Topanga Canyon’s Squatters Evicted to Make Way for Club

Cultures collided Friday when residents of Topanga Canyon’s last major commune were evicted by the developer of the area’s first proposed country club.

Los Angeles County deputy marshals routed about a dozen persons from cabins and camper trailers at the 406-acre Summerhill Ranch near the northern edge of the canyon.

The ranch’s owner indicated that the ramshackle encampment would be temporarily replaced by a tree farm until permanent development plans are drawn up for the land, which is across Topanga Canyon Boulevard from his Montevideo Country Club project.

Country club developer Christopher R. Wojciechowski, who purchased the ranch last year, traveled up one-lane Santa Maria Road two miles south of Woodland Hills to oversee the eviction.

His lawyer called the ranch dwellers squatters. But leaders of several mountain ecology groups offered a different assessment.

“They’re the last of the hippies,” said Sue Nelson, who heads the Friends of the Santa Monica Mountains. “This is the end of an era.”

“It’s not like the 1960s any more up here,” said Jan Moore, president of the Topanga Town Council. “The canyon’s moving upscale.”

Personality Changing

Although Topanga Canyon is the site of a controversial nudist colony, hundreds of modest cabins and scattered transients who sleep in vans, its hills are increasingly being covered with luxury homes and its meandering streets with expensive cars.

Bob Bates, chairman of the Topanga Assn. for a Scenic Community, said Wojciechowski’s ranch development could spell doom for one of the canyon’s richest archeological areas.

His group went to court Wednesday in hopes of stalling the eviction and the tree farm development until archeologists check for evidence that the site was a major Chumash Indian burial ground. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Jerome K. Fields refused to issue a preliminary injunction.

Ranch resident Samantha Gann, who said she has lived on the site “off and on for 18 years,” was in tears as Sgt. Gary Hiraiwa, one of the marshals, told her she must leave.

“It’s a political battle and I’m stuck in the middle,” said Gann, who said she is a clothes designer. “I have no place else to go. It’s impossible to move 18 years worth of stuff in one day. It’s not fair for you guys to do this.”

Donna Simon, who moved to the compound last year with her husband and two sons, said they hoped to find a new place in the canyon to stay once they got their trailer packed, hooked up and towed away.

15 Days for Possessions

Wojciechowski and the marshals huddled privately with Gann, Simon and other residents before announcing that the residents must vacate the ranch immediately but would have 15 days to remove their possessions.

County animal control Lt. Martin Broad said Gann would be given 30 days to find permanent homes for 11 dogs and about 25 cats living at the commune. A county ordinance prohibits possession of more than three dogs or cats without a kennel license, he said.

Wojciechowski’s lawyer, Robert D. Crockett, said it was not known whether the 50-year-old ranch house that served as the commune’s main building would be saved or torn down. The commune may once have housed up to 50 persons, he said.

“If there are any Indian ruins or relics, we plan to do whatever possible to protect them,” Crockett said.

Gann said Wojciechowski won’t have to look far.

“The house is on top of a burial site,” Gann said. “People may laugh, but I’ve heard the spirits. On New Year’s Eve, I saw them.”

Of future development: “God willing, it will be haunted,” she said.