Topanga Canyon Blvd is one of the main roads that take Angelenos from the Pacific Coast Highway north of Santa Monica into the San Fernando Valley. As we can see in this photo taken in 1922, the Valley was filled with wide open spaces, ranches, and orchards. That’s certainly not the case now where pretty much every square foot of land we can see here is now filled with urban sprawl. But back then, it must have made for an enjoyably bucolic Sunday drive with the top down and all that endless California sunshine warming your skin.

Susan M said: “This would have been looking down at the now, long forgotten town of Girard. Girard became Woodland Hills by the start of the war years. Girard used to have the famed landmark of a collection of structures of minarets and Moorish domes. The town started as a questionable real estate development. It was always kind of a curiosity seeing the minarets out there in what was the middle of nowhere!”

This is a 2021 satellite image of the same area we can see in the vintage photo. Those parallel streets so clearly visible in the 1922 are harder to see in the satellite image.