What’s in a Name? Still, if North Hills Just Rose a Bit Higher

Approaching the would-be community of North Hills from the northwest, it’s easy to see what inspired backers to choose that name: The first hill must rise a good three or four feet.

North Hills, you understand, is so flat that it takes a keen eye to appreciate its rolling hills, as they mostly roll only a few yards at a time.

The hill at the community’s northwest gateway, near Lassen Street and Hayvenhurst Avenue, is one such mound. It begins its slight rise near a blue sign emblazoned with the Los Angeles city seal and the word Sepulveda .

Sepulveda? But is this not North Hills?

Not yet, at least. And therein lies a tale.

A group of residents, hoping to distance themselves from what they say is Sepulveda’s unsavory reputation, have asked the city to rename their community North Hills.

In despair they note how barricades to deter drug dealers have been erected in streets of Sepulveda east of the San Diego Freeway. Some people, they say, think Sepulveda is Spanish for “drug-infested neighborhood.”

The proposed community of North Hills would lie west of the freeway, bordered by Lassen on the north, the freeway on the east, Roscoe Boulevard on the south and the Bull Creek Wash on the west.

Councilman Hal Bernson’s staff is now checking signatures on petitions for the change, which he has promised to approve if enough residents want it.

Some real estate agents, such as Carol Tasker, who has sold houses in the area for 15 years, say the name change certainly would make it easier to attract buyers for homes in “North Hills,” because Sepulveda has long been a lackluster name.

“People had a certain image of Sepulveda,” she said. “It sort of puzzled me,” but people carry strange prejudices, she said. “There’s people who won’t go to Reseda.”

But what about the hills of North Hills? Are there really any hills there?

Sort of.

The Veterans Hospital sits on a large hill that begins its rise at the corner of Plummer Street and Woodley Avenue and continues for three-tenths of a mile before flattening out. In San Francisco, it would be a speed bump, but you can’t name a community North Bumps.

In North Hills, the Woodley Avenue hill is, relatively speaking, a mountain. From the top you can see the Anheuser-Busch brewery in Van Nuys, the field lights at Monroe High School (“Home of the Vikings”) and--like everybody else for miles around--the mountains ringing the San Fernando Valley.

But that’s about it.

“It’s incongruous,” said Alex Karington of the proposed name change. He lives near the “summit” of the Woodley Avenue hill. He noted that his neighborhood is located more or less in the center of the Valley. “This wouldn’t be exactly north,” he said.

The preoccupation with names--and the status they imply--he finds distasteful. “When you say Pacoima, does that mean my friends in Pacoima are bad people?” he said.

A retired computer programmer who takes his daily walk up the Woodley hill saw little sense in a name change (or in printing his). “I’d be embarrassed to live in North Hills,” he said.

“I haven’t seen the other hill,” he said after strolling down the Woodley grade. “I’ll have to walk a little farther, I guess.”

But don’t tell Ruth Day there are no hills in North Hills. “What do you think we’re on?” she snapped at a visitor recently. Day lives a few houses away from Karington. “There are hills. We’re on a hill.”

Day, a feisty 69-year-old retired bookkeeper with silver glasses and hair the color of champagne, has lived on the hill since 1966, when Woodley was just a two-lane road. Now it’s a broad four-lane thoroughfare.

She signed the petition requesting the name change. “I think we should set ourselves apart from the dope alleys,” she said, adding that she calls the cops when she spots suspicious characters prowling the alleys. “I don’t like the riffraff,” she explained.

Sepulveda, she said, just doesn’t have the right ring. North Hills would be aristocratic, she said. When people ask where she lives, “I say I live near Northridge.”

Day, a widow who has filled her house with hundreds of figurines, dolls and stuffed animals, says the city should crack down hard on gangs--the kind of people who gave Sepulveda a bad name.

“I’d request troops,” Day said, imagining herself behind the mayor’s desk. “In one week, I’d clean up Los Angeles. I’d take them out to the desert and have them build a compound.”

The gangs, she explained, could then live in their new compound. “I say take the prisoners and put them to work. Don’t give them steak and potatoes and sauna baths.”

The people of North Hills are not the first to seek a new identity by fiddling with maps. Residents of the tonier side of Canoga Park broke away to become West Hills a few years ago. A slice of North Hollywood recently became Valley Village. People in West Los Angeles trying to sell their condos have long claimed to hail from Beverly Hills Adjacent.

Indeed, history is filled with name changes: Constantinople became Istanbul, Burma has metamorphosed into Myanmar, Saigon is now Ho Chi Minh City, Upper Volta opted for Burkina Faso and Rhodesia for Zimbabwe. A legislator from South Dakota proposed renaming his state Dakota, saying it was unfairly confused with its northern neighbor. (Or was it a North Dakotan legislator? Perhaps he had a point.)

As for North Hills, it should be noted that the name is not foreign to the San Fernando Valley.

There already are, for example, a North Hills Loan, a North Hills Cleaners and a North Hills Chiropractic.

They are located in Northridge, Granada Hills and Sylmar.