North Hollywood was once part of the vast landholdings of the Mission San Fernando Rey de España, which was confiscated by the government during the Mexican period of rule.

The leading investor was Isaac Lankershim, a Northern California stockman and grain farmer, who was impressed by the Valley's wild oats and proposed to raise sheep on the property.

Van Nuys thought the property could profitably grow wheat using the dryland farming technique developed on the Great Plains and leased land from the Association to test his theories.

In time, the Lankershim property, under its third name, the Los Angeles Farming and Milling Company, would become the world's largest wheat-growing empire.

On April 1, 1888, they offered ready-made small farms for sale, already planted with deep-rooted deciduous fruit and nut trees—mostly peaches, pears, apricots, and walnuts—that could survive the rainless summers of the Valley by relying on the high water table along the Tujunga Wash rather than surface irrigation.

[4][5] The land boom of the 1880s went bust by the 1890s, but despite another brutal drought cycle in the late 1890s, the fruit and nut farmers remained solvent.

The Chatsworth Limited made one freight stop a day at Toluca, though the depot bore the new name of Lankershim.

[9] At first, resistance to the real-estate development and downtown business interests of Los Angeles remained strong enough to keep the small farmers unified in opposition to annexation.

When droughts hit the valley again, rather than face foreclosure, the most vulnerable farmers agreed to mortgage their holdings to the fruit packing company and banks in Los Angeles for the immediate future and vote on annexation.

In turn, these were bought up by the real-estate developers and by the late 1920s a massive effort was underway to market the area to prospective home owners throughout the country.

[16] In the late 1940s and 1950s the area saw the first department-store-anchored, auto-oriented shopping center in the Valley: Valley Plaza, covering both a development at Laurel Canyon at Victory boulevards but also a loose collection of other retail stores south along Laurel Canyon to Oxnard, including a branch of the May Co., the second-largest suburban department store branch in the U.S. at the time.

In the mid-1950s Valley Plaza claimed to be the largest shopping center on the West Coast of the United States and the third-largest in the country.

[citation needed] The North Hollywood shootout occurred in 1997, leaving 12 Los Angeles Police Department officers and eight civilians injured and the two armed robbers dead.

The 2000 U.S. census counted 77,848 residents in the 5.87-square-mile North Hollywood neighborhood—or 13,264 people per square mile, about an average population density for the city but among the highest for the county.

[27] The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, El Portal Theater, Idle Hour Cafe, Phil's Diner, NoHo Gateway Sign, and Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery are located in North Hollywood.

[31] Eighteen percent of North Hollywood residents aged 25 and older had earned a four-year degree by 2000, an average figure for both the city and the county.

Close to half a million people took advantage of free rides on the 17.4-mile (28.0 km) Red Line subway in its first weekend in operation.