A Down-to-Earth Suburban Life Style : An original valley suburb, it has little smog, lots of gardens, and ‘50s vintage homes
Philip Hall has managed several Ralphs grocery stores in the San Fernando Valley and he has noticed something about the shoppers in Granada Hills, where he lives: Their hands.
“You don’t see a lot of plastic fingernails,” Hall said. “You see people who work in their yards. Down-to-earth people. The kind of people I like.”
One of the original suburbs of the Valley, Granada Hills was built of single-family homes and wide thoroughfares, and even now has few apartments and condominiums--also very few specialty restaurants and fashionable stores.
The community’s focal point is a dowdy strip of shops on Chatsworth Street, around the post office and bowling alley.
“We’re pretty much happy to stay around the house,” said Hall, 36, who couldn’t name a restaurant he goes to often. “That’s one of the reasons we like Granada Hills.”
He lives with his wife and two young children in one of the original buildings of Sunshine Ranch, the plantation of nearly six square miles from which Granada Hills evolved.
New Custom Houses
Hall cherishes an old photograph that shows his house in the foreground and beyond it, downhill to the south, a grid of trees stretching to the hazy distance.
Hall’s home site, on Rinaldi Street, is no longer the focal point of Granada Hills. Above Rinaldi, new custom houses on one-half to quarter-acre lots range part way up Santa Susana Mountain, and below Rinaldi, ‘50s-vintage tract houses are the norm.
A four-bedroom house far up the mountain was listed early this month for $440,000; another four-bedroom in a nondescript cul-de-sac below Rinaldi was recently appraised at $235,000.
Hall, who moved from his native Burbank in 1982, says he looked at houses below Rinaldi that were in far better shape than the one he chose--the ceiling leaks in one corner of his living room--but he couldn’t resist the house’s charm and location.
The weather, especially, suits his pastime: he has planted a hundred varieties of fruit trees--cherries, apples, plums, citrus and exotic tropicals--on the hillside about his house. His specialty is growing pineapples.
“I’m kind of into my own experimental station for fruits,” he said in the greenhouse he is building in his back yard. He intends to grow a coconut palm through the greenhouse roof.
Orchard Wonderland
As much as ever, Granada Hills is a wonderland for orchards, and the conditions that make it so also account for the community’s hold on residents.
The mountain, for instance, dun and patchy as a buffalo, raises the community above the valley’s ambient smog, and through its gaps allows wind from the north to blow down with cooling and smog-abating breezes.
“One reason we’ve had a lot of pilots living out here is that they’d take off from LAX and come banking over this area, turning east, and they’d look down and see this community with trees and no smog,” said Ed Zeier, a realtor and former chemist who has lived in Granada Hills since 1960.
Larry McCall, the principal of an elementary school near Hollywood, has lived in Granada Hills since 1971 and relishes its farm town values.
“So many of the kids I’ve seen in Little League will stay in town and enter the local businesses. Or I’ll go to a ballgame at Kennedy High School and see 30 or 40 people I’ve known for years.”
McCall bought his house on Odessa Avenue shortly after the Sylmar earthquake of 1971 had scared the former occupants, New Yorkers, out of the state. They abandoned the house to the Veterans Administration and McCall claimed it with a bid of $28,000.
Soon he and his children were involved in community sports. Granada Hills produced the world champion Little League team in 1963 and has long made use of its parks and open spaces--the land around the Van Norman Reservoir, for instance--as sports centers.
Denver Broncos’ quarterback John Elway went to high school here, as almost anyone in Granada Hills will tell you.
“What’s great about this area,” says McCall, “is the community involvement, where you feel that everybody knows everybody else--even if you don’t really.”
Crime rates are lower here than in some parts of the Los Angeles Basin. From July 1 through Feb. 28, there were 378 burglaries reported in Granada Hills, compared with 546 reported in Hollywood and 702 reported in the Rampart sector.
Granada Hills is an outdoorsy neighborhood--its 600-acre O’Melveny Park is the second-largest in the city of Los Angeles--but it is not a neighborhood for walking. Its layout is the ordinary drive-to-shop variety. Two minutes by car from McCall’s house is a Vons, a Builder’s Emporium, and--about as tony as this town gets--a Trader Joe’s deli-supermarket.
McCall has noticed more traffic, and Zeier more renters since the Simi Valley Freeway, crossing Granada Hills and connecting the western valley to Interstates 5 and 405, was opened.
Zeier said that although Granada Hills is nearly surrounded by freeways, the interchanges are so pinched that the community is at some hours less accessible to downtown Los Angeles than it has ever been.
“The secret of getting into town is not to go,” he deadpanned. McCall starts work in the morning at 7:30 and beats the traffic going in, but routinely drives more than an hour to travel the 25 miles home.
Also, McCall said, his street and the ones nearby have changed. He and his neighbors haven’t had a block party for seven years now. The couples that organized the old annual affairs have divorced or followed their grown children to smaller, more distant houses. There are fewer kids about on the street. Young families seem less interested in making friends.
Still, “The Most Neighborly Town in the Valley” is Granada Hills’ slogan, and despite some changes, it continues to apply, Zeier said.
“The basic people out here haven’t changed,” he said. “Families with kids. Quiet streets. A high level of community involvement . . . but not a whole lot going on.”
Hall likes it that way.
“When I bought that bunkhouse,” he said, referring to the property next door, which indeed was the bunkhouse for the Sunshine Ranch, “I wanted to rent it to down-to-earth people. People who get in the garden, get their hands in the dirt. And that’s what I did. They weren’t really hard to find.”
GRANADA HILLS AT A GLANCE Population 1988 estimate: 47,539 1980-88 change: 10% MEDIAN AGE 35.4 years Racial/ethnic mix White (non-Latino): 80.9% Latino: 11% Black: 1.7% Other: 6.4% Annual income Per capita: 17,016 Median household: 50,335 Household distribution Less than $15,000: 10.3% $15,000-$30,000: 14.1% $30,000-$50,000: 25.2% $50,000-$75,000: 28.8% $75,000+: 21.5%
