Suburban Restaurants as Evolving Suburban Anchors: The Sportsmen’s Lodge, Ventura Boulevard, and the Growth of Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley

Abstract

Examining the historical evolution of the Sportsmen’s Lodge, a restaurant and banquet facility located on Ventura Boulevard in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, this essay argues that suburban restaurants have served as vital “suburban anchors” facilitating suburban growth and place-making. Established in the 1920s as a recreational fishing concession for the film industry, the Sportsmen’s Lodge expanded to become a renowned restaurant and banquet hall by the 1940s. Its facilities were used not only for social gatherings among politically conservative white homeowners, but also for business meetings where attendees strategized for the suburban region’s growth. Ironically, their success in recruiting suburban industry and infrastructure produced an increasingly dense and diverse suburban landscape in which the Sportsmen’s Lodge’s itself ultimately became obsolete. The Lodge’s recent demolition and redevelopment as a mixed-use retail complex signals the multiple purposes fulfilled by suburban restaurants, while highlighting the limits to their evolution in diversifying suburbs.