About Lake View Terrace

Lake View Terrace is a suburb district in the north east quadrant of the San Fernando Valley region of the City of Los Angeles, California.

Surrounding areas include the Angeles National Forest, Little Tujunga Canyon, Big Tujunga Canyon, Hansen Dam, Kagel Canyon, and a portion of the Verdugo Mountains. The community lies adjacent to the communities of Sylmar, San Fernando, Shadow Hills, Sunland, Sun Valley, and Pacoima. The area shares the 91342 ZIP code with Sylmar. Lake View Terrace is accessed by the Foothill Freeway (Interstate 210) and the major thoroughfares of which include, Foothill Boulevard, Glenoaks Boulevard, Van Nuys Boulevard and Osborne Street.

The community is middle-class and ethnically mixed, including Latinos, African-Americans, Whites and Asians.

The area hosts a large equestrian community, and is one of the few remaining residential areas in the City of Los Angeles that has private homes zoned for horsekeeping.

Lake View Terrace gained international notoriety as the location of the beating of Rodney King by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department in 1991. Lake View Terrace is also the setting of much of the 2008 film Lakeview Terrace, starring Samuel L. Jackson, although the area used for the neighborhood was actually filmed in Walnut, California.

Lake View Terrace was a part of the Rancho Tujunga Mexican land grant community. Settlers in Rancho Tujunga sold firewood to residents of El Pueblo, a settlement that was in what is now Los Angeles. In the 1800s Homer and Marie Hansen established a horse ranch in the area. In 1939 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers seized the horse ranch's land via eminent domain to build a dam due to occurrences of flooding in the northeast and southeast portions of the San Fernando Valley. The Hansen Dam was built in 1940. Alyson Pitarre of the Los Angeles Times said "legend has it that" the name of Lake View Terrace originated from Holiday Lake, a 150-acre (61 ha) lake that was once behind the dam and a popular vacation area in the 1950s; the lake since dried. The Rodney King incident occurred in Lake View Terrace in 1991; Pitarre said that Lake View Terrace "gained notoriety" because of the incident.