The city of Burbank is 12 miles (19 km) northwest of Downtown Los Angeles. The population at the 2010 census was 103,340. It is surrounded by Glendale to the east, North Hollywood to the west, Sun Valley to the North, and Hollywood to the south.  Cultural icon Johnny Carson, the late-night talk show host from the classical era of television, drove himself from Malibu to Burbank each weekday morning. Carson did that daily commute for decades.  Everyday, thousands of entertainment industry professionals brave the commute from Los Angeles to Burbank, dodging bumper-to-bumper traffic and a nightmarish 101. With Warner Bros, NBC, ABC, and The Walt Disney Company all located in Burbank, your commute to your fancy industry job is just a few minutes away.

Billed as the “Media Capital of the World” and only a few miles northeast of Hollywood, numerous media and entertainment companies are headquartered or have significant production facilities in Burbank, including Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros. Entertainment, Nickelodeon Animation Studios, The Burbank Studios, Cartoon Network Studios with the West Coast branch of Cartoon Network, and Insomniac Games. The city is also home to Hollywood Burbank Airport, previously known as Bob Hope Airport. It was the location of Lockheed’s Skunk Works, which produced some of the most secret and technologically advanced airplanes, including the U-2 spy planes that uncovered the Soviet Union missile components in Cuba in October 1962.

The city of Burbank occupies land that was originally part of two Spanish and Mexican-era colonial land grants, the 36,400-acre (147 km²) Rancho San Rafael, granted to Jose Maria Verdugo by the Spanish Bourbon government in 1784, and the 4,063-acre (16.44 km²) Rancho Providencia created in 1821. Historically, this area was the scene of a military skirmish which resulted in the unseating of the Spanish Governor of California, and his replacement by the Mexican leader Pio Pico. Remnants of the military battle reportedly were found many years later in the vicinity of Warner Bros. Studio when residents dug up cannonballs.

Dr. David Burbank purchased over 4,600 acres (19 km²) of the former Verdugo holding and another 4,600 acres (19 km²) of the Rancho Providencia in 1867 and built a ranch house and began to raise sheep and grow wheat on the ranch. By 1876, the San Fernando Valley became the largest wheat-raising area in Los Angeles County. But the droughts of the 1860s and 1870s underlined the need for steady water supplies.

When the area that became Burbank was settled in the 1870s and 1880s, the streets were aligned along what is now Olive Avenue, the road to the Cahuenga Pass and downtown Los Angeles. These were largely the roads the Native Americans traveled and the early settlers took their produce down to Los Angeles to sell and to buy supplies along these routes.

History abstract above is courtesy of the City of Wikipedia.

Popular Home Searches