Oct 16, 2026 · 1 hr 16 min · 19 segments
On Halloween night in 1957, Peter Fabiano was shot and killed at his front door in North Hollywood, California, after answering what he thought was another late-night trick-or-treater. His lasts…
Our story takes us to Los Angeles, again, in 1957, but this time not to the Los Angeles of the movie premieres and the glamorous hotels that we love to talk about, and no Hollywood stars are involved.
We are heading north over the Hollywood Hills and way into the San Fernando Valley, where Ritchie Valens was from.
See? All comes full circles.
It always does.
1957, see? I just realized that now.
Hmm.
Wow.
Right?
Hollywood is, as I said, on the other side of the Hollywood Hills, while North Hollywood sits in the southeastern part of the valley.
And before the Second World War, large parts of the valley were still farmland, you know, with ranches and fields and all these citrus orchards.
But then after the war, Los Angeles was experiencing yet another boom, and it needed housing, lots and lots of housing.
So naturally, these developers, they looked at all that relatively cheap land in the valley, and they thought, "Yep, we need that for our houses." So the orchards started to disappear, and the neighborhoods went up in their place, and really a lot of neighborhoods.
In 1950, the San Fernando Valley had around, like, 400,000 residents, and by 1960, there were about 840,000.
So the population more than doubled in just 10 years.
That's the kind of growth we saw during the industrialization in the second half of the 19th century.
That's, like, a, a huge explosion.
And all these people obviously needed somewhere to live, but not only that, they also needed schools, supermarkets, restaurants, shops, places to work, and cars.
As I've heard, it's It's a city of cars, you need one.
Yeah.
And North Hollywood itself wasn't some brand-new development that had suddenly appeared after the war.
It had actually been around for much longer, and it was already a proper little commercial center, but it was also surrounded by all this enormous post-war growth, and all those new people that moved into the valley, they needed all these kind of things.
They also, obviously, needed to have a place to have their hair done, and a beauty salon was probably not a bad business to be in at that time.
I think for most of us today, going to the hairdresser is at most, I'd say, a monthly thing, because it got relatively expensive.
Our story takes us to Los Angeles, again, in 1957, but this time not to the Los Angeles of the movie premieres and the glamorous hotels that we love to talk about, and no Hollywood stars are involved.
We are heading north over the Hollywood Hills and way into the San Fernando Valley, where Ritchie Valens was from.
See? All comes full circles.
It always does.
1957, see? I just realized that now.
Hmm.
Wow.
Right?
Hollywood is, as I said, on the other side of the Hollywood Hills, while North Hollywood sits in the southeastern part of the valley.
And before the Second World War, large parts of the valley were still farmland, you know, with ranches and fields and all these citrus orchards.
But then after the war, Los Angeles was experiencing yet another boom, and it needed housing, lots and lots of housing.
So naturally, these developers, they looked at all that relatively cheap land in the valley, and they thought, "Yep, we need that for our houses." So the orchards started to disappear, and the neighborhoods went up in their place, and really a lot of neighborhoods.
In 1950, the San Fernando Valley had around, like, 400,000 residents, and by 1960, there were about 840,000.
So the population more than doubled in just 10 years.
That's the kind of growth we saw during the industrialization in the second half of the 19th century.
That's, like, a, a huge explosion.
And all these people obviously needed somewhere to live, but not only that, they also needed schools, supermarkets, restaurants, shops, places to work, and cars.
As I've heard, it's It's a city of cars, you need one.
Yeah.
And North Hollywood itself wasn't some brand-new development that had suddenly appeared after the war.
It had actually been around for much longer, and it was already a proper little commercial center, but it was also surrounded by all this enormous post-war growth, and all those new people that moved into the valley, they needed all these kind of things.
They also, obviously, needed to have a place to have their hair done, and a beauty salon was probably not a bad business to be in at that time.
I think for most of us today, going to the hairdresser is at most, I'd say, a monthly thing, because it got relatively expensive.
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