Drive west along Ventura Boulevard on a Friday evening and somewhere around Tampa Avenue the signage begins to change. English gives way to Persian script, the kabob houses outnumber the burger joints, and the queues outside the bakeries are for barbari and sangak rather than baguettes. This is the heart of the Persians in Tarzana, a community that turned a quiet San Fernando Valley suburb named after a fictional jungle hero into one of the most settled Iranian enclaves in America.
The Place
Tarzana sits in the southern San Fernando Valley, tucked against the northern edge of the Santa Monica Mountains, covering roughly 8.79 square miles of Los Angeles. It is bounded by Encino to the east, Reseda to the north, Woodland Hills to the west, and the wild green of Topanga State Park to the south.
The neighbourhood owes its name to Edgar Rice Burroughs, the author of the Tarzan novels, who bought a ranch here on 1 March 1919 and called it Tarzana Ranch. He subdivided part of the land for housing in 1923, and a proper community with its own post office followed by 1930.
For decades it was a leafy, comfortable Valley suburb. By the 2000 census the median household income sat at around $73,195, and just over 40 per cent of adult residents held a four-year degree. The November 2025 population estimate put the neighbourhood at about 38,184 people.
How It Became Persian
The story of Iranian Los Angeles does not begin in Tarzana. It begins on the Westside, in the 1960s, when Iranian students and professionals first clustered around Westwood and the university there. But the community that gives Tarzana its character today arrived later, and under very different circumstances.
Before 1979: a trickle of students and traders
The earliest Iranians in Los Angeles were a small, largely secular group: students at UCLA, doctors, engineers, and merchants who came to study or trade and often returned home. They were the seed of what would become the largest Iranian community outside Iran, but in the 1960s and early 1970s they were a modest presence concentrated on the Westside rather than the Valley.
The revolution and the exodus
Everything changed with the 1979 Iranian Revolution. As the Pahlavi monarchy fell and the Islamic Republic took its place, hundreds of thousands of Iranians left, and a great many of them came to Los Angeles. The newcomers were disproportionately drawn from the country’s secular, professional and merchant classes, the very people with the resources and the reason to leave.
Estimates of the resulting community vary widely and are disputed, but figures for the Los Angeles metropolitan area commonly range from 500,000 to 600,000 people of Iranian origin, by far the largest such community anywhere outside Iran. Los Angeles earned the nickname Tehrangeles, a blend of Tehran and Los Angeles, and it stuck.
Why the Valley, and why Tarzana
The first wave settled where Iranians already had a foothold, on the Westside, in Westwood and Beverly Hills. But as the community grew and prospered, families looked for what families always look for: more space, good schools, larger homes and quieter streets. The San Fernando Valley offered all of that within reach of the Westside, and the gravity shifted north and west.
Tarzana, along with neighbouring Encino and Woodland Hills, became a natural destination. It was affluent without being ostentatious, it had room for the kind of large family homes Iranian households valued, and crucially it was close enough to Westwood and Beverly Hills that the cultural and commercial life of the community remained within easy reach.
By the 2000 census, Iranian was the single most common ancestry reported in Tarzana, at 10.3 per cent of residents, ahead of Russian at 9.1 per cent. More than a third of the neighbourhood, some 35.1 per cent, was foreign-born. For a suburb named after a jungle adventurer dreamed up by an American novelist, the numbers told a story of profound reinvention.
Two communities, one neighbourhood
The Iranians who settled in Tarzana were not a single bloc. Among them were Muslims, but also a very substantial Persian Jewish community, one of the oldest continuous Jewish populations on earth, tracing its presence in Iran back more than two and a half millennia to the era of Cyrus the Great.
Of the roughly 300,000 Iranian Americans often cited for the Los Angeles area, an estimated 30,000 are Persian Jews. After 1979 many of them chose not to worship at existing American synagogues but to build their own, places that could carry forward the specific liturgy, language and customs of Jewish life as it had been lived in Iran. Tarzana and Encino became two of the main centres of that effort.
The Landmarks
Eretz Cultural Center, 6170 Wilbur Avenue. Founded by Persian Jews who left Iran after the 1979 revolution, Eretz is one of the largest Persian Jewish cultural centres in California. The founding generation wanted a place that would let them practise their faith while acting as a focal point for Persian Jewish culture specifically, and the centre still hosts the weddings, bar mitzvahs and Persian buffet celebrations that anchor community life in the Valley.
Ventura Boulevard. This is the spine of Persian Tarzana. The boulevard, which traces the old route of El Camino Real through the Valley, is lined with Iranian restaurants, bakeries, grocers and professional offices whose signs mix Persian and English freely. It is where the community is most visible, and where a newcomer from Tehran or Shiraz can do an entire day’s errands in their mother tongue.
Maneli’s Persian Cuisine, 19347 Ventura Boulevard. A Tarzana fixture for traditional Persian food, run by an owner steeped in the Valley’s restaurant scene, having previously worked at well-known kitchens including Darband in Tarzana and Shiraz in Sherman Oaks. It is the kind of place that serves the koresh stews and chelo kabob that define a Persian table.
Orchid Grill & Kabob, 19649 Ventura Boulevard. Family owned and operated since 1995, Orchid specialises in homemade Persian cooking: kabobs, stews and saffron rice. Its longevity on the boulevard, now three decades, is a measure of how deeply rooted the community’s everyday institutions have become.
Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center, 18321 Clark Street. Opened in 1973 as Tarzana Medical Center, the hospital has served the Valley for more than half a century and is among the area’s most important institutions. A related ten-storey medical and office tower rose on Ventura Boulevard in the mid-1970s and remains by far the tallest building for miles, a literal landmark visible across the neighbourhood.
Encino-Tarzana Branch, Los Angeles Public Library, Ventura Boulevard. The local library sits right on the boulevard and serves a readership that is, like the neighbourhood, strikingly multilingual. It is an unglamorous but telling institution, the kind of civic anchor that signals a community has settled in to stay.
Caballero Canyon Trail. At Tarzana’s southern edge, where the suburb meets the Santa Monica Mountains, a roughly 3.6-mile loop climbs into the hills for hiking and cycling. It is a reminder that for all the urban bustle of Ventura Boulevard, Tarzana remains a place where the wild edge of Los Angeles is a short drive from the front door.
Where They Came From
The Iranians of Tarzana came overwhelmingly from Iran’s cities, above all Tehran, but also Shiraz, Isfahan and the other urban centres that had produced the country’s professional and merchant classes. They were not, by and large, rural migrants. They were doctors, engineers, business owners, jewellers and academics, people whose skills and capital travelled with them.
For the Persian Jewish families among them, the journey carried an extra weight. They were leaving a homeland their ancestors had inhabited since antiquity, and the synagogues and cultural centres they built in Tarzana and Encino were deliberate acts of preservation, attempts to keep a 2,500-year-old way of life intact on the far side of the world.
That the community settled so visibly in one cluster of Valley neighbourhoods, rather than dispersing, was itself a choice. Chain migration, where each arriving family draws the next, concentrated relatives, friends and former neighbours from Iran into the same few square miles around Ventura Boulevard.
Tarzana Today
Today Tarzana is one of the most settled Iranian neighbourhoods in the United States, a place where the immigrant generation that arrived after 1979 has raised American-born children and grandchildren. The Persian script on Ventura Boulevard is no longer a novelty; it is simply how the neighbourhood looks.
The community has matured rather than faded. Restaurants like Orchid have passed the thirty-year mark, the synagogues and cultural centres are now led by the children of their founders, and the second and third generations move easily between Persian and English, between Norouz and the Fourth of July. The old Westside core in Westwood remains the symbolic capital of Tehrangeles, but the Valley, and Tarzana within it, is where a great deal of daily Iranian American life actually happens.
It is, in the end, a quietly remarkable thing. A suburb named in 1919 for a fictional ape-man became, within a single human lifetime, a home for one of the great diasporas of the late twentieth century. The Persians in Tarzana did not so much arrive as settle, and the boulevard tells you so in two alphabets.
Their story sits alongside others across the region. Persian families also gathered in nearby hill towns like Thousand Oaks and Westlake Village, and the wider Iranian diaspora has built communities as far afield as Houston, Atlanta and Bellevue, Washington. The Valley itself is a mosaic of such migrations, including the Korean community of Anaheim Hills and the Chinese families who reshaped San Jose. For the broader picture of Iranian Los Angeles, the Wikipedia entry on Tehrangeles is a useful starting point, as is the history of Tarzana itself.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Persians in Tarzana?
The Persians in Tarzana are mostly descended from Iranians who fled after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. As the community grew and prospered on the Westside of Los Angeles, families sought larger homes, good schools and quieter streets, and the affluent San Fernando Valley, including Tarzana, Encino and Woodland Hills, became a natural destination within reach of the original Westwood core.
How many Iranians live in the Los Angeles area?
Estimates vary and are disputed, but figures for the Los Angeles metropolitan area commonly range from 500,000 to 600,000 people of Iranian origin. This is by far the largest Iranian community anywhere outside Iran, which is why Los Angeles is widely nicknamed Tehrangeles.
What share of Tarzana is Iranian?
At the 2000 census, Iranian was the single most commonly reported ancestry in Tarzana, at 10.3 per cent of residents, just ahead of Russian at 9.1 per cent. More than a third of the neighbourhood was foreign-born, a reflection of how central the immigrant experience is to the area.
Is the Persian community in Tarzana Jewish or Muslim?
Both. The Persians in Tarzana include Muslims and a very substantial Persian Jewish community. Persian Jews are one of the oldest Jewish populations in the world, and after 1979 many built their own synagogues and cultural centres, such as the Eretz Cultural Center on Wilbur Avenue, to preserve Iranian Jewish traditions.
Where can I find Persian food and shops in Tarzana?
Ventura Boulevard is the centre of Persian commercial life in Tarzana, lined with Iranian restaurants, bakeries and grocers. Long-running establishments include Orchid Grill & Kabob at 19649 Ventura Boulevard, family run since 1995, and Maneli’s Persian Cuisine at 19347 Ventura Boulevard.
How did Tarzana get its name?
Tarzana is named after Tarzan, the fictional jungle hero. The author Edgar Rice Burroughs bought a ranch in the area in 1919 and named it Tarzana Ranch after his most famous creation. He subdivided part of the land for housing in 1923, and the community had its own post office by 1930.
If your family’s story passed through Tarzana, or any of the places Persians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the cities of Iran to the bakeries and synagogues of Ventura Boulevard, to wherever you are now.