From Citrus Groves to Ex-G.I. Homes : Duarte: Nestled below the San Gabriel Mountains, the city now is attracting another generation of home-seekers.
The city of Duarte was built on G.I. dreams. Dreams like Monty and Dorothy Montgomery’s.
At the end of World War II, J. A. (Monty) Montgomery had just finished a South Pacific sojourn on a Navy destroyer; Dorothy was a WAVE stationed at Treasure Island naval base in San Francisco.
They met, fell in love, got married, mustered out of the service and then, like a lot of Northerners--she was from chilly Michigan, he was from chillier North Dakota--they joined the migration to sunny Southern California and started looking for a place to live and raise a family.
Unfortunately, like thousands of other former servicemen and their families who had similar hopes and dreams, they found themselves in the middle of the worst housing shortage in Los Angeles history.
“God, it was awful,” Monty Montgomery, 67, a retired construction contractor and former Duarte city councilman, says. “There was nothing--nothing!--available anywhere.”
But if housing was scarce, orange and avocado groves were plentiful. And in the face of the incredible demand for new homes, developers cut down the groves, poured thousands upon thousands of concrete slabs and created vast tracts of single-story, ranch-style houses with big back yards--”G.I. houses,” they called them then.
After living with his parents in Pasadena for awhile, and then in a too-small house in what is now Monrovia, the Montgomerys visited one such tract in an unincorporated area at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, due east of Pasadena.
“A real estate agent took us around to look at lots of houses, including these, which were still being built,” says Dorothy Montgomery, 64, sitting in the kitchen of her four-bedroom, two-bath home on a cul-de-sac at the end of Cinco Robles Drive. (Cul-de-sacs were a startlingly innovative concept back then.)
“Everything clicked; we were the first family to move into this tract. It was like being out in the country.”
The Montgomerys paid $12,800 for their home, which seemed like a lot of money at the time. Monty Montgomery says he was offered $190,000 for the house not long ago.
According to real estate agents in the Duarte area, that puts the Montgomery home in the medium price range; prices in Duarte range from $130,000 at the extreme low end to almost half a million dollars for some homes in the newer, hillside areas.
In 1957, the 6,000 or so residents of the area became concerned about encroaching gravel quarry operations, so they incorporated a 6.8-square-mile area and became the city of Duarte, named after Andres Duarte, a 19th-Century Spanish soldier who owned Rancho Duarte until the Americans took over from Mexico and he got behind on his tax payments.
The new city was a classic Los Angeles “bedroom community.” There really wasn’t a downtown to speak of, police and fire protection were provided by the county on a contract basis and except for the City of Hope Hospital (now Medical Center), which was founded in 1913 as a tuberculosis sanitarium, there wasn’t much in the way of large business or industry in the city either. It was a place where people lived and raised families.
“It was a very family-oriented community back then,” says Monty Montgomery, the kind of community where PTA meetings were always packed. (Duarte had formed its own school district in 1957.) Almost every family had two or three children; the Montgomerys had six.
That sense of community began to change in the late 1960s, the Montgomerys say, when the Foothill (210) Freeway was built, dividing the city into north and south. Increased commercial development along Huntington Drive, which runs north of and parallel to the freeway, also served to separate the two sections of the city.
Generally speaking, homes south of Huntington Drive are older and less expensive than the ones to the north, many of which were built in the 1970s rather than in the post-World War II boom.
“We’re in Baja Duarte,” Dorothy Montgomery says, laughing. “A lot of new people (in Duarte) see it as a lower economic area.”
Although Monty Montgomery would like to move--now that their children have grown, he says, “the house is just too big”--both Montgomerys think that Duarte, whether baja or alta , is still a good place to live.
“There’s just a good basic attitude here,” Monty says. “I still enjoy this community.”
Ed Carey, a retired auto upholsterer and a 40-year resident of Duarte, agrees.
“It’s just been a very pleasant place to live,” says Carey, 67, who with his wife, Nita, paid $8,600 for their three-bedroom home on Chesson Street in 1949, back when “there was nothing but orange groves out here.” He values it now in the just-under-$200,000 range.
Carey is concerned that “there just isn’t as much a sense of community as there used to be”--an old-timer’s lament that probably can be heard in any city or town in America--and he misses the “out in the country” feeling that Duarte had before it was surrounded by suburban sprawl, and saw its own population grow from 6,000 to more than 21,000.
Still, he rates Duarte highly in “quality of life” terms--and adds that even the famous San Gabriel smog isn’t really as bad as some people may think.
“We’re in a kind of a pocket here in Duarte,” Carey says. “We have smog some days, but other times we don’t.”
The Careys plan to spend the rest of their lives in Duarte--”If I was going to move I would have done it years ago,” Carey says--but if they did decide to leave Duarte, who would take their place?
Most likely it would be people who, like the ex-G.I.s, are looking for relatively affordable housing in a suburban atmosphere. They may be raising a family--Duarte now averages three persons per household, the highest average since the end of the postwar baby boom--or they may be people who are simply looking for more bang for their home buying buck.
They may also be Latino; Duarte, like many L.A. suburbs, was once almost exclusively Anglo, but now is 30% Latino.
Margie Garcia, an executive secretary who works in Eagle Rock, and her husband, Orlando, lived in Northeast Los Angeles for 30 years, until her mother moved to Duarte. They were quickly hooked on the community.
“We got to know the area, because of my mother, and we liked it a lot,” Margie Garcia, 51, says. “And the housing prices were pretty good.”
So about a year ago, the Garcias bought a single-story, three bedroom home on a quiet residential street called Greenbank Avenue. They paid $175,000.
“I just love it up here,” Garcia says. “We have a big back yard, a beautiful oak kitchen--I fell in love with that kitchen--nice neighbors. It’s a safe place to live. And I enjoy being able to see the mountains. The mountains are just beautiful.”
Since she moved there, Garcia says, two of her grown children have also moved to apartments in Duarte, and they want to buy homes there as well.
According to Phil Reyes of Century 21 Always, who has lived in Duarte for 12 years, this may be a good time for them to start looking.
“There are a lot of good values out here,” Reyes says. “There’s been a real settling of prices, and there’s tons of inventory.”
Good housing values were what prompted Ron Moore, 46, a commercial real estate broker, to buy a home in Duarte. He and his wife, Dianne, and their two young children had formerly rented a home in Pasadena.
“Why did we move to Duarte? Because I wasn’t happy with what a quarter million dollars could buy in Pasadena,” Moore says. “So we decided to look eastward.”
The Moores recently paid about $250,000 for a 2,000-square-foot, decade-old four-bedroom house on Shadylawn Drive--a misnomer, since as Moore points out, there aren’t any large shade trees on it.
But despite the lack of foliage, Moore says he is “very pleased and impressed” with the city so far, “especially with all the community services geared toward children The parks are excellent.”
Moore isn’t certain how long he and his family will stay in Duarte. A Northern California native, Moore says he’s getting increasingly fed up with life in Southern California in general--smog, traffic, crime, etc., the usual Northern Californian’s complaint.
For Moore, then, and perhaps for some other newcomers, Duarte may not be the settle-in-for-life suburban dreamland that it was for many of the ex-G.I.s of 40 years ago.
But as Moore says, “For the moment, at least, Duarte’s a very nice place to live.”
AT A GLANCE
Population
1990 estimate: 22,113
1980-90 change: 31.9%
Median age: 30.7 years
Annual income
Per capita: 12,184
Median household33,980
Household distribution
Less than $15,000: 19.8%
$15,000 - $30,000: 23.2%
$30,000 - $50,000: 31.2%
$50,000 - $75,000: 18.4%
$75,000 + 7.3%
