VILLA PARK : Neighborly Is Word for This Town

When fire broke out at a neighbor’s home at 3 a.m., volunteer firefighter James Brodsky pulled on his boots and rushed to help. Other neighbors sped to the scene and worked side-by-side with the house’s owner until the blaze was extinguished.

That’s the sort of town Villa Park is, Brodsky and others say.

It is small, quiet and almost rural, with a general store, a volunteer Fire Department, and only four traffic signals. And with 6,951 residents, it has less than 3% of the population of the county’s largest city, Anaheim. The disparity between the two is such that it would take almost one-third of Villa Park’s residents merely to run the city of Anaheim.

But Villa Park residents say that smaller is better and that the city’s diminutive size helps make it one of the county’s hidden treasures.

“Villa Park is a bastion of rural activity in the midst of giant cities where people get swallowed up and nobody knows who anybody is. It’s a little treasure hidden away in the hills,” said Brodsky, who has lived in the city for 20 years.

Brodsky, 47, owns the city’s general store--a pharmacy that also serves as the post office and gift shop and provides video rentals.

“This is probably the only place where you can call a doctor and a pharmacist at 3 in the morning and they’ll get together and get you a prescription,” he said.

His store is also one of the few places that will send its stock boy to deliver food to the sick and a roll of film to the family whose sheep is giving birth to triplets.

The small-town atmosphere of the city is pervasive: Little League baseball games routinely draw hundreds of spectators, the volunteer Fire Department responds to emergencies, and neighbors are always willing to help out.

Everyone knows everyone else in Villa Park, he said. “This is Smalltown, U.S.A. You can go into the supermarket and see 20 people you know in 20 minutes. More political problems are solved in Ralphs than in City Hall,” he said.

If you blink while driving through Villa Park, you could miss it. The city covers only 2.1 square miles, making it the county’s second smallest. Only La Palma, at 1.6 square miles, is smaller.

Villa Park’s size is only part of its charm, residents say. Its physical character is another. Horse and bike trails meander throughout the hills in the northern portion of the city.

Incorporated in 1962 and surrounded by Orange, Villa Park is zoned for residential use, with the exception of the Villa Park Shopping Center. And in the ‘60s, many residents begrudged the addition of that, saying that commercial property had no place in the city.

Now, however, it is the hub of Villa Park and usually filled with spotless family vans, Volvos, Tauruses and Mercedes-Benzes. The city’s wealth has earned it various nicknames, including “the Bel-Air of Orange County.”

The city’s only crime wave ended several months ago when police arrested some youths who had been playing “mailbox baseball”--smashing mailboxes with a bat from a speeding car. A neighborhood watch group waited for the kids to travel down a dead-end street, then blocked the exit and called the police. County Sheriff’s Department Investigator Helen Kaufmann said the residents’ willingness to get involved helps keep the the town safe.