Pick of the Litter : Car Buffs and Do-It-Yourselfers Find a Paradise of Parts at 26-Acre Junkyard

Most people look out upon the 26-acre U Pick Parts junkyard in the east San Fernando Valley and see nothing but thousands of beat-up, shelled out, mangled vehicles.

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Then there are folks like Robert Garcia, who see wondrous possibilities.

“This is what I build cars from,” said Garcia, who restores old cars as a hobby. He had just found the very items he was looking for--three bulbs for the exterior lights on his cherished ’65 Buick Riviera. The total cost for these treasures: two bucks.

“Sometimes I can rebuild a whole car by just coming here,” he said, delighted with his find.

Garcia, a regular at the Sun Valley self-service junkyard since it opened nine years ago, knows that shopping at the huge lot is a hit-and-miss proposition. There are no inventory lists, so you can spend hours searching through the 3,000 cars, motorcycles, trucks and other vehicles without finding anything on your wanted list.

“Everyone knows you take your chances when you come here,” said Garcia, 32, who lives a few miles away in Arleta. “If I don’t find it here, I have to buy it someplace else and probably pay an arm and a leg for it.”

“The customers know there is no guarantee on anything, they pay cash, and they do the work themselves,” said Andrew Adlin, controller for Aadlin Bros., the firm that owns the lot, and a member of the family that runs the junkyard. The extra “a” was added to the business name to get a higher placement in telephone listings.

Like a supermarket, the junkyard is restocked every day. The cars are added at a rate of about 50 a day, commonly coming from police auctions, tow companies, insurance companies and the back yards of people who want to make a few bucks off a car they had sitting around.

Signs in English and Spanish encourage customers to bring their own tools and wear sturdy footgear. Patrons pay a dollar to get in.

The price of parts ranges from $100 for a complete engine down to the $1 paid by Garcia for the bulbs. (The entrance fee doubled his cost.)

In addition to road vehicles, the junkyard is now the home of the huge yellow arches that once belonged to a Valley carwash, a condemned Santa Fe train car and the remnants of an old Army tank with an intact turret.

Also on the lot is a Brahma bull named 7-Up who lives in a pen in the center of the junkyard with half a dozen chickens.

Nino Gasparini, 33, was at U Pick Parts one weekday afternoon looking for a right front fender and a hood that would fit his 1974 Chevy Malibu. He had wrecked the car that morning.

“The insurance company won’t pay for it because it is such an old car,” he said, looking through a white Malibu on the lot for parts. “Here I can fix it and not have to pay more than the car is worth,” he said, smiling.

Teresa Villalobos, 35, of Pacoima came to the junkyard with her husband, who was searching for parts for his Chevy truck. Wearing white shoes, she delicately stepped over grease puddles and glass.

“I don’t like coming here, but you have to if you want parts for a good price,” Villalobos said.

“With the money we save, maybe he will get me a new pair of shoes.”