Lake Los Angeles Reflects on Its Name : Cityhood: Discussion of using the name Wilsona prompts a drive for cityhood in the high desert.

Lake Los Angeles has no lake.

And it’s nowhere near Los Angeles.

“Climatologically, we’re a desert,” real estate agent Maurice Kunkel said of the dusty desert community 20 miles east of Palmdale. “The last few days, they have been talking about fog in Los Angeles. There have been blue skies here for 50 miles. The only way we’re connected to Los Angeles is by commuting.”

That outlook--along with an unusual residential configuration placing the northern half of this unincorporated community in Lancaster and the southern half in Palmdale--has prompted some of the 14,000 residents to call for a name change.

The split may not seem like such a huge inconvenience. But because Palmdale mail carriers will deliver packages to the one-room Lake Los Angeles post office but Lancaster postal carriers will not, residents sometimes must make a 65-mile round trip to pick up a package.

Chamber of Commerce leaders in Lake Los Angeles, who say that Lancaster and Palmdale ignore their community’s needs, are spearheading a drive to form a city of their own.

That reorganization would provide groundwork for a separate ZIP code, improved mail delivery and local control of police services, schools and road maintenance.

David LeVeque, vice president of the chamber, said talk about the name change was the catalyst for the discussion of incorporation. “It’s making people think about other things we need,” he said at a recent chamber meeting, held in a school cafeteria.

A former Chatsworth resident, Lynn Baer, 31, who moved to Lake Los Angeles 14 months ago, said she thinks the community needs a change.

“I think Lake Los Angeles is a beautiful name if we had a lake,” she said recently. “I would like to see a name that could rejuvenate the reputation. We love it here. It’s a real family atmosphere. Everyone helps everyone out. It’s like the San Fernando Valley was when I was a little girl. But it’s kind of like a joke because there is no lake.”

Whitney Henry disagreed. “I’d rather leave it like it is,” he said last week, at a local market. “They did not have a lake when I moved here. I knew that. It would mean getting used to another name. Why name it anything else? It doesn’t make sense.”

Suggestions for a new name include Lovejoy Springs, after a once important spring that is now dry; the Twin Cities, referring to Palmdale and Lancaster, and Wilsona, which the area was once called.

Talk of a name change recently brought Jean Estes to a chamber meeting all the way from Nashville, Tenn. Estes, who moved from the Antelope Valley 20 years ago, is the great-granddaughter of rancher Aaron Huff, one of a small group of settlers that named the area Wilsona after President Woodrow Wilson.

Estes urged that the original name be restored. “It’s history,” Estes, 57, told a rapt group of about 40 listeners at the meeting. “This isn’t Lake Los Angeles. Where’s the lake?

“All of my childhood memories are at the old Wilsona Ranch,” she said. “The Fourth of July, the masses of fireworks. I can remember to me what was a huge house and now I see pictures of it, it was a shack. There was a big kitchen that us kids slept in, and great-grandma cooked in.

“There was the little store where we could get chocolate sodas. And the cattle drives. Yes, cattle drives. Cowboys, horses and the butchering of the cattle and the barbecues to prepare steaks for the riders.”

Estes attended the meeting with her mother, Libby Hurd, 76, of Lancaster. After finishing her speech, she opened a loose-leaf notebook containing postmarked envelopes that were delivered to Wilsona in the 1920s. There were also pictures of her great-grandmother and tall, slender great-grandfather in front of a tent they had lived in for 14 months. Another photo showed them beside a gas pump at their general store.

Lake Los Angeles propane supplier Chuck Nielsen said he was pleased to learn the history of the area and asked if the chamber could compile a synopsis for residents as they considered a name change, but others at the meeting were not sympathetic.

“If you were so concerned about the area, why did you move away?” one man called out as Estes finished her talk.

After Estes moved to Nashville, the area changed a great deal. In 1967, a Santa Monica developer, Ray Watt, created the lake and built a planned community he dubbed Lake Los Angeles. The lake was filled with bass and catfish and used by boaters and water skiers, who were visible to diners at the posh Mr. B’s restaurant, lakeside. But Watt drained the lake in 1981 after homeowners refused to assume the cost of maintaining it.

Today, the lake sits empty. The hard, dry, cracked lake bed is the site of a baseball field for youths. Signs advertising local merchants form a fence, across center field.

Down the left-field foul line, behind the plywood dugout, rumpled newspapers are scattered at the base of a small group of short, bare trees. Only a whizzing car on the highway pierces the quiet of the wind.

“The lake was nice,” said Jim Sparks, who was the manager of Mr. B’s. “We would go down there in the evening and it would be peaceful. But we’re not in Los Angeles and we don’t have a lake, so the name probably should be changed.”

LeVeque said the chamber would send a newsletter to each resident to conduct an informal poll on whether Lake Los Angeles should incorporate.

If the residents approve, the chamber will study community budgets and tax structures and talk to officials who led recent incorporation drives in cities of comparable size.

They expect the process to take two years. In the meantime, residents on the Lancaster side may continue to take their long drives to the Lancaster post office.

And the controversy will continue. In the end, the resolution of the name dilemma may have nothing to do with whether there is a lake or whether Los Angeles is nearby.

“There are a lot of people who do not like change,” said Kunkel. “For the most part, the reaction is leave it alone. Why mess with it?”