COVER STORY : Against the Tide : Understated Toluca Lake Offers Sophisticated Calm in Urban Storm

It’s happy hour at a dimly lit Toluca Lake tavern.

Here, a few over-the-hill softball players order up postgame mugs of beer when they should be sending out for bottles of liniment.

Into the room strides TV’s Jonathan Winters, wearing a Civil War cap, his firepower of impromptu comedy in combat readiness.

“Captain!” a player named Don Page baits Winters, his friend. “I was with you at Bull Run!”

Seizing the moment, Winters picks through the semidarkness like a blind man, his fingertips finally caressing Page’s face.

“I remember!” Winters deadpans. “You were the only one who shaved!”

From there, Winters unleashes a fusillade of snappy one-liners that all but leave the customers summoning paramedics to treat them for side aches.

Once again, Toluca Lake (population 35,000)--an unincorporated community that sits within both North Hollywood and Burbank--adds a few more laugh lines to its 70ish face, having grown up with resident gagsters from W.C. Fields to elder statesman Bob Hope, who turns 90 on Saturday.

But gags and guffaws aren’t the only imprints on Toluca Lake, which Hope and the late Bing Crosby helped put on the map during the 1940s when they swapped barbs about each other’s golf prowess at the Lakeside Golf Club during radio spots for war bonds.

Today, Toluca Lake takes on multiple personalities and faces--many of them rich and famous--still on a laugh track, yes, but not necessarily on a fast track.

“We’re kind of a poor man’s Beverly Hills over here,” says Paul Ramsey, a longtime resident and civic leader, partner of the Ramsey-Shilling Associates real estate firm and owner of the newly refurbished Toluca Lake Tennis Club.

“The well-to-do here are more understated and always have been,” Ramsey says. “Bob Hope’s an old-fashioned guy; he has a seven-acre estate, but it’s not high style. Same thing with Jonathan Winters. . . .

“I think everybody’s kind of low-key. They don’t need to own a Rolls-Royce or a Mercedes, although there’s a little bit of that.”

The community appeals also to semi-outsiders such as Ray Szada, a retired Lockheed Corp. quality-assurance analyst who lives in La Canada Flintridge but hangs out in Toluca Lake, where he presides over the Lions Club.

“In La Canada, we don’t have the same businesses, or the atmosphere,” Szada says. “I come here, and one day I might find myself having breakfast with Jonathan Winters. It’s a place where people try to have fun. There’s something magical here. . . .

“It’s not really Los Angeles to me. It’s someplace that reminds me of something that I used to have--back in Wisconsin, perhaps.”

Scott Lorimer, a young businessman, describes Toluca Lake as “more a state of mind than a town because it straddles two cities.”

Wedged amid Burbank’s Media District on the east, Universal Studios to the south and working-class North Hollywood to the west and north, Toluca Lake comes across as a Hollywood star navigating a slow boat from bright lights to bit parts, the water now choppier, the lifestyle rougher around the edges.

It is five square miles of restaurants, shops and residences that range from middle-class apartments and $300,000 condos to $500,000 single-family houses with white picket fences to $4-million estates overlooking a tiny, picturesque lake that may well be the community’s best-kept secret.

It’s eateries such as the landmark Smoke House Restaurant (opened in 1946), Paty’s sidewalk coffee shop, JP’s Money Tree, the three-star Val’s and Timmy Nolan’s Grill, where co-proprietor Tim Crowner, the Toluca Lake Chamber of Commerce’s president-elect, has fashioned an Irish-style pub that conjures up visions of the set for TV’s “Cheers.”

It’s the 4,000-member St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church, where Paul Salamunovich, conductor of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, has directed the choir since 1948, and where longtime parishioners have included Hope’s wife, Delores, and her mother.

It’s celebrity watchers like those who recently scurried out of a barbershop to gawk at a 1934 Packard Phaeton parked by Efrem Zimbalist Jr., who appeared, to one observer, to be doing nothing more than nonchalantly running an errand.

It’s the venerable Lakeside Golf Club, organized in 1924 and thrust into folklore by many of Hollywood’s elite, who wagered extravagantly on its pine-studded course and inside its Spanish-style clubhouse. A rousing poker game once drove the stakes so high that one interloper scribbled out a personal check, hurled it onto the floor and said, “That check for $1 million is good--my name is Howard Hughes. Roll the dice.”

Toluca Lake is home not only to Hope and Winters but dozens of other celebrities including Dudley Moore, Markie Post, Denzel Washington and Joanne Worley. And it’s eternally identified with a who’s who of Hollywood’s golden past: Crosby, Mary Astor, William Holden, Dorothy Lamour, Richard Arlen and Johnny Weissmuller.

Legend has it that Weissmuller took solitary, post-midnight swims in the lake, then climbed to the balcony of his lakeside mansion. There, he screamed, “Ahhhhhh-eeeeeeee-ahhhhhhh-eeeeeeee-ahhhhhh!”--reprising his fabled “Tarzan” yell and watching the lights suddenly snap on inside his neighbors’ houses along the lake.

Toluca Lake is known for other eccentricities: It briefly had two chambers of commerce after some business leaders quarreled. A Bob’s Big Boy coffee shop recently became a state historical point of interest--an example of 1950s teen-age car culture and Streamline Moderne architecture--despite protests by the building’s absentee owner, who wanted to tear it down and put up an office tower.

And the community offers a study in contrasts, with sidewalk cafes and trendy shops flanking Riverside Drive, the main drag, which boasts all the charm and ambience of the Indianapolis Speedway.

Toluca Lake also is described by some as Hollywood’s “bedroom” and “middle-class underbelly.” Some restaurants in Toluca Lake (and on Los Angeles’ Westside) have served as “Mafia hangouts,” former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates wrote in his 1992 autobiography, “Chief,” although he didn’t specifically identify any in Toluca Lake.

As one pokes beneath Toluca Lake’s facade, it’s easy to imagine Bob Hope starring in yet another “road” film--”Road to Toluca”--and asking, “What’s a nice community like you doing in a place like this?”

As with much of contemporary urban America, Toluca Lake is plagued by traffic and congestion. It also wages a gallant but sometimes futile war against burglaries and car thefts while worrying about gangs in nearby parts of North Hollywood.

“You’re talking about a 3-wood shot from Camarillo Street, and you’re in gang-bang territory,” says Don Page, an eternal golfer and now a retired over-the-hill softball player who writes a column for The Tolucan, a weekly newspaper.

Still, Toluca Lake remains largely an island of sophisticated calm in an urban storm, thanks in part to a tight-knit rapport between many homeowners and police.

“We can’t do it alone--we’re fortunate that Toluca Lake has such a strong Neighborhood Watch,” says Nancy Reeves, a senior lead officer for the Los Angeles Police Department’s North Hollywood division.

At the heart of Toluca Lake’s pride are the old-timers, some of whom suffer from future shock, figuratively hanging out their “Do Not Disturb” signs, clinging to their Garboesque privacy and longing for 1948 again.

As one local small-businessman, Ted Takorian, puts it, “You have old-money people whose houses are all paid for. They want to keep the status quo.”

Among Toluca Lake’s wealthiest residents are those who live along the natural, spring-fed lake itself, which covers six acres and is bottom-surfaced with asphalt to prevent seepage.

The lake is a meticulously guarded preserve, privately owned by about 30 homeowners who live on its shoreline and who, for security reasons, rigidly prohibit photographs of the lake or descriptions of it. They recently purged it of pollution by installing electrically operated aerators. Fishing is allowed only from residences, and no gasoline-powered boating is permitted.

It’s a waterway ranging in depth from 18 inches to 10 feet, virtually sealed off from outsiders unless they visit a lakeside homeowner or gaze out from the high-rises of Universal City or the Media District.

“Every day, we get calls from people who ask, ‘Where’s the lake?’ ” says Jackie Girard, The Tolucan’s managing editor and sales manager.

The lake looks like a picture postcard from the landscaped back terrace of a 4,000-square-foot colonial home that John Broughton, 62, a retired United Parcel Service executive, shares with his wife, June, an interior designer.

At the lavish parties that the Broughtons frequently host, they entertain guests with tales of community folklore, pointing out the mansion where W.C. Fields lived, partially hidden by trees on a peninsula across the lake.

“When the wind is blowing a certain way, we get a slight aroma of Jim Beam bourbon,” John Broughton quips to a visitor. “So I’m sure that was his house.”

For all their proprietary interest in what Toluca Lake should be, Broughton and friends such as Paul Ramsey--both prosperous civic leaders who grew up delivering the old Hollywood Citizen-News--strive to make certain that the community doesn’t take itself too seriously.

“We’re not snooty,” Broughton insists. “We’re anything but dull.”

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Careful investors are buying in Toluca Lake Park because it is the one high-class, exclusive development in the fast-growing San Fernando Valley, where they cannot be elbowed out by lower-class developments . . . .

--From a promotional brochure, circa 1920s

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Toluca is an Indian name meaning “fertile or beautiful valley.”

The lake is said to have stemmed from a natural flow that trickled from the hills north of Chatsworth.

By the late 1920s, the Lakeside Golf Club had opened, its 18-hole course built with horse-drawn graders, flanked by the lake on the north and the Los Angeles River basin to the south.

For a residential lot on the lake in 1928, the going price was scandalously cheap by today’s standards: $2,000 to $3,000 per lot.

The late actor Charles Farrell built the first house on the lake. Soon other Hollywood stars followed. Famed aviator Amelia Earhart lived nearby. Crosby settled into a mansion a few blocks away. Hope took up residence on property that doesn’t front on the lake but is large enough to keep his golf game in tune.

In time, Hope would play golf at Lakeside with former Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford. He also would wisecrack about former Vice President Spiro Agnew:

“He’s a great physical specimen. He’s got a Black Belt in golf. Nobody has to ask him his score--you just look back along the hole and count the wounded. The last time he played good, he had a birdie. A birdie, an eagle, an elk, a moose and a Mason.”

Now, Toluca Lake stands at a crossroads--still a venue of golf and glitz, but now also taking tee shots at its tomorrows.

“A lot of the older, moneyed people are moving on--some of them to Palm Springs,” says Tim Crowner, 50, the co-owner of Timmy Nolan’s eatery and a transplanted Midwesterner. “We’re getting a whole new generation of media people and younger Warner and Disney executives.”

The community’s biggest challenge, some leaders say, is grappling with politics of both cities that Toluca Lake occupies, making sure that Burbank’s growth is addressed by Los Angeles and kept from trampling Toluca Lake.

It’s also keeping Toluca Lake’s small retail strip alive, Crowner says, “so Riverside Drive doesn’t turn into a lot of three-story buildings.”

Toward that end, some community leaders have pushed for angled parking along Riverside Drive, scaling down the busy thoroughfare from four to two lanes, slowing down the vehicular traffic and, as The Tolucan’s Jackie Girard says, “encouraging more foot traffic on our sidewalks.”

Yet even as some visionaries try to thrust Toluca Lake’s name back in lights, others say it matters little if it remains a throwback to old Hollywood, like an aging star recycled on the late, late show. They’ll take Toluca Lake pretty much the way it was and is, thank you.

Broughton, for one, says he and June once toyed with relocating to Switzerland while they visited Europe.

“We thought, ‘Gee, we can live in this gorgeous country--and Geneva is a safe place,’ ” he recalls. “Boy! Talk about the best of two worlds! It’s great tax-wise, and it’s clean!

“But then,” he adds: “we thought it over. The U.S.A. is our country. We have our friends, our church, the lovely people here and, yes, the lake. We came back to Toluca Lake.”