Tarzana was "created" when
Edgar Rice Burroughs bought 540 acres for a
country house in the
San Fernando Valley in the foothills of the
Santa Monica Mountains. This was way back on March 1, 1919, 7 years after Burroughs wrote his first
Tarzan story. The small town
surrounding Burroughs's
ranch was
petitioning for a
post-office, something they had long needed, but they needed an
official name and Tarzana was
voted in. By december of 1930 they had their post-office.And through the rest of the 1930's Tarzana was known as the "
Heart of Ventura Boulevard". Tarzana grew then only very slightly during the 30's and 40's but with a
post-war boom it slowly began to lose it's
farms and create small
homes and
apartment buildings.
Ok,
funny story. I live in one of those apartment buildings in Tazana, and I was over in the
local library the other day and was surprised to find that
the Tarzana library had no books about Tarzan. So I contacted
Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. or something and they took care of it, loading up the library with a
complete collection of
Tarzan books.
Back to history. Tarzana is one of the
oldest communities in the San Fernando Valley (if you've ever heard someone use the term "valley girl", that's it). In 1769 Tarzana was the second community
Gaspar de Portola (the first
white guy in the valley)passed through. Then some
Fransiscan Missionaries turned it into part of their mission land. Tarzana was even built on
El Camino Real (it's now
Ventura Boulevard).
Nowadays, Tarzana's pretty big. The odd part is, half of it is really nice with a bunch of huge
mansions and
country clubs, and then the other side is like a
ghetto with
gangsters and
shootings and
drug dealers and
crap. Too bad I live on the
gangster side. I guess it's all part of being in
LA.
And yes
Deborah909 was right. It is named after
Tarzan.