Woody and Buzz: Landscape Motifs in the San Fernando Valley

The following is an excerpt from LAtitudes: An Angeleno's Atlas, published by Heyday and featuring maps and essays that offer fresh insights into a city that brims with complexity and surprise, revealing its multiple histories, the nuances of its lived experiences, and the possibilities inherent in an ever-shifting world. You can purchase the book here or from your local independent bookseller.

Allusions to cowboys and spacemen are deeply encoded into San Fernando Valley's residential, commercial, and industrial landscape; the gun-slinging past and rocket-ship future imagined by Cold War-era Valley residents are still etched in the environment today, selling everything from alcohol to used cars to insurance. The Valley's center-less surface grid inspired this map maze, offering playful (and intersecting) traversals from two "cowboy" sites, the equestrian-friendly Stetson Park Ranch and the restaurant Sagebrush Cantina, and two "spaceman" sites, a former Boeing field laboratory and Lockheed's Skunk Works, where classified aviation work continues to this day.

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When my kids were toddlers, they loved watching the computer-animated feature "Toy Story." For those who haven't seen it, "Toy Story" recounts the adventures of a group of toys, who, when no humans were around, would come to life. It is a brilliant storytelling device that no doubt confirms the imaginative suspicions little kids have regarding their toys. "Toy Story" is largely a "buddy tale" in which rival toys, a cowboy doll named Woody and a spaceman action figure named Buzz Lightyear, become fast friends after a series of thrilling journeys across town. It occurred to me shortly after I moved my family to Los Angeles in 2003 that Woody and Buzz provide excellent metaphors for exploring the landscape of America's classic postwar suburb, the San Fernando Valley. Cowboys and spacemen are everywhere in the Valley: the former evoke a romanticized past and the latter a romanticized future as dreamed by those living in the 1950s and '60s. Over and over, Woody and Buzz -- and their tensions and ultimate similarities -- tell the story of the Valley during its adolescence, narrating a story about past and future as they were understood during the Cold War. Other places in the United States also feature cowboys-and-spacemen landscape motifs; Houston, Roswell, Area 51, even other parts of L.A. come to mind, but no location anywhere matches the San Fernando Valley in terms of the sheer volume and intensity of this iconic and ironic imagery. Today, though, one wonders if their tale can be heard, or even be understood, in the cacophony of the postmodern landscape crowding around, slowly displacing or rendering illegible their once hegemonic dualism.

Woodyland: America's Suburban Cowtown

Cowboy iconography is deeply woven into both the domestic and commercial landscape of the San Fernando Valley. Loads of businesses leverage Western terminology to sell products, like "Mustang Liquor" in Canoga Park, or the "Silver Saddle Motel" in North Hollywood. Many signs around the Valley are painted in "rural" paint schemes, or feature the one of dozens of variants of "Old West" fonts -- even on plastic backlit signs. In the Valley, it's still easy to find huge neon-framed cowboy hat signs in front of Arby's restaurants. They are rare elsewhere in the U.S. Developers have built entire neighborhoods with fake cowboy themes, complete with street names like "Stagecoach Road," "Silverspur Lane," and "Wrangler Court." Some of it is kitsch, some of it is just dated, but the recently reconstructed gateway entry arch to the hyper-exclusive Hidden Hills neighborhood at the western end of the Valley still features a cowboy. Cowboy rusticity is one of America's favorite motifs: it's quintessentially American, especially as it was framed by Hollywood. We Americans like to think of ourselves as rugged, individualistic, independent, and competent, and our desire to craft this self-image has been heightened by the emasculating effects of living in a densely packed urban area. The astounding success of the Marlboro Man marketing campaign in the late twentieth century stands testament to the power of that imagery. The extraordinary popularity of this imagery in the San Fernando Valley may have been a product of the way land developers marketed the Valley as a wholesome, rural escape from the perceived dangers rapidly integrating postwar inner cities.

Unlike, for example, the cultural messages at play in King Arthur Liquor, cowboy iconography is rooted in this place: cowboys have an exceptionally long history in the San Fernando Valley. Francisco Reyes, a former alcalde of Los Angeles, established Rancho Los Encinos, a massive cattle-grazing venture during the 1780s to go alongside several other hide and tallow operations on Spanish land grants in the Valley. For nearly two centuries, the Valley would remain a largely agricultural realm, complete with cowboys on dusty horses. When Mulholland brought water to the Valley in 1913, it was clear to many that homes and small farms would eventually replace sprawling ranchlands, but it wasn't until the after World War II that the threat became reality.

Before the war ended, Bing Crosby unintentionally initiated the first major marketing effort to snuff out Valley cowboys and replace them with suburbanites when he sang dreamily about the charms of the rustic lifestyle of the Valley in his number one hit, "San Fernando Valley." One of the verses goes:

While Crosby was singing about loping around the Valley on a lazy horse, engineers in Nazi Germany were quickly advancing the science of rocketry in an effort to rain death across Europe. The shocking contrasts between the comforting imagery of a pre-modern rural lifestyle and the horrific potential of modern science unfolded vividly in the Valley during the war years as well. At the beginning of the war, only around 150,000 folks lived in the entire Valley. There were dozens of working cattle ranches, hundreds of small farms, and places like Van Nuys and Canoga Park were still considered "farm towns." Many Valley residents didn't even realize they were citizens of Los Angeles. Few streets were paved. Sewers were generally nonexistent. It was rural.

Buzzland: Rocket City USA

Nearly as ubiquitous as Western motifs in the San Fernando Valley are landscapes evocative of astronauts and planetary travel. Space Needles, starbursts, chevrons, UFOs, early satellites are incorporated into hundreds of signs used by retailers and service providers. You can get your automobile cleaned at "Galaxy Car Wash" in Valley Village, take martial arts lessons at "10th Planet Jiu Jitsu" in Van Nuys, and buy candy at "Rocket Fizz" in various locations in the Valley. Fry's electronics in Burbank, near the site of the old Lockheed Skunk Works factory, carries the motif furthest by incorporating a "crashed" UFO into the facade of the building. The interior of the building pays homage to 1950s era sci-fi movies and space invasion hysteria. It's no wonder that Spielberg set E.T. in the San Fernando Valley.

These spacey landscapes were even more common a generation ago. Space motifs signaled to passersby the promise of a bright shiny happy future, free from the hassles of work, illness, grief, and even dirt. Futurescapes began popping up during the Great Depression mostly in Art Deco buildings, which frequently leveraged machine imagery, streamliners and steam liners, to evoke a hygienic world of tomorrow. The ebullient optimism of 1930s Art Deco evolved as designers adopted jet aircraft and rockets as the latest-and-greatest iconography of the future. For thousands of young Valley families, living in brand-new homes full of miraculous home appliances, sprawled across a brand-new suburb, the unbounded promise of the future was no doubt easy to imagine. For the business community, the metaphor of space was easy to leverage for profit, even if World War II had taken some of the shine off the imagery of the machine age.

The imagery of space was especially salient in the Valley during the Cold War because here is where much of the machinery of the space age was designed and built. Even while the region was primarily dusty ranch land, several of the world's most high-tech factories and research facilities were operating in the Valley. Prime among them were Lockheed (still today one of the largest defense contractors in the world) headquartered in Burbank, and Rocketdyne/Atomics International out in the western end of the Valley. After the war, the promise of good jobs in defense industries and affordable suburban housing attracted thousands of veterans and their sweethearts to the Valley. Within a decade, many, especially those working on rocketry and jet aircraft, found their wartime-defense industry jobs had evolved into longer-term careers in the aerospace industry. Thousands more moved in. By 1950, the population of the Valley had topped 400,000, making the Valley one of the top ten most populated "cities" in the US, and perhaps the top city for space-industry jobs. The landscape that emerged from this high-tech-city-on-a-dusty-ranch is one of deep irony and cartoonish frivolity.

Old West, the Outer Rim, and the Ironies of the Age

Perhaps only in the 1950s San Fernando Valley could you so readily find factories full of rocket scientists springing up among sprawling ranchlands. Cowboys and spacemen worked and lived in the Valley alongside each other for decades. The spatial juxtaposition of the Old West and the Outer Rim was intense during the 1950s. Consider, for example, that Rocketdyne, the designer and manufacturer of the rockets that both put Russia in peril, and Americans into space and onto the moon, was established in 1949 in sleepy Canoga Park. Just a few blocks down the street, employees of Rocketdyne or their children could take classes on animal husbandry at the newly opened Pierce Agricultural College. Across the Valley, Lockheed's infamous Advanced Development Projects division, affectionately known as the "Skunk Works," developed the U2 spy plane, the rocket-shaped Woody and Buzz 111 F-104 Starfighter, the Mach 3-capable SR-71 Blackbird, and later the F-117 Nighthawk stealth bomber. Just blocks from the Skunk Works was the seventy-five-acre Los Angeles Equestrian Center, where rodeos and barrel racing continue to this day. In 1955, Atomics International (a division of North American Aviation) began setting up shop alongside Rocketdyne in the Simi Hills at the west end of the Valley. It was there that nuclear power production was first commercialized in 1957. Two years later, it was the site of the first partial nuclear meltdown, a secret kept from everyone for decades, including the cast and crew of the TV series "Gunsmoke" being filmed just a quick mule ride away in Box Canyon. Today, Pioneer Street runs through the middle of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which overlooks the Flintridge Riding Club on the eastern rim of the Valley.

Valley historian Kevin Roderick notes that during the Cold War, nine out of ten of the biggest manufacturers in the Valley were defense contractors. They included, in addition to Lockheed and Rocketdyne, Litton Systems (later Northrop Grumman), Bendix, RCA, Marquardt, and Radioplane, among others. Still, the Valley clung to its Western-themed past. G. Henry Stetson, the cowboy-hat impresario, still operated the huge Rancho Sombrero, part of which is now Stetson Ranch Park in Sylmar. Nudie Cohn, the tailor to the most famous cowboys and cowboy wannabes in the nation for forty years, ran his shop on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood. There was a cowboy theme park in the Santa Susanna Pass operated by B-Western legend Ray "Crash" Corrigan. Looking down on the park no doubt were soldiers stationed at the Nike missile batteries on Oat Mountain. The intended target of the Nike missiles was a Soviet bomber called "The Bison." Even the Soviets were playing along. Straddling both sides of the cowboy-spaceman divide was J. D. Hertz, owner of the car rental company. He raised world-class thoroughbreds in Woodland Hills on his spread called Amarillo Ranch, while his foundation supported research in ballistic missile systems. Perhaps this strange hybridization of past and future was perfectly captured by the epigrammatic ode to Rocketdyne sang by Valley school kids to the tune of the campfire standard "My Darling Clementine" (also a John Ford Western movie):

Of all the landscapes that capture the duality of cowboys and spacemen, the ever-present ranch-style home is most noteworthy. I live in one. Every house on my street is a ranch. Built largely in the twenty years following World War II, the ranch-style home seems the perfect domestic setting for the San Fernando Valley. Ranches built during the 1950s were built to appeal to suburban cowboys and cowgirls. Board and batten siding, weathered brick chimneys (largely useless), and fieldstones were common design elements. Built largely in a sprawling L or U shape, with large glass doors at the back of the home, single-story ranch homes directed families to spend time out-of-doors, even if it was only in the backyard. Here Dad could make a proper cowboy dinner (steak and beans?). At the same time, the design of the ranch directed family life away from the streets or front porches that marked the communal, anti-cowboy qualities of life back East, or even in L.A. proper. Ranches were in many ways an adaptation of the Spanish/Mexican adobe rancho, but refashioned to appeal to a generation raised on Hollywood Westerns.

Merry Ovnick argues compellingly that the ranch-style home was well suited to house "GI Joe" and "Rosie the Riveter" who wished to settle down in a safe location. To anyone who witnessed the horrors of Iwo Jima, Utah Beach, or the Ardennes Forest, a little ranch house on a sleepy suburban street in the Valley provided servicemen back home from the war a cozy and safe domestic space without sacrificing their masculinity. Ranches were safe and secure, but not too emasculating. Women, also having contributed mightily to the war effort, especially in the Valley, building, among other weapons, the deadly P-38s, also probably found the ranch a suitable homestead, one that permitted some room to explore their newly won, yet still modest expansion of their gender role. Both cowboys and cowgirls no doubt found the ranch an appealing stage upon which to live out their Hollywood-inspired rides into the sunset.

The great paradox underlying the notion of Woody's ranch home as a sanctuary from the memories of the war years was that Buzz's rockets and jet fighters were largely what folks in the San Fernando Valley built while at work away from their cozy ranch homes. The hundreds of war factories were largely the reason so many job seekers flocked to the Valley, in turn boosting land values and in time laying waste to the ranch culture that had originally inspired the appealing home-on-the range lifestyle. The presence of so many critical elements of America's war-fighting machinery in the Valley also darkened the clouds of nuclear terror over the sea of ranch homes. The Valley was surely high on the list of Soviet nuclear targets. As a result, thousands built fallout shelters in their backyards. Air raid sirens wailed on Fridays, a haunting reminder that Woody was never safe from Buzz's future gone mad.

Despite the deep antithesis of Woody and Buzz and the threat that the latter would displace the former, the characters were in many ways two sides of the same coin. Buzz's catch phrase was "To infinity and beyond!" but he never really escaped the gravity of American cultural norms that bound Woody to the ground. The spaceman narrative in both "Toy Story" and on the landscape of the San Fernando Valley is little more than a spin-off of the classic Western meme, just reset in an interplanetary Wild West. Buzz Lightyear was, after all, a "Space Ranger." Unable to properly fashion a character from new cloth, Americans simply traded white hats and chaps for white helmets and spacesuits. The spaceman remained hypermasculine, white, gender certain, and paternalistic throughout the Cold War. The iconography of spacemen integrated seamlessly into the Western landscape narrative of the Valley in the 1950s. Woody and Buzz were brothers after all.

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Celebrate the publication of LAtitudes with the contributors this Sunday, May 5 at 4 p.m. with a walking tour and launch party. More details here.