‘Little’ College Town Is Inland Oasis : Claremont: Academic founders brought trees, village center. Residents like the amenities--and chafe at growth.

Tall shamel ash trees shade Bridgeport Avenue in Claremont, where Chris and Vianne Wagner moved nine months ago. This fast-growing variety of ash is the street’s designated tree, and it gives the quarter-century-old neighborhood a look of maturity and permanence all out of scale with its years.

The Wagners settled in Claremont, a city of 35,000 in the San Gabriel Valley 35 miles east of Los Angeles, after Chris Wagner’s company returned him to Southern California from Honduras in the summer of 1990. Before they saw Claremont, they thought they had a fair idea of what to expect.

“We had some preconceptions about the Inland Empire--smoggy, hazy, a pall over everything,” said Chris Wagner, 31. “We had a pretty dim view. Then we found Claremont, a kind of oasis.” It is true that, with its ash and eucalyptus and live oak, its deciduous hardwoods, its liquidambar and jacaranda and its many varieties of evergreens, Claremont stands out freshly green against its backdrop of brown foothills.

The Wagners--he is an executive with Dole Fruit in Ontario and they are the parents of a 5-year-old son and a 20-month-old daughter--found a strong sense of community in Claremont. Strict regulation and a high level of citizen involvement have preserved much of Claremont’s small college-town character.

That is a product of heredity. Speculators founded the town as a resort in 1884. The venture soon failed, and the place had been all but abandoned when Congregationalist educators arrived from Massachusetts and Connecticut in 1888 to establish Pomona College, the first of the Claremont Colleges.

The New Englanders settled the dust, swept away the sagebrush and planted the first trees, to remind them of the gray, damp, chilly places they left behind. Claremont grew slowly, a quiet academic community surrounded by a broad green, yellow and orange belt of citrus groves.

The founders and their successors built a little town center on the New England model, known as The Village today, and meanwhile kept on planting trees, each street with its designated species. In due course new colleges were established: Scripps in 1926, Claremont Men’s (now Claremont McKenna) in 1946, Harvey Mudd in 1955 and Pitzer in 1963.

The early settlers were so successful that, even now, with the citrus groves long vanished and suburbia everywhere ascendant, Claremont still suggests New England to many newcomers.

Pat Simmons arrived from New Jersey with her parents in 1948 and has been selling houses for Curtis Real Estate in Claremont since the 1960s. She long ago stopped remarking how often clients from the Northeast would look around and murmur, “Oh, this reminds me of back home.” They respond, she said, to the trees, to the city center with its restaurants, antique shops, drugstores, banks, bakery and hardware store, and to something less tangible too.

“It has a history you can measure in years rather than months,” Chris Wagner said.

“It’s very much an anomaly,” said Margaret Harloe, 31, who moved to Claremont from Las Cruces, N.M., with her husband 18 months ago. “The rest of Southern California, you kind of drift from one town to the next. There’s no there there.”

There is a park two blocks away from their house on Northwestern Avenue, and Margaret and Bart Harloe like to walk there and in The Village with their 7-month-old daughter, Katherine. “The scale of it’s right. It’s a walkable town,” said Bart Harloe, 44, who is a librarian at the Claremont Colleges’ Honnold/Mudd Library.

Still, Claremont’s scale has changed greatly over the decades. Longtime residents remember how citrus groves have disappeared under vast tracts of housing, and residential development has spread northward into the foothills.

The war brought the first intensive residential development--tract neighborhoods for defense workers and servicemen who stopped over in Southern California on their way to the Pacific Theater, liked what they saw and returned to live permanently. Claremont’s population doubled in the 1950s and doubled again in the 1970s.

“We lived in one of the first tract developments, built in the 1940s,” Pat Simmons recalled. Now those houses, in the southern section of the city nearest the San Bernardino (10) Freeway, are Claremont’s most affordable. The MLS book lists a two-bedroom, 1,100-square-foot ranch house on South Carleton Avenue, built 41 years ago, for $135,000.

The book has many listings in the $200,000 to $250,000 range. The Harloes had to pay out more than twice what they received for their property in Las Cruces when they bought here earlier this spring, but at $199,000 their 1,600-square-foot house is a bargain by Claremont standards. At the top end of the scale, a five-bedroom house on four acres at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains is listed for $2.85 million.

The real estate slump has slowed the pace of building here as elsewhere. In any case, planners say the city has nearly grown out to its boundaries, and not much vacant land remains.

Developers find Claremont restrictive. Regulations prohibit drive-in fast-food restaurants and bars. Restaurants have been allowed to sell alcoholic drinks with meals only for the last decade or so.

“They’re trying to keep their ‘little town’ image,” Eric Brown of the Meyers Group, consultants, said of city officials. “It’s a fairly closed community. Claremont doesn’t act like the rest of the Inland Empire.”

Sharon Wood, Claremont’s community development director, said only a few open parcels remain, though the City Council is moving to annex hundreds of empty acres in the foothills to the north. Some new residential building will be permitted there, she said.

The newest and most expensive neighborhood is Blaisdell Ranch just below the foothills between Baseline and Mount Baldy roads. Only a corner of the old citrus grove remains, weed-choked rows of unwatered trees with dusty gray leaves and a few pieces of shriveled fruit clinging to the branches. Immediately to the north, 6,000- to 8,000-square-foot houses are being built in every conceivable mix, however reckless, of architectural styles. The price range, said Pat Simmons, is from $700,000 to $1.2 million.

Still, Claremont retains much of its distinctive flavor. For the Wagners, whose last Southern California stop was Culver City, the chief component is the sense of community identity handed down by Claremont’s academic founders. Vianne Wagner, who is 29, and her children use the parks and library and the children’s bookstore downtown.

When they moved in, she said, still sounding faintly surprised, the neighbors dropped by to introduce themselves, and some actually brought plates of cookies.

Claremont turned out to be well within the Wagners’ financial reach. They sold their house in Culver City for $275,000 two years ago when the market was hot. It had begun to cool by the time they returned from Central America. Their 1,900-square-foot house, with shaded grounds on a quiet street, cost $262,000.

The Wagners and others mention Claremont’s college-town feel, and Claremont and the colleges are inseparable. Still, the colleges get in an expansionist mood from time to time, and there have been clashes with neighborhood groups and with the city.

Town-gown relations “run hot and cold,” said Frederick M. Weis, vice president and treasurer at Claremont McKenna College. For Claremont McKenna, much of the heat during the last decade or so has involved the Arbol Verde, the barrio district whose boundaries have been eroded by development over the years.

Some of the houses in what remains of the barrio date from the 1940s and so are of historical interest. And some barrio families have lived there for two or three generations. Put simply, the disputes have centered on Claremont McKenna’s plans to raze or relocate houses to make way for college facilities.

After years of stalemate, the city and the college appear to be close to an agreement that would allow the college to expand in the northern part of the barrio, while the southern section of the neighborhood would be left undisturbed.

Meanwhile, Pomona College, the city and a local lawyer are in dispute over a wooded lot at 5th and Harrison near The Village. The college wants to put up a classroom building there. The lawyer argues that the original deed suggests the lot should remain open space.

“Local legend has it that the deed restricts building there, that the land, the trees belong to all of us,” said Sharon Wood.

It ought to be a hard fight, and the shades of Claremont’s Congregationalist founders, lugging heavy buckets of water from tree to thirsty tree, will no doubt take more than a passing interest.

AT A GLANCE Population

1990 estimate: 37,488

1980-90 change: +21.1%

Median age: 31.4 years

Annual income

Per capita: 18,679

Median household: 50,369

Household distribution

Less than $30,000: 27.5%

$30,000 - $50,000: 22.1%

$50,000 - $75,000: 24.8%

$75,000 - $150,000: 22.4%

$150,000 + 3.2%