Park in the structure off Dallas Drive, walk into the Kavli Theatre lobby for a Saturday matinee, and you are standing on sandstone tile in a building anchored twenty-two feet into volcanic rock. Nothing about the space suggests anything came before it. But for forty-three years, roughly where you are standing, or close enough to it, there were lion cages. Real ones, with real lions in them, and a woman named Mabel Stark walking tigers across a dirt midway a few hundred feet from where the box office now sits.
This is not a metaphor and it is not exaggeration for effect. Thousand Oaks City Hall and the Civic Arts Plaza occupy the former site of Jungleland USA, a 170-acre wild animal park that operated from 1926 until 1969. This year marks its 100th anniversary, and the Conejo Valley Historical Society is marking the centennial with an event at the Stagecoach Inn Museum this coming Friday, August 21. If you've lived here more than a few years, you've probably heard the broad strokes: lions, a theme park, something about MGM. The specifics are stranger, and better documented, than the version that usually gets passed around at dinner parties.
The Man Who Paid Fifty Dollars for the Land
Before it was ranch land or a lion farm, the property was part of Rancho El Conejo, a Spanish land grant. Egbert Starr Newbury bought 2,259 acres of it in 1874 and built a home there. A drought in 1876 and 1877 bankrupted the Newbury family, and the land was foreclosed and sold to the Crowley family in 1887, who ranched it until 1922.
In 1925, a former animal trapper named Louis Goebel bought five lots of that former Newbury and Crowley land for fifty dollars. Goebel had been working at Universal Studios' animal compound when the studio decided to close its own operation and offload its animals. Accounts differ slightly on the exact founding number: a Ventura County historical marker states Goebel established his lion farm a year later with seven lions and a few smaller animals, while other sources put the founding group at five lions bought directly from Universal. Either way, within a year Goebel had built what he called Goebel's Lion Farm, training animals for Hollywood and renting them out to studios shooting on location nearby.
Travelers driving along what was then Ventura Boulevard started stopping to look at the lions from the road. Goebel noticed, and by 1929 he had opened the property to the public as a theme park.
Who Actually Lived Here
At its peak, the compound held elephants, lions, tigers, hippos, camels, llamas, giraffes, orangutans, chimpanzees, and more, spread across elephant rides, tortoise rides, ducky boat rides, a miniature steam train called the Jungle Flyer, and for a stretch, a sky tram. Several of its residents became genuine celebrities in their own right:
- The MGM mascot known on screen as Leo the Lion, whose actual name according to Stagecoach Inn Museum records was Jackie
- Mister Ed, the talking horse from the television series of the same name
- Bimbo, the elephant from the Circus Boy television show
- Tamba, the chimpanzee who appeared in the Jungle Jim films
Mabel Stark, billed as the world's only woman tiger trainer, ran shows on what was called the Great White Stage. Movie stars including Clark Gable, Johnny Weissmuller, and Harold Lloyd came out to have their photos taken with the chimps and elephants. Productions filmed there over the decades included Birth of a Nation, Tarzan the Ape Man, Doctor Dolittle, and The Adventures of Robin Hood, along with an episode of the television series Route 66.
The name changed hands more than most people realize. Goebel sold the park in 1946 and it operated as the World Jungle Compound until 1955. In 1956 it was sold again, this time to a pair of 20th Century Fox executives, who renamed it Jungleland. When business slid over the following five years, Goebel bought it back in 1961.
What Actually Ended It
The standard explanation is that Disneyland opened in 1955 and drew the crowds away. That's part of it, but not the whole story. The construction of the Ventura Freeway rerouted travelers around the park instead of directly past it, cutting off the drive-by traffic that had built the business in the first place. Insurance for an open-cage zoo grew more expensive as animal welfare and public safety standards began to tighten industry-wide.
Then, in November 1966, a lion attacked the young son of actress Jayne Mansfield during a family visit. The boy survived, but the lawsuit and the publicity that followed were damaging, and Mansfield's death in a car accident the following summer kept the story in the news longer than the park could absorb.
In October 1969, the company that owned Jungleland declared bankruptcy and announced an auction. Over two days, the entire collection went under the hammer. Lions and tigers sold by the cage, elephants by the head, parrots by the lot. Buyers included circuses, private collectors, other zoos, and, according to accounts from the time, ordinary Conejo Valley residents who left with things like a small alligator. Actress Tippi Hedren bought several of the big cats at that auction. They became the founding animals of her Shambala Preserve, which still operates today north of Los Angeles in Acton.
From a Lion Cage to Ten Stories of Sandstone
The buildings were torn down. Goebel kept ownership of the underlying land for a time before it was sold to the city, and over the next twenty five years the site became what it is today: the Civic Arts Plaza, city hall, the library, and the surrounding civic center, along with The Lakes shopping and dining complex nearby.
The Civic Arts Plaza itself opened in 1994 at a construction cost of $63.8 million, designed by AIA Gold Medal architect Antoine Predock in a blend of postmodern and modern styles. The 210,000 square foot building rises ten stories at its highest point and drops twenty-two feet below ground at its lowest, anchored into volcanic rock. It's a genuinely striking piece of architecture, and almost nobody walking into a show there connects it to the fact that the ground beneath their seats once held a working menagerie.
The only physical traces left on the site itself are modest: a small historical marker recognized by both Ventura County and the City of Thousand Oaks, and a plaque near the Civic Arts Plaza noting Goebel's name. The fuller record, photographs, props, and artifacts, lives a few miles away at the Stagecoach Inn Museum in Newbury Park, which maintains a permanent Jungleland exhibit drawn largely from the Conejo Through the Lens collection at the Thousand Oaks Library.
This isn't the first time the city has paused to mark the story. In 2016, on the park's 90th anniversary, the Civic Arts Plaza itself hosted a temporary exhibit inside the Kavli Theatre, with Jungleland artifacts on loan from the museum displayed alongside animal-themed work by local artists, running through the following January. The building where the lions used to be quite literally hosted a show about the lions.
How to Hear the Rest of It This Week
The Conejo Valley Historical Society, which operates the Stagecoach Inn Museum at 51 S. Ventu Park Road, is holding its annual La Fiesta del Triunfo this Friday, August 21, from 5 to 9 p.m., built around Jungleland's centennial. The evening includes the crowning of this year's Don and Doña Triunfo, a tradition the society has kept since 1965, one year after it formed to save the Stagecoach Inn itself from demolition. Expect live music, dinner, tours of the museum grounds, and the society's annual silent auction, which helps fund the upkeep of the historic buildings on the property.
If Friday evening doesn't work, the museum's regular hours are Wednesdays and Saturdays from 1 to 4 p.m., and the Jungleland exhibit is part of the standing collection, not a one-time display. The Stagecoach Inn Museum itself has its own century-plus backstory worth knowing: built in 1876 as the Grand Union Hotel, a working stagecoach stop between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, and one of the few structures in the Conejo Valley old enough to have witnessed the entire arc of this story, from before Goebel bought his first five lots to well after the last lion left town.
For anyone who wants the primary source detail on the marker itself, the Jungleland historical marker record is documented publicly, and the site's fuller history is also covered on Wikipedia's Jungleland USA page.
None of this changes anything about your Tuesday commute down Thousand Oaks Boulevard. But the next time you're sitting in the Kavli Theatre waiting for the house lights to dim, it's worth knowing what was roaring there a hundred years before you.
Rick Pena has spent his life in this part of Ventura County and pays attention to the stories that make these neighborhoods worth knowing, not just the listings in them. If you're curious about a specific street, a specific school boundary, or just want to talk about what's changed and what hasn't, Rick Pena would love to hear from you. Let's Connect.
