The Tarzana Community & Cultural Center is established to provide and maintain a facility, in a park-like setting, dedicated to the community for meetings, activities and programs that nurture community spirit, the arts, education and leadership, and preserve the history and unique cultural qualities of Tarzana.

     Surrounded by towering, long-needled pines, the picturesque Ventura Boulevard-Vanalden Avenue property that is now the Tarzana Community & Cultural Center almost never happened. Only the vision, dedication, financial contributions and continuing perseverance of a few local residents saved it from becoming one more built-up commercial establishment.

     As many know, Tarzana is the birthplace of Tarzan – Lord of the Apes. Celebrated American novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs created the world-famous jungle hero right here on his own spacious Tarzana Ranch, in the San Fernando Valley where he spent most of his life riding, writing, and living life to the fullest.

     The author would have seen and recognized the modest 1940s Spanish-style home located just a few blocks west of his own large, hilltop hacienda.

     From the early ’50s through the next four decades, the southeast corner at Ventura and Vanalden became Diane and Rudy’s Garden Statuary, a rustic, wooded outlet well known to Valley residents. In the early ’90s, the property was again sold to a commercial developer who, in turn, sold it a few years later to a major storage company.