For Many, Living on the Hill Is Tops : Adams Hill: Once part of a rancho, the area straddles the Los Angeles and Glendale boundary. It now attracts residents ‘who need a home that’s not out of reach.’

Adams Hill, on the border of Los Angeles and southeast Glendale, is a sunny, breezy, jaunty place, bedecked with flowers and burbling with bird song.

Dawn LaMadeleine Carrillo of Coldwell Banker, listing the area’s main attractions, says: “It’s so close to L.A. Also, a lot, a lot of the homes there have views. And you can find three-bedrooms in that area for 250 ($250,000).”

How close is it? Well, most Angelenos have seen Adams Hill, even if they don’t know what they’re looking at: A cross marks the spot.

It gleams white from the museum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, which occupies the southwest part of the hill, and is plainly visible for miles in either direction from the Golden State and Glendale freeways. Adams Hill nestles between those two freeways, just north of where they intersect.

Nestle, that favorite verb of the real estate industry truly applies here. Small houses nestle on small lots that nestle on winding roads, some of which--belying the quaint and rustic feel of the area--bear the names of vast and sophisticated Eastern campuses: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Wellesley, Cornell, Oberlin, Dartmouth.

John Wilson, an associate at Dorn-Platz & Co. realtors, says that in addition to a lot of old-timers “who love the place,” the hill represents “an intermediate step upward,” ideal for “people who are moving to the area who need a home that isn’t out of reach.”

Wilson grew up in the area but sensibly refrained from living on Adams Hill--his brand of deadpan drollery might charm the birds from the trees. After he retired from the Bell System, he says, “I cut the same bush every day at the house and followed my wife around like a puppy dog” until he started his career in real estate at the age of 59.

The houses on Adams Hill, he says, “generally are 40 to 50 years old, family homes, well-maintained,” that go “for somewhere between $120 and $150 a square foot.”

Besides its preponderance of old-time Anglos, the hill shows “quite a cross section of ethnic groups,” Wilson says. And residents agree, mentioning Asians, Latinos and the fastest-growing segment, Middle-Easterners: Armenians, Iranians, Syrians and Lebanese.

One glance at Adams Square, at the corner of Adams Street and Chevy Chase Drive, tells the story. Next to the rosy-beige Adams Square Pharmacy with its modest Art Deco tower, is the Super Mercado, and across the street is an Armenian grocery, the Zeitoon.

The pharmacy’s owner, Gil Franklin--who’s on a first-name basis with most of his customers--says the building, which once contained a ballroom upstairs, has housed a store of some kind for 75 years. Nearby, at the intersection of Adams and Palmer streets, the first Baskin-Robbins ice cream store opened in 1948.

Forest Lawn is the largest landholder on Adams Hill (“They’re very quiet neighbors,” cracks Harnsberger Real Estate agent Cheryl Johnson), and those spacious acres probably represent the major draw for winged nesters.

Some human ones are put off by the proximity to the cemetery. Bob Taylor, an associate at Harnsberger, says “about 40% would like to purchase because of Forest Lawn; maybe 60% wouldn’t.”

Among the unspooked category were architect Georgie Kajer, who bought her house eight years ago for $85,000, and Bruce Cranston, 34, a Walt Disney Co. creative executive who moved there at the end of May, paying “close to the high 200s,” he says.

“I think everybody considers Forest Lawn a plus, to look up there and see open space,” says Kajer, a past president of the Adams Hill Homeowners Assn. “We get raccoons, opossums, skunks, all kind of little critters from across there.”

Explaining his move from Pasadena, Cranston says, “First of all, I have friends up here, . . . industry associates. And it’s a hill, a well-kept hill.”

He revels in his view of south Glendale, and his easy commute. He considers the price he paid “very reasonable” in light of comparable houses in other areas, he says. “And there’s always a breeze. It’s cool at night.”

It’s impossible to talk to anyone on the hill, old or new residents, without hearing mention of “afternoon sea breezes.” It was a prime selling point of 1920s developers.

Until then the hill, roughly bounded by Palmer and Glendale avenues, Verdugo Road and the Forest Lawn boundary, had been almost bare. It was part of 36,000 acres that Jose Maria Verdugo received from the governor of California in 1784.

At his death in 1828, Verdugo left his Rancho San Rafael to his son, Julio, and daughter, Catalina. Don Julio, who was bequeathed the portion that included what is now Glendale, lived on Adams Hill from 1860 until his death in 1876. After that, as the rancho was broken into smaller parcels, W.C.R. Richardson owned much of the hill, which at the time bore the name of the Santa Eulalia Ranch.

At the turn of the century, Glendale stopped at Colorado Boulevard. The settlement south of there was named Tropico by Southern Pacific when it built a railroad depot. Forest Lawn arrived in 1906. Tropico acceded to becoming part of Glendale in 1918, and a few years later, developers hopped onto the inviting hill in force.

What is remarkable about their ads is how well they capture its flavor today.

A 1923 newspaper promotion, thinly disguised as a news story, points out that the area’s being “only about 20 minutes by automobile from Fifth and Spring streets . . . does not mean much to the man with two or three automobiles for the use of his family, most of whose members have nothing to do to occupy their time, but it is a decided factor in the calculations of the man with only one automobile. . . .”

The advantages of this “country within the city,” the article maintains, are evident: “the tree-embowered homes of Glendale lying at the foot of the eminence . . . the wave upon wave of encircling green foothills rising to the distant lofty mountains.”

It is this very heritage--the country within the city, an area affordable to those of more modest means--that inspires old-timers on this conical Monopoly board to want to adhere to its style of little houses and wish that the builders would go directly to jail with their dreams of big red hotels.

“It’s my little paradise right here. . . . We love it here,” says Barbara Alm. “We don’t like it being pillaged and raped by these humongous houses.”

Alm and her husband, a retired school principal, grew up in the area and in 1956 moved to Adams Hill, where Robert Alm, an amateur radio operator, could take advantage of the unobstructed view. They paid $5,000 for two lots. “And we built the house ourselves. Hammer and nail. Brick by brick. Window by window,” Barbara Alm says. It cost them $23,000.

Now, like a surprising number of hill residents, their family lives close by. “My mother-in-law lives across the street,” she says. “Both my twin daughters live eight houses from me; they’re three houses apart.

“Now, I could sell the house for $400,000. But where would I move? I have a glorious view, family close by.”

Kajer agrees that so-called “mansionization” is the hill’s major problem. “I think if people want to add a second story, that’s OK, but not a 500,000-square-foot house.”

The small lots--many are less than 5,000 square feet--have created the hill’s character, she believes. “The density is a positive thing from my point of view. It encourages you to get to know your neighbor. . . . Some of my neighbors are some of my best friends.”

Urbanologist Jane Jacobs has theorized that “eyes on the street,” in her words, are a neighborhood’s chief deterrent to crime. And the low crime rate on Adams Hill bears her out.

Jenny Lau, a community services officer who covers southeast Glendale for the Glendale Police Department’s crime prevention unit, termed a recent two-month period “relatively slow; (wrong-doers) can get lost up there. . . . And it’s a very close-knit community.”

But the quaint antiquity of the area has led to another problem. Because the early developers aimed their ads at the workingman with one car, “most of us have one-car garages, and people tend to use their garage for storage” and park on the narrow streets, says Arlene Joye, current president of the neighborhood association.

To avert the streets being crammed with cars, Joye says, she advocates an official parking-permit policy and cars being parked in homeowners’ garages.

She and her husband bought a house on Adams Hill after she had rented a house there in 1979, when she was single. Their son, 8, had first attended private schools but now goes to John Muir, for which she says she has high praise.

(Muir handles grade-schoolers on the Glendale side; and Delevan Drive elementary on the Los Angeles side. In Glendale, children attend Roosevelt Junior High and Glendale High; in Los Angeles, they attend Eagle Rock junior and senior high schools.)

Mention children’s needs on Adams Hill, and Barbara Alm warms to her subject. “There are no areas for children to play in with these monsters they are building! Streets are no place for people to play!

AT A GLANCE Population: 1990 estimate: 12,338 1980-90 change: 17.7% Median Age: 33.9 years Annual Income: Per capita: 13,312 Median household: 28,552 Household Distribution: Less than $15,000: 20.4% $15,000-$30,000: 33.0% $30,000-$50,000: 28.3% $50,000-$75,000: 13.1% $75,000+: 5.1