Drive north on Glenoaks Boulevard, past the soundstages where cartoons and blockbusters are made, and you will pass a butcher slicing basturma, a bakery pulling lahmajo from the oven, and a cathedral whose dome catches the light off Interstate 5. The Armenians in Burbank built all of it in a single generation, and they did it in the shadow of the studios that gave this town its name.
The Place
Burbank sits in the eastern San Fernando Valley, six miles from Hollywood and pressed up against the Verdugo Mountains. It was incorporated on 8 July 1911, named for David Burbank, a New Hampshire dentist who had run sheep on the land since 1867.
What made the town was the camera. Warner Bros. bought a studio on Burbank farmland in 1928, Walt Disney completed his animation plant here in 1939, and NBC arrived in 1952. Burbank took to calling itself the “Media Capital of the World,” and the title stuck.
Today the city of roughly 105,000 is still defined by Warner Bros., the Walt Disney Company, Nickelodeon Animation and the network offices clustered along Olive Avenue. But over the last three decades a second story has grown up beside the first one, told in Armenian.
It is a small city, dense and walkable in the centre, with the Verdugos to the north and Griffith Park to the south. The downtown grid around San Fernando Boulevard still looks like the prosperous mid-century company town it was. What has changed is who walks it, and the language they speak when they greet one another at the meat counter.
How It Became Armenian
Burbank did not start as an Armenian town. It became one by overflow, the way a glass fills and then spills into the saucer beside it. The saucer, in this case, was Glendale.
The Glendale spillover
Glendale is the largest Armenian city in the United States outside Armenia itself, and by the late 1980s it was crowded. As Armenian families who had first landed in Hollywood climbed toward the suburbs, they pushed past the Glendale line and into Burbank, just across the wash. The two cities share a border, a school-bus radius and, increasingly, a grocery list.
You can read the arc of that movement in the wider Los Angeles County numbers. The county counts close to 190,000 Armenians, the densest concentration in the country, and Burbank caught the western edge of it. The relationship is best understood alongside the older anchor communities documented in the Armenians in Glendale and in the original Hollywood enclave of Little Armenia in Los Angeles.
The numbers that doubled
The growth was fast enough to register in the census. Burbank’s Armenian population more than doubled between 1990 and 2000, climbing from about 2,780 residents to 7,950. It kept climbing through the next two decades.
Estimates now put the Armenian community at roughly 12,000 people, a substantial share of a city that, on paper, still reads as overwhelmingly white. That paper hides a great deal: because the United States census offers no Armenian box to tick, most Armenian residents are counted as white, and the true footprint of the community is larger than any single statistic admits.
Why the studios mattered
The media industry shaped who came and who stayed. Burbank’s Armenians were not only grocers and contractors. They were editors, animators, post-production engineers, set builders and visual-effects artists, drawn by the same studios that had drawn everyone else to this valley.
An Armenian editor cutting a feature at Warner Bros. could buy a house ten minutes from the lot, send the children to a Burbank public school, and shop for sujuk on the way home. The combination of steady creative work and a familiar community a short drive south made Burbank an unusually comfortable landing place.
It helped that the work suited the people. The post-production world rewards patience, precision and the willingness to sit alone with a problem until it yields, qualities a community that had survived dispersal and rebuilt from scratch tended to have in supply. Whole edit suites along Olive Avenue came to run partly on Armenian talent, and the trade passed down within families, from a father grading film to a son colour-correcting digital.
The schools tell the story
Nowhere is the change clearer than in the classrooms. Maral Tavitian, managing director of the USC Institute of Armenian Studies, has estimated that the Armenian share of Burbank Unified’s student body rose from roughly 35 percent a little over a decade ago to about 55 percent.
Those figures do not appear in any official report, for the same reason the census misses the community: there is no category to count them. The number lives instead in the experience of the schools themselves, in the Armenian heard in the hallways of Burbank High and John Burroughs, in the names on the honour rolls, in the parents at back-to-school night.
The growth has not been frictionless. When a charter academy aimed at students of Armenian heritage was proposed near Hollywood Way, some neighbours pushed back, arguing they had not been properly consulted. The episode was a small reminder that a community can become a majority in the schools long before it feels fully at home in the civic life around them.
The Landmarks
St. Leon Armenian Cathedral, 3325 North Glenoaks Boulevard. The single most important Armenian building in the western United States stands in Burbank, its dome visible from Interstate 5. Consecrated on 11 September 2010 by Karekin II, Catholicos of All Armenians, it is the mother cathedral of the Armenian Apostolic Church for the entire western half of the country.
Western Diocese Headquarters, 3325 North Glenoaks Boulevard. The cathedral shares its grounds with the administrative seat of the Western Diocese, established in 1927 to serve Armenian parishes across the western states. That the church chose to plant both its cathedral and its government in Burbank, rather than in larger Glendale, is itself a measure of how central this town has become.
Raffi’s Market, 324 South Glenoaks Boulevard. A neighbourhood Armenian grocery with a staffed meat, cheese and deli counter, the kind of shop where the man behind the case knows which cut of lamb you want before you ask. It supplies the basturma, sujuk and string cheese that anchor an Armenian kitchen.
Tun Lahmajo, 2202 North Glenoaks Boulevard. A family bakery built around lahmajo, the thin Armenian flatbread topped with spiced minced meat. Its second location is in Yerevan, a detail that says everything about the two-way traffic between Burbank and the homeland.
Red Top Market and Kitchen, 600 South Glenoaks Boulevard. A larger international supermarket and prepared-foods kitchen serving the Armenian and Middle Eastern households that now fill the blocks south of downtown. The hot table runs from dolma to kebab, dinner for the family that worked a long day on the lot.
Magnolia Fresh Market, 418 North Glenoaks Boulevard. One more grocer in the Glenoaks corridor that has quietly become Burbank’s Armenian high street, the stretch where the city’s signage shifts, block by block, into a second alphabet.
Where They Came From
The Armenians of Burbank are, overwhelmingly, a diaspora of a diaspora. Most did not arrive directly from the Republic of Armenia. They came by way of the places where Armenians had already scattered after the genocide of 1915: Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Soviet Armenia.
The Iranian-Armenians left Tehran and Isfahan around the 1979 revolution. The Lebanese-Armenians fled the civil war that tore Beirut apart through the 1980s. Soviet and post-Soviet Armenians came in waves after the 1988 earthquake and the collapse of the USSR.
Each group landed first in the older Los Angeles enclaves, then moved outward and upward, a pattern shared by the nearby foothill communities of the Armenians in La Crescenta and the Armenians in Pasadena. Burbank, with its studio jobs and its good schools, was a natural next step on that climb. For the broader history, the history of Armenian Americans in Los Angeles traces the full arc.
Burbank Today
Burbank in 2026 is a town living two lives at once, and mostly comfortable with it. By day it is the studio city, its sidewalks full of crew badges and coffee runs. By evening, the Glenoaks corridor fills with families shopping for the week, and the cathedral bells carry over the freeway.
The two lives intersect more than outsiders realise. The Armenian community is not separate from the media economy that defines Burbank; it is woven into it, in the edit bays and the art departments and the visual-effects houses. The same family might have a grandfather who survived Aleppo and a granddaughter who animates for Disney.
It is not a finished story. The friction over the charter school, the strain on housing prices, the quiet anxiety about whether the language will survive into the third generation, all of it is real. But on a Sunday morning, with the market full and the cathedral fuller, Burbank looks very much like a place the Armenians have decided to call home.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Armenians live in Burbank, California?
Estimates put the number of Armenians in Burbank at roughly 12,000 people. Because the United States census has no Armenian category, most are counted as white, so the true figure is likely higher than official statistics suggest.
Why are there so many Armenians in Burbank?
The Armenians in Burbank are largely an overflow from neighbouring Glendale, the largest Armenian community in the country. As families climbed from Hollywood toward the suburbs in the late 1980s and 1990s, they crossed the Glendale line into Burbank, drawn by good schools and steady work in the media industry.
Where is the Armenian cathedral in Burbank?
St. Leon Armenian Cathedral stands at 3325 North Glenoaks Boulevard, its dome visible from Interstate 5. Consecrated in 2010, it is the mother cathedral of the Armenian Apostolic Church for the western United States and shares its grounds with the Western Diocese headquarters.
Where did Burbank’s Armenians come from?
Most are a diaspora of a diaspora, arriving by way of Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Soviet Armenia rather than directly from the homeland. They left amid the 1979 Iranian revolution, the Lebanese civil war, the 1988 earthquake and the collapse of the USSR, settling first in older Los Angeles enclaves before moving to Burbank.
Are there many Armenian students in Burbank schools?
Yes. The Armenian share of Burbank Unified’s student body has been estimated to have risen from about 35 percent a little over a decade ago to roughly 55 percent today, according to the USC Institute of Armenian Studies, though no official census category tracks the number precisely.
Where do you find Armenian food and groceries in Burbank?
The Glenoaks Boulevard corridor has become Burbank’s Armenian high street. Raffi’s Market at 324 South Glenoaks, Red Top Market at 600 South Glenoaks, Magnolia Fresh Market at 418 North Glenoaks, and the lahmajo bakery Tun Lahmajo at 2202 North Glenoaks all serve the community.
If your family’s story passed through Burbank, or any of the places Armenians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a courtyard in Tehran or Beirut, to a house ten minutes from the Warner Bros. lot, to wherever you are now.