Wrecking Crew Dealt Landmark the Greater Blow

The 1971 earthquake’s epicenter was only 18 miles from Canoga Park.

It took 52 months for the temblor’s biggest jolt to hit the community, however.

That came the day a wrecking crew came to town to demolish a pair of landmark Canoga Park High School classroom buildings that had been deemed irreparably damaged by the quake.

For 45 years, the graceful Greek-styled buildings had stood behind a broad green lawn at the corner of Topanga Canyon Boulevard and Vanowen Street. Column-fronted and topped with tile, they looked more like an Ivy League college than a public high school.

“It was like nothing else,” remembers Mary Ann Swanson, an English teacher at Canoga Park High since 1959. “It reminded me of a beautiful Greek temple.”

The demolition experts had come to the school in June, 1975, expecting to find a teetering old wreck on the verge of toppling under its own weight onto hollow, decorative columns.

Instead, they discovered that Canoga Park High was as sturdy as it was stately.

‘Hollow’ Columns Proved Solid

The “hollow” columns turned out to be solid concrete laced with steel reinforcing rods. Workmen resorted to jackhammers to chip away at the two-story structures that the experts had feared would collapse if shaken. It was more a dismantling than a demolition.

That made it all the more painful for students, alumni and Canoga Park residents, who had lobbied to preserve their one-of-a-kind high school after nervous Los Angeles school district officials decided to replace the high school’s old buildings.

About 10,000 people had signed a save-the-school petition circulated by a community group. Students had talked of chaining themselves to the pillars to prevent the school from being razed.

The demolition order was puzzling to many because the two old buildings had apparently ridden out the Feb. 9, 1971, earthquake that rumbled across the Valley at dawn and destroyed hundreds of other buildings.

Teachers who reported to work later that morning found cracked plaster, broken glass and books strewn about classrooms--nothing worse than the kind of damage suffered that day by thousands of other Valley structures.

The cracks came under special scrutiny from state safety experts and local structural engineers, however. The two buildings had been built in 1930, three years before tough earthquake safety standards for public buildings had been spelled out by the state’s Field Act.

Teachers were relieved when the experts decided a few days later that Canoga Park High was safe and could be reopened for regular classroom use.

But Los Angeles Unified School District officials changed their minds when aftershocks continued to rattle the Valley. A month after the earthquake, officials decided that Canoga Park High might not survive another big earthquake. The two old buildings were ordered evacuated.

During a three-day period, the school’s 14,000-book library was moved to the student cafeteria from one of the condemned buildings. School counselors and attendance office workers were moved into the dining room next to the books.

The principal and school deans commandeered mathematics classrooms in a newer campus building for their offices. The teacher’s cafeteria was turned into a classroom and the men’s faculty lounge became the nurse’s office. Portable classrooms were trucked in and scattered about the campus.

The condemned buildings were padlocked and fenced off from students. Immediately, the Save Canoga Park High campaign was launched by students and by a lawyer whose Topanga Canyon Boulevard office overlooked the distinctive buildings.

But interest lagged as time passed, students graduated and the school district took no steps to tear the old school down. When the school board finally did vote in late 1973 to replace the buildings with something newer, citizens could only ask that the graceful front columns be preserved and somehow incorporated into the new buildings’ design.

They weren’t.

“They hired architects. And architects want to do new things--they don’t want to duplicate something that’s already been done,” Canoga Park High dean Martin Denyer recalls.

Denyer said he watched the demolition in anguish during the summer of 1975.

“It was a tough job to tear it down. They had a hell of a job taking it down, honest. I don’t think it would have ever fallen down,” he said.

Government teacher Dale Daily was teaching a summer school class that year. He took his students outside to watch when the demolition started.

“You think of a building collapsing. But it wasn’t that way,” Daily, a Canoga Park High faculty member for 27 years, said. “They had a horrible time getting those walls down.

“You could see the cracks after the earthquake. But you can see cracks in walls now without any earthquake. I’d feel safer in those old buildings--or just as safe--as I feel in the new ones.”

When the wreckers removed the 16 Greek columns from the front of the two buildings, they were broken up.

The top sections of seven pillars were loaded on pallets and dragged to the rear of the campus, behind the school’s football field. Eight smaller 10-foot columns that had lined a walkway between the two condemned buildings were also saved.

There was no room for the columns in Canoga Park High’s replacement buildings.

“At the board of education meeting when they approved the new buildings, one board member said it looked like an aircraft hanger on stilts,” said journalism teacher Mike Wiener, who attended the session. “Kids say it looks like San Quentin.”

Morris Fields, a Canoga Park High counselor for 30 years, said the new building reminds him of a “1938 Art Deco-style radio” with its curving, windowless walls.

“The first time I went back to Canoga Park and saw the new building, I was in shock,” said Lynn Ceresino Neault, a 1972 Canoga Park High graduate who was active in the save-the-school campaign.

“It looks like any other high school now. The ambiance is gone. The history is gone. It doesn’t seem right,” she said Saturday by telephone from San Diego, where she now works as a community college administrator.

Canoga Park High Principal Ted Siegel said officials have no plans for the souvenir pillar pieces that are still stacked behind the football field.

Present-day students who have only seen pictures of the old buildings can catch a glimpse of the column sections each time they play on the gym field or watch a football game.

“I think they should put them up on display someplace in the school,” said Mike Sherill, a 10th-grader who was only a year old when the earthquake sealed Canoga Park High’s fate. “But I can’t think of a place they should go.”