A courthouse and city hall complex sits at one end of Van Nuys Boulevard, with a general aviation airport a few blocks northwest.
What Van Nuys looks like
Three things sit close together in the flat middle of the San Fernando Valley. A government complex holds and the at Sylvan Street and . The boulevard runs north past car dealerships and low, single story storefronts. sits to the northwest.
City Hall is the tallest thing in the government complex, an eight story Art Deco tower finished in 1932 as the Valley Municipal Building. Architect Peter K. Schabarum designed it as a smaller version of downtown Los Angeles's own city hall, in the same stepped shape. Earthquakes in 1971 and 1994 damaged it badly enough that the city council did not meet inside it again until 2005, after a retrofit added underground parking.
The neighborhood was laid out in 1911 and named for rancher Isaac Newton Van Nuys. It was the first stop on the Pacific Electric's rail line into the Valley, and Los Angeles annexed it in 1915.
was one of the Valley's cruising strips, teenagers driving up and down it on weekend nights from the 1950s into the 1970s. The 1979 film Van Nuys Blvd. took its name from that stretch of the street.
The airport opened in 1928 as Metropolitan Airport and took its current name in 1957. It covers 725 acres and handles more than 230,000 takeoffs and landings a year, mostly private and corporate jets. General Motors ran an assembly plant on the boulevard's east side from 1947 to 1992. The site is now , a shopping center with a multiplex.
Films shot in Van Nuys
's tower gets reused as a plain, official government building often enough to be one of the more familiar pieces of civic architecture in Los Angeles. In The Terminator, the title character arms itself at the Alamo Gun Shop, a real gun shop that stood at Victory Boulevard and Tyrone Avenue and is now a used car lot. Major Strasser's arrival in Casablanca was filmed at on July 10, 1942, when the field was still called Metropolitan Airport. The film's famous ending was shot on a Warner Bros. soundstage instead. In 1972, a newly completed hangar on the field stood in for the forest domes of the spacecraft in Silent Running.
The Mask
The 1994 film used the building as the exterior of a police station, visible about an hour into the film.
Cannon
The CBS series Cannon used the building for its episode "Killer on the Hill," appearing as itself rather than as a fictional building. Matt Houston used the same building the same way about a decade later.
Matt Houston
The ABC series Matt Houston returned to the same building for its episode "The Woman in White," again appearing as itself. Cannon had already used it the same way about a decade earlier.
Entourage
HBO's Entourage shot its series finale at the airport, where private and corporate jets make up most of the traffic.
Airwolf
The CBS series Airwolf based its fictional charter company Santini Air in a hangar on the field. Jetcopters, Inc. owned the real helicopter used in the show and was also based at the airport. Background aircraft from the field appear across several episodes.
What Van Nuys can double for
Van Nuys can stand in for wartime Casablanca, Morocco's airport, for Major Strasser's arrival scene in Casablanca (1942), a police station in the fictional Edge City of The Mask (1994) and the interior forest domes of the fictional spacecraft Valley Forge in Silent Running (1972).
