Old-Time Fair to Return to Hansen Dam Area July 18

The San Fernando Valley Fair, complete with a midway and live entertainment, will return for a second year to Hansen Dam Recreation Area, which fair officials hope will someday become the event’s permanent home.

The fair will run July 18-22 and will be “a celebration of old-time Americana,” said Ted Naumann, a spokesman for the 51st District Agricultural Assn., the state agency that runs the fair.

It will include arts and crafts booths, homemaking exhibits, children’s rides, a horse show, a hog-calling contest and a petting zoo. There will be 2,000 exhibits, including animals raised by local 4-H Clubs and Future Farmers of America chapters. No alcoholic beverages will be sold.

A smaller, three-day version of the fair, without the popular carnival attractions, was held at Hansen Dam’s sports complex and outdoor theater area last year after the event was ousted from its former home, Devonshire Downs in Northridge.

The hastily organized event was moved to the site in the northeast San Fernando Valley after a plan to hold the fair at Pierce College in Woodland Hills fell through at the last minute because of homeowner protests. The smaller fair drew about 30,000 visitors, down from 70,000 in 1988.

Although skeptical before the event, homeowners in the Hansen Dam area said they had no complaints about the smaller fair and are now willing to support fair expansion. As a result, fair officials now hope to make the site the event’s permanent home.

But delays by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which owns the dam property and leases part of it to the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Department, in planning for development of the 1,540-acre flood-control basin as a recreation area have kept any formal proposal to build permanent fair facilities there on hold.

“Everyone recognizes that the eastern rim represents the last bastion of rural lifestyle in the Valley,” Naumann said. “The fair fits in there.”

The idea is supported by homeowner groups. “Last year, we asked them not to have a midway or live concerts and to make the fair smaller,” said Phyllis Hines, land use chairwoman of the Lake View Terrace Improvement Assn., which represents some neighboring homeowners. “There were few problems then, so all we asked this year is that they have no liquor, and they agreed.

“They’ve been very, very cooperative with us,” she said. “We really hope it’s successful.”

Hines and Lewis Snow, president of the Lake View Terrace Home Owners Assn., said the fair would be a good addition to the neighborhood.

Many northeast San Fernando Valley residents also want to see a lake restored at the dam. The former 130-acre boating and swimming lake was closed in 1982 after two decades of heavy rains brought millions of tons of debris into the basin.

Snow and Hines expressed impatience with the Corps of Engineers’ delays in issuing preliminary plans for the site. The plans are necessary before the lake, or any other facilities such as fairgrounds, can be planned there.

“I have never been more frustrated in my career as an activist as I have been with Hansen Dam,” Snow said.

A corps spokeswoman said a draft plan for the recreation area--primarily viewed by the corps as a flood-control basin--was scheduled to be issued in May but has been delayed several months, mainly because of personnel changes.

When the plan is complete, the corps will conduct hearings on the plan at which fair officials and the public will have a chance to argue for building the fairgrounds.

“We can’t even begin to design a proposed fairgrounds until we know where the Army Corps will allow ‘high-intensity’ uses,” Naumann told members of Snow’s homeowner group in May. Fair directors are “just as frustrated as you are,” he said.

Naumann said in an interview that the city parks department, which operates recreational programs at the dam, favors locating the fairgrounds there. He also said the agricultural district now has about $15 million--to be matched by the state--which it can use to acquire or develop a permanent home.

The fair was evicted in 1988 after 14 years at Devonshire Downs to make room for an expansion planned by Cal State Northridge, which owns the property.

What resulted in the move to Hansen Dam was a scaled-down, old-fashioned fair, which pleased Hansen Dam’s neighbors and many fair-goers.

“The surroundings made you feel you were in the country. You weren’t looking at condominiums and asphalt,” said Steve Pietrolongo, an agriculture teacher at Canoga Park High School who has several students entering animals in this year’s fair.

In the fair’s 1990 exhibit entry guide, Sal Buccieri, president of the fair’s board of directors, promised that this year’s event will protect “the wholesome family experience.”

Mel Simas, program coordinator for the fair, has scheduled covered wagon rides, an exhibit by the Model A Clubs of America, a National Horseshoe Pitching Assn. tournament, coloring contests for children, whistling contests and musical washboard and saw-playing competitions. Also on the bill is a show of rats and mice, featuring about 200 short-haired and curly-haired rodents that have been bred as pets.

Community members have been invited to work at the fair’s carnival games of skill to raise money for their nonprofit organizations. And the Lake View Terrace Improvement Assn., under Hines’ direction, is planning a pavilion that will showcase recycling and environmental concerns.

Entertainment will include the Parachute Express, a children’s variety show; a sock hop reunion featuring Tiny Tim, Bobby Day and other musicians of the past; and concerts by country singer Johnny Rodriguez and a band called Michael Wolf and the Posse.

Hours will be from noon to 10:30 p.m. July 18-20 and from 10 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. July 21 and 22. Admission is $5 for ages 11 and older. Children 10 and younger will be admitted free. Parking is $2 a car.

The fair is attempting “to re-establish a very carefully themed fair,” Naumann said. “We’ve learned not to try to be all things to all people.

Hines said that if fair officials continue to cooperate with the community, she believes they will succeed.

“Last year, I took my 83-year-old father on opening day,” she said. “But there were no benches, and I had to take him home in a couple of hours. I called Ted Naumann about the benches. The next day, there were benches all over the place. That’s the kind of cooperation we’re getting.”