1936 Council Action Leaves Streets in Public Limbo

Something strange is happening on the hillside streets that snake through the canyons of the San Fernando Valley and West Los Angeles.

The streets are disappearing from public use.

No one seems to know exactly why. But it apparently stems from an action taken by the Los Angeles City Council 52 years ago.

At that time, the council withdrew from public use nearly 200 streets in Benedict Canyon, Laurel Canyon, Beverly Glen and other affluent hillside areas.

The 1936 ordinance allows streets to be withdrawn from public use if they are considered substandard or potentially dangerous. The council’s action was designed to reduce maintenance costs and restrict building in the lush canyons, neither of which occurred.

But a court decision in the late 1940s found that even if the city withdrew the streets from public use, it was still required to maintain them and was still liable for street-related accidents. So, in 1951, the city returned some of the streets to public use.

Yet some of the small, orange signs announcing the withdrawal of the canyon streets--many of which don’t meet city size requirements and the majority of which are dead ends and cul-de-sacs--have been posted within the last few months.

City officials say they don’t know how many streets are not public thoroughfares because they don’t know how many of the streets were returned to public use in 1951. In addition, they say, the street closures are tabulated on a citywide basis and are not broken down by district.

Not surprisingly, because the appearance of the orange signs comes more than half a century after the original council action, residents are perplexed.

“All of a sudden you come home one day, and you find out that you can’t use your own road,” said attorney Barbara S. Blinderman, who lives in Benedict Canyon. “Then when you read the code, you find out it’s OK for you to use it, but people from the general public can’t. It’s absurd. No one seems to know what’s going on.”

Many canyon homeowners are concerned because they were never notified of the decision to withdraw the streets. They say that the decision could affect house prices because new buyers and developers would be wary of the street restriction.

Even some city officials admit that the sign saga is mysterious, but there are a few who can fill in pieces of the puzzle.

The office that has been posting the signs, the street maintenance bureau of the Department of Public Works, said it is just following orders from the city’s engineering division.

Larry Burks, deputy city engineer, said that the recent decision to remove streets from public use was based on problems with illegal dumping on the hillsides and with young adults using the isolated streets to have “boisterous parties.”

Several of the city workers posting the signs from Mt. Olympus to Sherman Oaks said they believed that the streets were being withdrawn from public use as a cost-cutting measure.

“We’ve been getting quite a few calls,” said Gregory Scott, general superintendent for the street bureaus’s West Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley division. “It comes as a shock to these people that their streets have been removed from public use. But the signs really don’t do anything.”

Technically, a person is guilty of trespassing if he drives on a road that has been withdrawn from public use and doesn’t live on it. But city officials said they can’t remember a case in which someone has been cited for violating the ordinance, and the signs are virtually ignored.

Hillside residents express other concerns. They say they are worried that the city will no longer maintain the streets despite the city’s claims to the contrary, and are concerned that deteriorating roads could create hazards.

“It’s a phony,” said Dixie Canyon resident Kenneth Evans. “All it means is the city doesn’t want to repair the roads.”

Evans said drivers ignore the signs, which are about a foot wide and posted about 4 feet high. “No one pays any attention to them. The sign is so small you could put it on a letter and mail it.”

He said that when Beverly Glen was closed for repair work, commuters used Dixie Canyon as an alternate route. And drivers often speed down the narrow road, part of which is not paved. “They just barrel on ahead,” he said. “It’s frightening.”

Evans’ neighbor Larry Ross is frightened for a different reason: gangs. He said youths have shot at abandoned cars, setting two on fire, and graffiti have appeared on mailboxes, rocks and fences in the area. “The signs don’t do the inhabitants any good,” he said. “It’s a joke.”

Other hillside residents agree that the withdrawals may not have any effect.

Gordon Murley, president of the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Assns. said similar signs were posted in his Woodland Hills neighborhood about 10 years ago. “Then all of a sudden, the signs disappeared and we never heard anything else about it. We were never told why the signs went up, or why they were taken down.

“I’m just not sure if any of us really know if this is potentially bad or potentially beneficial. If they withdraw them from public use, then maybe that means they will have to give more scrutiny to developers building homes in areas where there are substandard roads. But maybe they just don’t want to be responsible for them anymore and are going to let them go.”

Blinderman said that if the city had withdrawn the streets from public use in 1936, it shouldn’t have been able to issue building permits on those roads. But the building continued.

“My conclusion is that the signs are erroneous” and the “situation ludicrous” Blinderman wrote in a letter to the city.

Burks said that in recent years, the city has removed hundreds of other city streets and alleys from public use because of criminal activity such as drug dealing.

“In recent years, the council has withdrawn these streets to eliminate the nuisance,” Burks said. “We have this nuisance dumping anywhere that the area is not readily visible from a home.”

After receiving several complaints about the new signs, Burks was asked by Kathleen Brown, commissioner of the Board of Public Works, to write a report explaining the department’s policy. Burks said that report is expected to be completed this week.

City officials say that in some cases, residents on certain streets have asked to have the road removed from public use and turned into a private road. To make a street private, every homeowner must sign a petition asking the city to withdraw the street, and they must sign an agreement to maintain it. In those cases, the residents can also put a gate on the street to restrict it.

But Burks said that since the city is posting signs under a 1936 law, the only way to overturn the decision to remove the streets from public use is through another council action. He said if the residents want to do that, they must petition the City Council to reopen the streets.

Burks said he could understand that some residents might be upset, especially since in some cases, it could be the first time the signs have been posted in 52 years.

“If the street was withdrawn in 1936 and was never posted, then I could see that as a possibility,” Burks said. “The whole issue is rather complicated.”

Times staff writer Suzanne Schlosberg contributed to this story.