Longtime Residents of Canoga Park Say They Stand by Their Community Despite the Stinging Defection of Affluent West Hills : Pride and Prejudice

Barbara and Carl Hopfinger were thrilled and proud to move to a brand-new tract home on the western edge of Canoga Park 26 years ago. It was nothing fancy, but it had four bedrooms and a little yard, nice neighbors and an affordable price tag of $19,800.

There was only one problem.

“You really had to be careful on your way home at night that it was your door you entered,” Barbara Hopfinger said. “I think there must be 4,000 homes like this. They all looked alike.”

The tract homes still stand, although by now their owners have individualized them with decorative touches of brick, stone, paint and landscaping. But the neighborhood has a new name: West Hills.

Nevertheless, Hopfinger, 50, an elementary school teacher and the mother of two, resolutely refuses to call it anything but Canoga Park.

“I’m proud to live in Canoga Park. What’s wrong with it?” she asked. “Perhaps it’s not as elegant as Woodland Hills or Sherman Oaks, but I’ve produced two wonderful children from Canoga Park. The markets have fed my family. The shops have clothed my children. It will always be Canoga Park to me.”

75th Birthday This Year

Aging, fading, proud Canoga Park ushered in its 75th birthday this year by absorbing a kick in the teeth. What was once a pastoral West San Fernando Valley farming community called Owensmouth now finds itself at a crossroads, forced to face the future minus a chunk of its newest, most affluent neighborhoods.

The defection has longtime Canoga Park residents stepping forward to defend their hometown as a pleasant if not prestigious neighborhood of people ranging from newlyweds lured by moderately priced homes to Latino families who have deep roots in the community.

One of the oldest communities in the San Fernando Valley, Canoga Park took a verbal battering and shrank in size by nearly a third in January after homeowners on its hilly western flank persuaded City Council members Joy Picus and Hal Bernson to give them the newer and supposedly more chic name of West Hills.

Seven months later, Picus is still being hounded by others intent on shedding the name of Canoga Park, which they say conjures up images of a seedy downtown area filled with pawn shops and porno palaces, aging subdivisions and a crime-ridden barrio.

“Canoga Park has a bad reputation. There’s a stigma to the name Canoga Park,” said Robert Hechtman, leader of a group of Canoga Park residents who want to be included within West Hills’ official boundaries.

‘Really the Pits’

“Downtown Canoga Park is really the pits--a haven for derelicts and strange people,” said Irene Friedman, a 24-year Canoga Park resident. “You avoid it like the plague because it’s disgusting.”

Canoga Park’s defenders acknowledge the community’s flaws but praise its economic, racial, cultural and commercial diversity, its shopping centers, service industries, strong community identification and friendly, hard-working people.

As bright signs of the future, they point to new condominiums, apartments and office buildings sprouting in Canoga Park’s barrio and to recent multimillion-dollar renovations at Fallbrook Mall and Topanga Plaza. A historic fire station has been saved from demolition and turned into a community center and Chamber of Commerce headquarters. A beautification campaign is being planned by the chamber for downtown Canoga Park.

“We have our ghettos and we have our Pussycat theaters, but we also have our lovely elegant areas,” said Chamber of Commerce secretary Gilda Ban. “It’s got a lot of history, a lot of warmth.”

Picus, who represents the West Valley, views Canoga Park as the “quintessential suburban American town. I think it represents the essence of the California dream that ordinary people who didn’t aspire to great wealth could come to California and buy a piece of land and raise a family there,” she said.

The result of the split may prove only psychological--both Canoga Park and West Hills after all are merely names that describe communities of Los Angeles. Moreover, the West Hills Property Owners Assn. has joined the Canoga Park Chamber of Commerce and pledged to work together to achieve common goals.

The leaders of the West Hills movement say they are not snubbing Canoga Park but simply seeking to differentiate their mostly hillside residential community from Canoga Park’s flatland residential and industrial sections.

But many Canoga Park residents are stung by the West Hills exodus.

Attitude Called Snobby

“I was very incensed by the attitude of the West Hillers. I thought their attitude was very snobby and not considerate of the future and the past and the heritage of this town,” said Leona Gschwind, 86, who came to Canoga Park in 1926 when it was a wind-blown expanse of lima bean and alfalfa fields with a few tiny frame houses and some small buildings. “I’m proud of Canoga Park. It has meaning.”

“We’re very happy here. We’ve decided even if we won the lottery, we would stay here,” said Betty Green, an elementary school teacher who lives in the barrio. “We would put in a pool, we would retire from our jobs, but we would stay in Canoga.”

Canoga Park is not a community of superlatives. Its neighbors to the north and south have the tall, gleaming buildings, neatly kept commercial parks and elegant custom homes. Canoga Park is largely composed of a hodgepodge of business and retail shops and thousands of tract houses that sprang up during building booms of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

Canoga Park is instead a city of contrasts. Casting about for a slogan a few years ago, the Chamber of Commerce considered the moniker “From Tacos to Rockets--Canoga Park Has It All.”

A case in point: Day workers, many of them illegal immigrants from Mexico and South and Central America, congregate along Canoga Avenue each day hoping to find temporary jobs in construction or landscaping. Only blocks away, in a cluster of low-slung blue buildings, some of the nation’s leading scientists work at Rockwell International’s Rocketdyne division. The Canoga Park-based company has built and designed the engines for almost every American rocket program and for the space shuttle, as well as segments for the MX nuclear missile program.

Along Sherman Way in downtown Canoga Park, an upscale clientele from as far away as Santa Barbara and Laguna Beach come to browse in a two-block cluster of nearly 20 antique stores. The shops, one of the largest conglomerations of antique stores in the region, seem to have resurrected downtown from its near-ghost-town status after fancy new malls siphoned off shoppers in the late 1960s.

But a block away, customers stream into a tattoo parlor. An adult theater is showing “Nasty Nurses,” and a resale clothing store advertises “Nothing Over $5.” Men in a darkened bar watch bikini-clad women dance.

Another block away, in Canoga Park’s barrio, gang members and drug dealers selling heroin live side-by-side with hard-working, low-income families crammed into small frame houses, some of which were built in the early 1900s and have been occupied by members of the same family ever since. The earliest inhabitants of the homes worked the farms of Canoga Park’s earliest days.

‘Two Different Worlds’

In some senses, Canoga Park is like “two different worlds,” said Los Angeles Police Detective Ed Pikor.

“You’ve got a poor Canoga Park and a wealthy Canoga Park,” said Grieg Smith, top deputy to Councilman Bernson.

William F. Vietinghoff, former president of the Chamber of Commerce, acknowledged that the community needs a face lift, but he praised its diversity.

“You’ve got lots of small, light industry . . . not cosmetically attractive businesses, but let’s face it, they employ people, they provide needed services,” Vietinghoff said. “Say I need tires for my car, a gate for my fence--there’s so many places here to get things like that. When you look at business directories, Canoga Park keeps popping up all the time.”

“Business is good in Canoga Park,” agreed Jack Dinsfriend, chamber director. “This is a very, very busy, thriving community.”

There are 6,700 licensed businesses in Canoga Park, 38 of which have more than 100 employees, said chamber secretary Ban. The largest, Rocketdyne, employs more than 7,000 people, and is planning to hire another 1,000 during the next few years to build engines for the space shuttle, Atlas and Delta rocket programs and power systems for a space station planned by NASA.

Other large Canoga Park companies include Hughes Missile Systems Group, a manufacturer of tactical guided missile systems that employs 3,400 people, and Redken Laboratories, the largest U.S. manufacturer of hair- and skin-care products sold only through beauty salons, which has 540 employees. Mission Foods, one of the country’s largest suppliers of fresh tortillas, employs 600, Ban said.

Canoga Park’s other great strength, its residents say, is its people.

“I hear people talking that they’ve lived in their community for 20 years and they still don’t know their next-door neighbor. I’m the newcomer, and I’ve been here since 1974. We’ve basically had the same neighbors for all those years, neighbors I can trust and rely on. I feel much more secure in this neighborhood than I hear other people talk about in their neighborhoods,” Green said.

She said neighbors “see you painting your house and they come along and start talking and visiting, and pretty soon they have a paint brush in their hand. So I go to the store and buy some hamburgers and beer, and pretty soon, you have a barbecue.”

“I love it out here. I’ve never been in a nicer neighborhood,” said Isabelle Campo, 57, a 12-year Canoga Park resident who proudly displays an “I Canoga Park” bumper sticker on her Ford station wagon. “People are friendly. They remember your name.”

Canoga Park’s barrio, bounded by Topanga Canyon Boulevard on the west, De Soto Avenue on the east, Roscoe Boulevard on the north and Vanowen Street on the south, “is the center of the Hispanic community in the West Valley,” said Los Angeles police Officer Fred Romero, who has worked for several years in Project Amigo, a police outreach program in the barrio.

Two gangs, the Alabama Street Gang and Canoga Boys, operate in the barrio, selling heroin, stealing cars and carrying out armed robberies and burglaries, Pikor said. The gangs have been less active in recent years, partly because their leaders have died or been jailed, police said. There hasn’t been a gang-related homicide in Canoga Park since 1985, said Lt. Bill Gaida.

Police statistics show that Canoga Park has no unusual crime problems in comparison with the rest of the Valley, said Capt. John Higgins.

Gorge Castro, 35, a barrio resident, said he is “content and thankful to the Lord” to live in Canoga Park and have a $7-an-hour job with a swimming pool construction company. On Saturdays, Castro earns another $70 to $100 in his neighborhood by selling paletas, ice cream bars, from a pushcart. He sends part of his earnings home to his wife and four children in Jalisco, Guadalajara. “All I want is to work,” he said.

Most barrio residents are similar to Castro--hard-working, newly arrived illegal residents who “are lonely for their families” and “working long hours for short pay,” Romero said. Some live in homes with hard-packed dirt floors and keep chickens, roosters and other animals in their yards, just as they would in their homelands, Romero said.

But the barrio “is a piece of cake compared to other parts of the city. This is a piece of heaven,” he said. “I mean, it is the west end of the Valley. Living out here--even for the poor people--is nicer than other parts of town, like Watts.”

Many Canoga Park residents believe that the West Hills exodus was fueled in part by bigotry. Hopfinger, for one, attributes the split to “elitism, with maybe a smattering of racism.” She believes West Hills residents “are trying to disassociate themselves from the minority part of Canoga Park and from the downtrodden.”

The 1980 U.S. Census, the most recent available, showed Canoga Park with a population of 84,185 people, with 89% white, 13% Hispanic, 4% Asian and 6% other. Blacks made up less than 2% of Canoga Park’s population. By contrast, the census showed 32,370 people living in the portion of Canoga Park that is now West Hills, with 92% white, 7% Hispanic, 1% black, 4% Asian and 3% other.

A 1984 Los Angeles County census listed Canoga Park’s population--before the West Hills split--as 131,736, Ban said. Los Angeles police and chamber officials say there has been a large influx of Indians, Iranians, Orientals and Latinos since the census.

Statistics also point to West Hills’ affluence. At the time of the 1980 census, the median home value for the West Hills area was $123,465, contrasted with $98,837 for Canoga Park. The average household income in West Hills was $31,256, contrasted with $23,992 in Canoga Park.

Only 1.7% of the houses in Canoga Park had a value of $200,000 or more at the time of the 1980 census, contrasted with 5.4% of the houses in West Hills. At the lower end of the spectrum, 27% of the West Hills homes and 51% of the Canoga Park homes were valued at $100,000 or less in 1980.

Families constitute 83% of Canoga Park’s population and 90% of West Hills’ population. Just more than half, or 52%, of Canoga Park residents own their residences, contrasted with 72% in West Hills. Fifty-three percent of West Hills residents and 45% of Canoga Park residents attended college, the census showed.

Land of Opportunity

Since its early days, Canoga Park has been billed as a land of opportunity.

The community was originally part of the San Fernando Mission lands sold by then-Gov. Pio Pico to the San Fernando Farm Homestead Assn., according to information in San Fernando Valley Historical Society files. In 1876, the land became part of the Workman Ranch, one of seven large ranches that made up the Valley.

In 1910, a syndicate called Los Angeles Suburban Homes bought 47,500 acres of Valley land to subdivide into small farms and home sites in what is now Van Nuys, Reseda (then called Marion) and Canoga Park, then called Owensmouth, after the Owens River aqueduct that delivered water from the Owens Valley.

Owensmouth was founded March 30, 1912, and billed as “the biggest new town in the Valley--where a small investment now means big profits.” The City of Los Angeles annexed it in 1917.

The town became Canoga Park in 1931 after Mary Orcutt, leader of the Canoga Park Women’s Club and wife of the petroleum geologist credited with discovering a giant sloth in the La Brea Tar Pits, led a petition campaign to drop the cumbersome name of Owensmouth. City officials relented, but postal authorities refused to grant the name change until Orcutt’s friend, President Herbert Hoover, stepped in, historical society files show.

Some say the name Canoga comes from an Indian word for water, because the area was once a watering hole for Indians, Franciscan fathers and Spanish soldiers. Others claim it means “hot hole.” Still others say the name was filched from the town of Canoga, N.Y..

Gschwind, who came to Canoga Park 61 years ago to teach English in its high school, remembers it as a friendly, quiet little agricultural town. The community’s social life revolved around the pool hall and American Legion Hall.

Downtown, located then as now along Sherman Way, had one good business block, a few drug stores, and in 1930 a movie theater, Gschwind said. Arcades shaded its sidewalks until they were later torn down after a fire, said Marion Lederer, wife of retired actor Francis Lederer, the longtime honorary mayor of Canoga Park.

“We didn’t know the word smog, “ said Gschwind. “We had fog, but all I remember was dust. We had the most awful dust storms. I hated it so. It always blew. The winds came, and the fields were plowed, and there weren’t many houses to stop it. The wind sometimes blew so hard that you couldn’t see your hand in front of you. I remember the first year we were married. I tried to make a Thanksgiving dinner, and I couldn’t get the pies made because the dust blew in.

“The alfalfa fields would smell so good. Then fruit trees and apricots and walnuts began to take over,” she said. Until the 1950s, Canoga Park stayed fairly rural, with cattle, sheep, and horses, crops and citrus trees.

“The great bulk of development in Canoga Park occurred 25 years ago with the movement to California and west across the Valley,” Picus said. After World War II, servicemen came to California, saw it, liked it, went home and married their sweethearts and moved to places like Canoga Park, said John Caulkins, president of the Chamber of Commerce.

‘Upstanding Citizens’

“Land was cheap and rentals were inexpensive, and so it became a place where the workers came and the little houses sold, and it has grown,” said Ban. “Those sorts of people are really the backbone of Canoga Park, nice upstanding citizens.”

Cheap land prices brought industry as well. In 1955, what was then North American Aviation purchased a 56-acre bean field and built Rocketdyne. Canoga Park’s population boomed from 8,000 in 1950 to 25,000 in 1954, chamber figures show.

In 1964, Topanga Plaza, the first two-story, air-conditioned enclosed mall in the western United States, opened where the Warner Movie Ranch once stood, luring tour buses full of gawkers. Topanga and Fallbrook Square, now Fallbrook Mall, enticed stores and buyers away from downtown Canoga Park, starting a decline from which it has yet to fully recover.

One day, “instead of being a small little darling town,” Canoga Park found itself “small and little and not modern enough,” Ban said.

Today, major construction is going on all around Canoga Park but not within its boundaries. Warner Center’s tall buildings and hotels are creeping northward from Woodland Hills, causing the value of nearby Canoga Park land to increase.

As the land values increase, the small, ramshackle houses of the barrio are being sold and torn down for more upscale apartments, condominiums and small office buildings. As a result, the barrio is shrinking. “I call it the recycling of Canoga Park. Lots of people have said Warner Center is too expensive, but they want to be close to it,” Picus said.

“The impact ripples through Canoga Park because the secondary businesses that service the major tenants of Warner Center want to be close,” said Larry Calemine, owner of Urban Realty Co., which manages Warner family real estate holdings in Warner Center.

Elias Carbajal, who operates a ceramics shop in Canoga Park’s barrio after moving from Tijuana 15 years ago, said a real estate agent recently offered him $110,000 for his house. He purchased the house two years ago for $70,000. Another offered him $125,000, then upped the offer to $140,000, Carbajal said.

Aside from speculative apartment or condominium buildings, there is no major business or residential construction under way in Canoga Park, Vietinghoff said. Calemine said he does not foresee intensive high-rise development in Canoga Park, where zoning laws limit buildings to three stories and there is virtually no available undeveloped land.

Nevertheless, Canoga Park residents are wary of Warner Center’s intensive growth.

“I hope Canoga Park doesn’t get squashed between the Chatsworth-Northridge-Woodland Hills growth pushing in from all sides,” said Tarky Hart, owner of Canoga Park Stationers.

Encroaching development in the barrio is displacing dozens of senior citizens and Latino families who can’t afford the new, higher rents, said Norma Solis, assistant director of Centro de Amistad, a barrio-based nonprofit center for mental-health education and dealing with alcohol and drug abuse.

Housing Recycling

Observers say a generational recycling is going on within the residential community as well, as young families buy up Canoga Park’s moderately priced houses.

“For a while, it became a neighborhood of older people. Now, we have roller skates on the sidewalks, little bicycles on the street,” said real estate agent Monroe Epstein, a Canoga Park resident who wants to be part of West Hills because he fears his real estate values will go down.

Epstein’s fear is common among Canoga Park residents, but observers disagree whether there are serious grounds for concern. Some say the name change has already inflated West Hills home values by $10,000 to $15,000. Others, like Picus, claim the West Hills name makes no difference whatsoever.

“Anyone who would pay $10,000 more because it says West Hills instead of Canoga Park is a fool, that’s all,” Picus said.

“It may have a psychological effect” on Canoga Park residents, who “feel that they’re being overlooked, being snubbed,” Calemine said. “But it won’t reduce the value of the existing homes in Canoga Park, and it won’t reduce the amount of commercial business that’s done in Canoga Park.”

The challenge for Canoga Park is to preserve its identity while struggling to cope with the loss of its newest, most affluent sector, to deal with encroaching development of Warner Center and other areas, and to reverse its negative image.

James R. Gary of Woodland Hills, the owner of a prominent Valley real estate firm, said, “I wouldn’t worry too much about Canoga Park. I think it’s going to do quite nicely.”

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Canoga Park West Hills Population 81,185 32,370 White 88.4% 91.5% Black 1.5% 1.4% Asian 4.2% 4.1% Other 6% 3% Hispanic 13.3% 7%

Employment by Occupation

Canoga Park West Hills Executive/Administrative 13.5% 17.7% Professional 13.5% 16.5% Technical 3.9% 4.2% Sales 12.3% 12.7% Administrative Support 20.3% 18.8% Services 9.9% 9.5% Production/Crafts 13.7% 11.7% Operations/Labor 11.9% 8.3% Farm 1% 0.6%

Family Income

Canoga Park West Hills Under $7,500 13.8% 8.1% $7,500--$14,999 19.5% 13.9% $15,000--$24,999 25.2% 21.1% $25,000--$34,999 20.9% 21.7% $35,000--$49,999 14.4% 20.9% $50,000--$74,999 5.1% 11.6% $75,000 and up 1.3% 2.7%

School Completed

Canoga Park West Hills 0-8 years 9.7% 4.8% 9-11 years 10.9% 9.5% 12 years 34.1% 32.8% 13-15 years 25.7% 27.3% 16 and up years 19.7% 25.6%

COMPARING COMMUNITIES

1980 census figures that reflect current community boundaries

Average Median Household Home Income Value Canoga Park $23,992 $98,837 West Hills $31,253 $123,465

Selected Other Valley Communities

Average Median Household Home Income Value Burbank $21,678 $94,418 Encino $38,691 $205,832 North Hollywood $20,235 $96,836 Pacoima $20,235 $69,512 Reseda $22,648 $89,656 Sherman Oaks $34,281 $192,649 Van Nuys $20,001 $99,046 Woodland Hills $41,947 $162,265

Source: 1980 U.S. Census figures