They Call It Lake Superior : Valley’s Miles of Unpaved Roads Turn to Soup

Superior Street isn’t.

It’s an inferior street in Northridge where it disappears into a 20-foot-wide, water-filled pothole in front of Pam Hobb’s house.

“It’s horrible. Everybody around here calls that puddle ‘Lake Superior,’ ” Hobb said Friday from the steps of the small home that she and her husband have rented since July.

Hobb and her neighbors on the 17700 block of Superior Street are among a dwindling number of San Fernando Valley residents who live on genuine country roads--dirt lanes that somehow have remained unpaved in the face of surrounding urbanization.

“I got stuck last week and had to wade out to call my father-in-law to pull my car out. It wasn’t fun,” she said. “I asked myself how in the world people around here have put up with this all these years.”

For some who live on dirt roads that meander through every corner of the Valley, it’s more a matter of preserving their little lanes than putting up with them.

“It’s a great place to live. It’s a great street,” said Tracy Huber, who has lived on the unpaved 8400 block of Eton Avenue in Canoga Park for 15 years.

“The only problem is when people come speeding by and stir up dust. Then, everyone just turns on their sprinklers and waters the road down.”

Huber said Friday that her neighborhood has rejected several efforts over the years to pave the street. “Most people here like it this way, without curbs and street lights,” she said.

Ditto for residents of the 22000 block of Tulsa Street in Chatsworth.

Julie Cressall and her 2 1/2-year-old daughter, Miranda, leisurely rode a horse named Gumby down the street Friday without worrying about speeding cars. Potholes and ruts were keeping motorists under 10 m.p.h.

“There are advantages,” Cressall said. “You don’t have to worry about your dogs and kids. And you can ride your horse. I grew up on a dirt road here in Chatsworth and had a ball.”

But Cressall acknowledged that now, “as an adult, it’s sometimes inconvenient” to live on a dirt road. She said traveling in rainy weather up unpaved Farralone Avenue toward her house can be “like driving up a riverbed.”

No Bed of Roses

That is no bed of roses, either, complain others who travel the Valley’s country roads.

“The rainy season is always terrible,” said Carla Lashbrook, who for 12 years has lived along an eight-block, unpaved section of White Oak Avenue in Northridge.

“It’s a pain. It’s a bummer. We’ve had people come and ask to use the phone when their cars have been stranded,” Lashbrook said Friday. “Everybody around here who has horses doesn’t want it paved. But we’d vote yes if we had a chance.”

Increasingly, say Los Angeles city street engineers, residents of unpaved Valley streets are doing just that. Homeowners can petition the city to form a neighborhood assessment district and pay for the paving themselves. The city does not pay for construction of new streets.

“I got a call just this morning from someone up on Hillcroft Drive in Chatsworth asking about an assessment district,” Ed Itagaki, head of street assessments in the Valley for the city Department of Public Works, said Friday.

Most Want District

As it turned out, the majority of property owners along that street agreed several years ago to establish such an improvement district. The city is preparing paving plans and expects the job to be done next year, Itagaki said.

The petition-to-pave process takes three to five years. The cost to a homeowner with a typical 50-foot frontage along a dirt road averages about $3,000 to $5,000, officials said.

Larry Burks, division engineer for the Department of Public Works, said Los Angeles has required for more than 50 years that subdividers building four or more houses at a time pave streets.

He said the city does not keep statistics on the number of unpaved roads. City work crews struggle to keep them passable, Burks said.

“These unpaved sections are a real maintenance problem. We send graders out to regrade and fill in potholes because the city faces a liability problem. If there’s a bad pothole, it can wreck a car,” he said.

The bulldozers had not reached the unpaved intersection of Kinzie Street and White Oak Avenue in Northridge on Friday, however. Bill Wright used a tape measure to calculate that one water-filled rut next to the corner was 27 inches deep.

‘It’s Like a River’

“When it rains, you could fish in this. It’s like a river, filled from side to side with water. You can see chunks of asphalt come tumbling by,” Wright said.

In Woodland Hills, to the delight of the occupants of several expensive hillside homes, maintenance crews had smoothed out a 100-yard-long unpaved section of the 5000 block of Campo Road by late Friday.

The 5400 block of Monte Street in Sylmar was also in relatively good shape--although homeowner Nobuko Miura was not all that impressed with its bumpy condition.

Miura’s family has lived 16 years on a street that is half-paved: the asphalt stops at her property line.

“It’s a mess all the time. There’s mud in the winter and dust in the summer,” she said.

One block away, Jim Bernasconi was hosing off his paved driveway and letting the water run into unpaved Dorian Street.

“I have to do this two or three times a week to get rid of the dust,” he said. “People race up and down this street like it was a freeway.”