Houses Squeezed Out Orange Groves : Covina: Like most of its neighbors in the San Gabriel Valley, the former agriculture center got caught up in the post-World War II housing boom.
There’s a very special oil painting on the living room wall of Charles and Mary Colver’s 74-year-old home in Covina.
It’s an amateur painting, done four decades ago by a family friend, a landscape that depicts an orange grove in the foreground, with the brown foothills and the gray-purple peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains rising in the background.
What’s special about it, to the Colvers at least, is that it depicts the view from their living room picture window in 1950.
Every time they look at it, they’re reminded of how much things have changed.
The mountains are still there, of course, although on many days they’re almost hidden by smog. But the foothills are dotted with homes now, and the 15-acre orange grove of the painting is now 15 acres of grass-covered yards and single-story suburban homes.
“It was a sad time when they covered this land up with homes,” said Charles Colver, a 69-year-old retired U.S. Forest Service employee and former Covina mayor. Colver grew up in the house on North Banna Avenue that he and Mary live in now--a house built by his father in 1916, for $2,500, as a wedding present for Charles’ mother.
“We used to grow the best oranges in the world right here, but you can hardly find any orange trees around here anymore.”
That comment, and the painting on the Colvers’ wall, tells not only the story of Covina but of almost the entire San Gabriel Valley.
Covina, which is situated north of the San Bernardino Freeway 18 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, was built on oranges. The city was first subdivided in 1884, largely in 10- or 15-acre tracts, the optimum size for one-family citrus grove operations.
In 1895, the Southern Pacific Railroad laid track through Covina, making possible the fast shipment of the perishable fruit to markets in the East, and by 1909 Covina was the third-largest orange producer in the world.
A measure of the esteem in which oranges were held by Covina residents is the fact that the city’s primary downtown street was not called Main Street or Broadway, but Citrus Avenue.
Like many small San Gabriel Valley communities, Covina remained an agricultural center until World War II. Its city motto was, “A mile square and all there”--the implication being that it was close to, but not of, the rapidly growing Los Angeles urban area.
But like most of the San Gabriel Valley, Covina and its citrus groves were caught up in the post-World War II population and building boom. Colver attributes it to the weather.
“I remember my grandfather saying, way back when I was a little kid, that this whole area was going to be a big city someday,” Colver recalled, “because once the word got out about our marvelous climate you wouldn’t be able to keep people out. And he was right.”
In 1950 the city had 5,500 residents; six years later, the Covina had expanded to about seven square miles, and more than 25,000 people called it home. Almost all of the orange groves were turned into tract homes; Covina had become another “bedroom community” in the L.A. megalopolis.
Today, Covina has a population of about 43,000, many of whom live here and work elsewhere. Most of the city is as flat as the proverbial griddle product, and most of the tree-lined streets are laid out in straight lines; the curved-street development concept was a later innovation. “Downtown” Covina is a short section of Citrus Avenue lined with small shops and old-style street lights.
Covina is, in short, a typical San Gabriel Valley bedroom community. Although there are some million-dollar-plus “horse property” homes in the hills at the eastern edge of the city, and quite a few new condominium developments, most of the homes are of the “California bungalow” style. and like homes in many other San Gabriel Valley communities, they can represent a bargain for home buyers.
“The market here is the same as most places you go,” said Tom Noice of South Hills Properties, a Covina real estate firm. “We have a tremendous amount of sellers and a lack of buyers, and it’s forcing prices down.”
Noice puts the median home price in Covina in the low- to mid-$200,000 range. And although the market is slower now than it used to be, Noice said, houses are still selling, particularly to buyers who are venturing out from Los Angeles in search of affordable housing.
“Covina is the last stopping point before the inland Empire,” Noice said, “but it’s still close enough to the city that people can commute.”
“Prices have come down,” agreed Arlette Lyons of Lyons & Associates, a real estate firm with numerous listings in Covina. “Finding a home for under $200,000 is possible now. But it’s cyclical, we all know that.”
Isle Hipfel, 37, an L.A. County government employee, has taken advantage of the reduced prices. She and a friend were looking for a home to invest in, and after looking at homes in several other San Gabriel Valley communities they finally bought a three-bedroom, three-bath house on a half acre on Cloverland Drive. The price was in the $400,000 range.
“It’s quiet, and the residents here are very neighborly,” Hipfel said. “And I think you get a much better investment in Covina.” Hipfel is hoping that Covina real estate prices will eventually go up.
One Covina resident who’s taking advantage of the flattening home prices is Rita DuShane-Jones. A real estate broker, DuShane-Jones and her husband, Mike, live on Grand Avenue in Covina, but they’ve made a $250,000 offer on a four-bedroom three-bath home with a pool on Covina Hills Road--a home that not long ago was on the market at more than $325,000.
“When we were younger we wanted to live on the beach,” DuShane-Jones said. “But I live Covina. It has a nice downtown, nice parks. It’s like a small town.”
Small town or not, Covina still has at least one major urban problem--smog, an inescapable fact of life there, as it is throughout the San Gabriel Valley. But longtime residents as well as newer ones seem to take a philosophical view of the problem.
“I like air I can sink my teeth into,” said Howard H. Hawkins, a former Covina mayor and city councilman and a longtime resident. Then, more seriously, he adds, “In the fall of the year we’ll have some smog, but I don’t know anybody who didn’t move into Covina because of it.”
Hawkins and his wife, Dorothea, moved to Covina in 1945 from San Dimas, buying a 1,600-square foot house on Navilla Place for $7,500; they have since expanded their three-bedroom, two-bath home to 2,200 square feet. Hawkins said he has “no idea” what the home is worth now, but adds that it doesn’t matter, since he has no plans to sell. He intends to stay in Covina.
“It’s a very solid community,” Hawkins said, “maybe the most solid community in California. There are a lot of second-generation families here.”
“It’s been a real nice place to live,” agreed Charles Colver. Despite the many changes that have taken place over the years, Colver said, “My roots are here, and this is where I’m going to stay.”
AT A GLANCE Population
1990 estimate 39,5911
1980-90 change17.3%
Median age 32.4 years
Annual income
Per capita 16,220
Median household 42,316
Household distribution
Less than $15,000: 14.4%
$15,000 - $30,000: 20.0%
$30,000 - $50,000: 26.0%
$50,000 - $75,000: 25.9%
$75,000+: 23.8%
