevard is a similarly helpful social landscape as a visual laboratory to observe America’s contemporary social landscape of diversity and difference.
IN the 1920s, the strip served auto-oriented Angelenos who were eager to shop at the many mom and pop shops along the route, which featured ample and convenient car parking. By the 1980s, the strip featured the Sherman Oaks Galleria, one of the premier Malls in the US, and a focus of 1980s hit films like “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (1982) and “Valley Girl” (1983). The 1982 cult classic pop-hit “Valley Girl” featuring the lyrics “On Ventura… There she goes… She just bought some bitchin' clothes” becomes a cultural phenomenon celebrating the local shopping experience.
In the 2020s, after the COVID interruption, the boulevard’s stature as a shopping destination seemed much less sure. These photos capture that time and beg the question “What will happen to Ventura Boulevard and other physical shopping places in the US in an era that online shopping is quickly becoming a primary option?