Gardens of the World

The Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza is a performing arts center and city hall for the city of Thousand Oaks, California. Across Thousand Oaks Boulevard from Gardens of the World, the site is considered the downtown core of the city. City hall includes Planning and Building Department, Public Works and other city departments. A park within the site is named for Richard Carpenter and his wife Mary.The immediate areas surrounding Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza was among the first populated parts of the Conejo Valley. The site, which was previously home to the Jungleland USA theme park, was home to some of the valley's first settlements in the 19th century. Prior to the settlers, the area was inhabited by the Chumash Native-Americans.

Jungleland USA was a private zoo, animal training facility, and animal theme park in Thousand Oaks, California, United States, on the current site of the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza. At its peak the facility encompassed 170 acres (69 ha).Louis Goebel created Jungleland in 1926 as a support facility for Hollywood. He had been employed at Universal Studios when the studio decided to close its animal facility. Five of the Universal Studio lions formed the nucleus of Goebel's collection. The facility was originally called Goebel's Lion Farm and then Goebel's Wild Animal Farm. Soon a wide variety of exotic animals were obtained, trained, and rented to the studios for use in films. The facility later became a theme park, opened to the public in 1929. Wild animal shows entertained thousands in the 1940s and 1950s. Mabel Stark, the "lady lion tamer", was featured in these shows; she also doubled for Mae West in the lion-taming scenes in the 1933 film I'm No Angel. The zoo's residents included Leo the Lion, mascot of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio; Mister Ed, the talking horse from the television show of the same name; Bimbo the elephant from the Circus Boy television series; and Tamba the chimpanzee, featured in the Jungle Jim movies and television series.Many TV and movie productions used the park's trained animals, and many productions were filmed there, including The Birth of a Nation, The Fugitive, Tarzan the Ape Man, Doctor Dolittle, and The Adventures of Robin Hood. It was also featured prominently in an episode of the television show Route 66 (Season 2, Episode 31, "Hell Is Empty, All The Devils Are Here"). The park made headlines in 1966 when a male lion at the compound named Sammy mauled Zoltán Hargitay, the young son of actors Mickey Hargitay and Jayne Mansfield. A barn fire in 1940 killed 12 of the animals including tigers, camels and elephants.Jungleland closed in October 1969, because of competition from other Southern California amusement parks, and because the facility "didn't blend in" with the increasingly urban character of Thousand Oaks. The company which owned the facilities declared bankruptcy and sold all the movable property at auction: animals, buildings, trucks, furniture and supplies. Goebel retained ownership of the land, which was eventually sold to the city to create the Civic Arts Plaza and other developments.

The Grant R. Brimhall Library serves as the main library for the city of Thousand Oaks, California. It is controlled by the Thousand Oaks Library System, which also controls the Newbury Park Branch Library. The Grant R. Brimhall Building is located on Janss Rd. near State Route 23. There are 81,000 square feet (7,500 m2) in the main building and 3,000 square feet (280 m2) in the adjacent Special Collections Storage building. It serves Thousand Oaks, including Newbury Park and Westlake Village. It is the largest library in Ventura County, the largest library in the region, and one of the largest in Southern California.American Radio Archive was part of the Special Collections Department at the library, and featured one of the largest collections of broadcasting documents in the United States, or perhaps in the world. It had a collection of 23,000 radio- and TV scripts, 10,000 photographs, and 10,000 books related to the history of radio. Furthermore, it contained archives of notable individuals such as Bob Crosby, Rudy Vallee, Norman Corwin, and Monty Masters.

On November 7, 2018, a mass shooting occurred in Thousand Oaks, California, United States, at the Borderline Bar and Grill, a country-western bar frequented by college students. Thirteen people were killed, including the perpetrator, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and a police officer who was shot multiple times, with the fatal round accidentally being fired by another officer. One other person sustained a gunshot wound, while fifteen others were injured by incidental causes.Police identified the killer as 28-year-old Ian David Long, a United States Marine Corps veteran.

Thousand Oaks is a city in the northwestern part of Greater Los Angeles, approximately 15 miles (24 km) from the city of Los Angeles and 40 miles (64 km) from Downtown Los Angeles. The second-largest city in Ventura County, California, it is named after the many oak trees present in the area. The city forms the central populated core of the Conejo Valley. Thousand Oaks was incorporated in 1964, but has since expanded to the west and east. Two-thirds of master-planned community of Westlake and most of Newbury Park were annexed by the city during the late 1960s and 1970s. The Los Angeles County–Ventura County line crosses at the city's eastern border with what is today known as Westlake Village. The population was 126,966 at the 2020 census, up from 126,683 at the 2010 census.

Janss Marketplace is an outdoor shopping mall in Thousand Oaks, California. Previously known as Janss Mall, it opened in September 1961 as Village Lane. It was the first mall established in the city, and Thousand Oaks' only shopping center until The Oaks was built in 1978. 39 businesses are located here as of 2023. Conejo Valley Art Museum is also located here. It is home to well-known anchoring stores - Nordstrom Rack, and Old Navy. - along with specialty shops and fast food establishments. It has a nine-screen movie theater and is surrounded by neighborhood restaurants.A big attraction here in the 1960s was its 854-seat Fox Conejo movie theater. The theater opened in May 1963 with a gala premiere of the movie A Gathering of Eagles (1963). Celebrities such as Lee J. Cobb, Barbara Eden, Gary Crosby and Annette Funicello attended the opening gala.In 2015, Sears Holdings spun off 235 of its properties, including the Sears at Janss Marketplace, into Seritage Growth Properties. Sears downsized its store from 171,000 square feet (15,900 square meters) to 68,750 square feet (6,387 square meters) to make way for Nordstrom Rack, DSW, and Sports Authority, which closed in 2016. The Reign of Terror Haunted House is located here, which is a 25,000 square feet (2,300 square meters) house open for tours on and around Halloween.Toys "R" Us closed in June 2018. On June 28, 2018, it was announced that Sears would be closing as part of a plan to close 78 stores nationwide. The store closed in September 2018. The former Sports Authority space became Dave & Busters that year.

Conejo Players Theatre is a performing arts theater in Thousand Oaks, California. Established in 1958, it is the oldest theater in the city -- as well as one of the oldest in Southern California. It hosts a full season of Mainstage shows each year, including musicals and plays -- plus special events, workshops, improv comedy performances, holiday shows, and a long-running children's theatre program taught by theater professionals. The theater was housed in an old barn building for several years, but constructed a new theater after donations from Janss Corporation in 1963. The 185-seat theater is located on S. Moorpark Road. Marilyn O'Connor performed regularly at the theater. She has later been seen in TV series such as Matlock, 7th Heaven, Frasier, ER, Little Britain USA and American Horror Story. As a child, Kurt Russell participated in several productions at the Players -- as did former Nickelodeon star Amanda Bynes and former Disney Channel star Corey Fogelmanis.Conejo Players Theatre is allegedly haunted.

Conejo Valley Art Museum is a museum located at Janss Marketplace in Thousand Oaks, California. Established in 1978, the museum showcases fine art, modern art, abstracts, textiles and sculptures. Displays are changing periodically and often include artwork featured on national tours. The museum has hosted art collections from artists such as Howard Brodie, David Rose and Elizabeth Williams. It was previously located in an old library on W. Wilbur Road, but was moved to the Janss Mall in 1990. . Exhibitions here have included oil paintings, prehistoric pottery, quilts, photographs, sketches and print making. Its store offers folk art, literature and jewelry.Conejo Valley Art Museum used to present the annual Thousand Oaks ArtWalk, used to draw 12-14,000 spectators, and included outdoor art exhibitions and live music.

Conejo Valley Adult Education (CVAE) is a public California Adult School in Thousand Oaks, California, part of the Conejo Valley Unified School District. It is the only adult education campus in the district. The school's principal is Mike Sanders. The school is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), the accrediting body for schools and colleges in the Western United States and territories.

The Case Study House No. 28, at 91 Inverness Rd., Thousand Oaks, California, is the only Case Study House in Ventura County. Built during 1965–66, it was listed on the National Register along with several other Case Study Houses in Los Angeles County on July 24, 2013, as part of the "Case Study House Program NPS". This one-story flat-roofed house, designed by architects Conrad Buff and Donald Hensman of the firm Buff and Hensman, was the last family home built in the program and one of the largest at 4,500 square feet. The architects designed the house with classic concept in modern architecture of merging interior and exterior spaces through glass expanses and seamless materials. Face brick was incorporated into the house since it is located on a knoll overlooking a development where this was the unifying material. Previous houses in the program consisted primarily of glass and exposed steel, but the Janss Development Corporation and Pacific Clay Products wanted to demonstrate the advantages of the alternative material.Decorative iron gates at the entrance frame the center courtyard that has a swimming pool. Along with the brick face, the house has more than 4,000 square feet of glass windows that are shaded by overhangs. The owners described how they considered installing double paned glass but found it would not fit into the steel frame; the single paned glass makes the house hot in the summer and cold in the winter. Solar panels have been put on the roof along with replacing the asphalt and gravel material, popular at the time the house was constructed, with white foam.When the current owners purchased the house in 1987, the previous owners had shared media coverage about the house with them. In 2013, the owner said to the local press, "I fell in love with the house. I saw it as a work of art."

Westlake High School (also known as Westlake High, Westlake, or WHS) is a public high school in the Westlake neighborhood of Thousand Oaks, in Ventura County, California. Westlake High School serves grades 9–12 in the Conejo Valley Unified School District. Middle schools that feed into Westlake include Colina Middle School and Los Cerritos Middle School. The first graduating class was the class of 1980. The first principal was William Albers. All students entering Westlake High School in 1979 signed a charter, which sits in the office today. Ron Lipari was the principal of WHS for 15 years. In 2015, Jason Branham was selected as the new principal.

Conejo Recreation and Park District (CRPD) is the park management agency for most of the parks in the Conejo Valley, California. Established in 1962, CRPD later established Conejo Open Space Conservation Agency (COSCA) in 1977 through a joint effort with the City of Thousand Oaks. COSCA administers over 15,000 acres of open space and 140 miles of trails, while CRPD administers over 50 community parks. In 2019, CRPD's annual operating budget was $20 million, of which about 70% comes from property taxes.It was previously headquartered in the historic 1910 Crowley House, which is City of Thousand Oaks Historical Landmark No. 7. However, CRPD is now housed near Hillcrest Center for the Arts.