RIVALRY: The Model of a Suburb : Sibling Rivalry : If Valley Secedes, Will It Take the ‘Real L.A.’ With It?

Arm-wrestled into Los Angeles, dwelling in resentful isolation from the bureaucrats on the other side of the hill, the 256-square-mile bowl of suburban angst that is the San Fernando Valley has never been a particularly happy resident of the city.

A thirst for William Mulholland’s water in 1915 brought the Valley into the city. And through successive battles over busing, apportionment and taxation, many have never stopped regretting that decision.

Squinting through the prism of time, it’s clear that the current chatter in favor of Valley secession from the city is simply the latest chapter in a long-running tale of conflict between two partners who have never gotten along very well, but who can’t seem to do without each other. Scrolling through the past is like thumbing through photos of sibling rivals. In some pictures, they’re pinching and pulling hair, in others hugging, if only at the photographer’s order. Always together, and always edgy with each other.

Which is ironic because, to much of the outside world looking in via movies and television shows such as “The Brady Bunch,” the Valley is Los Angeles. It is the place where all the things L.A. is admired and derided for--its balmy, chlorinated nights, its auto-centric lifestyle, packing crate housing and lack of cultural and historical perspective--exist in numbingly vast concentrations.

In this way, the Valley is a sort of Dorian Gray portrait of the city of Los Angeles, revealing, as the portrait revealed Gray’s hidden evil nature, the city’s middle-class soul. And if the Valley leaves L.A., the question might be: Will it take the real L.A. with it?

” . . . The very premise of the Southern California dream,” is how USC professor and California historian Kevin Starr refers to the Valley.

It’s a dream with love/hate roots going way back.

The first Valleyites were Native Americans, but by the turn of the century, the Valley looked like a giant cereal bowl, filled with fields of grain raked occasionally by high winds.

A rancher’s brief diary entry, recorded in a book called “The Owensmouth Baby,” tersely summed up the struggles of life after the turn of the century. “Wind. No work today.”

Townships sprang up, but the burgeoning population was even then dependent upon the infant colossus to the south.

Although the Pacific Electric Red Cars arrived in the Valley in 1912, there was no theater yet or even a mortuary. For years, the trolley’s Death Car carried bodies back to Los Angeles for undertaking.

But the history of the Valley, like that of Los Angeles as a whole, is all about the pursuit of water. And about holding onto it, once you’ve got it. Ranchers in the Valley looked on enviously as work neared completion in 1913 on the aqueduct that would bring Owens Valley water to Los Angeles.

They hoped to strike a bargain with the city without giving up their independence. But the Los Angeles City Council declared there would be no water for the Valley without annexation.

“The San Fernando Valley is no better than any other valley,” said aqueduct visionary William Mulholland, becoming an early member in a long line of Valley bashers.

Sentiments for and against annexation were strong.

“Water the San Fernando Valley and you have the garden spot of the world,” effused advocate Frank Keffer, editor of the Van Nuys News.

The debate raged into the summer of 1913, when Van Nuys experienced its first big fire. Flames destroyed a commercial district, while locals ineffectually squirted the blaze with garden hoses. As the embers smoldered, people could hear the noise of riveters working on the aqueduct.

Water from the Owens Valley Project began cascading down a viaduct into the Valley on Nov. 5, 1913. Thirty thousand spectators turned out on the hills north of San Fernando.

“There it is. Take it!” said Mulholland, amid the shouts and pandemonium.

Eventually, the Valley did. Making annexation still more attractive to the Valley towns, electric lights were being introduced in Los Angeles.

The symbolism was perfect. Valley voters saw the light and in March 1915, thirsty residents representing about 170 square miles voted to become part of the city of Los Angeles. It may have been a passionate debate, but when it came time to vote, the turnout in some towns was as phlegmatic as in any modern election.

Only 39 of the 202 residents of Owensmouth voted; 35 favored annexation. Valleywide, 681 voted for annexation and 25 opposed it, a greater mandate than in the city as a whole, where 37,276 favored annexation of the Valley, compared with 24,098 against.

Three towns held out, San Fernando--local headlines screamed San Fernando “is surrounded but not captured”--and Burbank, which remain independent. Lankershim joined the city in 1923 and became North Hollywood.

In the end, Mulholland himself bought 640 acres near Chatsworth and got himself a Valley address. It was to be a familiar pattern for those who denounce the Valley’s moribund sameness while living there anyway.

The Valley changed again after World War II, but sibling rivalry continued. Servicemen returned to find a checkerboard paradise waiting as the grain fields were ground up and replaced by a manicured schematic of battle-ready homeowner associations that served as America’s model bedroom community.

Author Raymond Chandler captured the frenzy of the era, when the rhythms of life in the Valley were tuned to the ever-present hum of earth-moving machinery.

“Tired men in dusty coupes . . . ploughed on north and west towards home and dinner, an evening with the sports page, the blatting of the radio, the whining of their spoiled children and the gabble of their silly wives,” he wrote, in the persona of detective Philip Marlowe.

Unimaginative men, spoiled children, silly wives. This became a common sneer. Where once there was almost universal admiration for the social engineering that created modern suburbs, the praise quickly turned to derision over the dull repetitiveness of the stuccoed housing tracts that were consuming the landscape.

Eventually, the undertow of hostility spread to the beach, the metaphor for everything California. Legendary Malibu surfer Mickey Dora railed in Surfer magazine in 1967 that the waves were “curdling already from the football-punchy Valley swingers.”

The extreme nature of these rants reflected the Valley’s success in imprinting its vision on the rest of the country. The Valley wasn’t the first suburb, but it was the suburb of “The Brady Bunch,” set in North Hollywood. The show was fiction, but those placid streets, those yards that went on forever, were authentic scenes of Valley life.

If the rest of Los Angeles scorned the Valley as it grew into an urban area larger than all but five of America’s cities, the Valley during this time was not unhappy with its lot, said Bob Scott, who was born in Van Nuys in 1946. He remembers little rancor during the ‘50s and ‘60s.

But as time went on, “the politics of division began to grow up,” he said.

Mandatory busing lighted the match of modern discontent in 1978. Suburbanites with good schools feared the migration of social problems aboard the yellow school buses that brought inner-city students to the Valley’s tree-lined campuses.

The issue was so hot that it elevated homemaker Bobbi Fiedler, an unknown campus crusader, to national prominence as the voice of step-down living room resistance. It later helped send her to Congress.

Concerns about the Valley’s lack of political clout flared over complaints that council districts were drawn in such a way as to mute the voice of Valley residents.

The modern secession movement began in 1975 with the formation of CIVICC, the Committee Investigating Valley Independent City/County, of which Scott was a member.

“Valley Taxpayers Don’t Get Their Fair Share,” was the cry of this Dichondra Rebellion. The secessionists charged that of every 40 cents in taxes collected by the city, the city returned only 15 cents in government services to the Valley.

City leaders were not impressed. “It is difficult to take the secessionists seriously,” sniffed Anton Calleia, an aide to then-Mayor Tom Bradley.

The Legislature made sure he wouldn’t have to soften his stance when it passed a bill in 1978 requiring that any secession would have to be approved by the City Council. Dismayed CIVICC leaders knew that was the kiss of death.

That’s how things stood until the 1994 elections altered the political equation in the Legislature, enabling Paula Boland (R-Granada Hills) to secure passage of her bill in the Assembly this year that would eliminate the City Council’s ability to veto a secession effort.

Some might argue that by forcing the rest of the city to finally address its complaints the Valley has already won. But not Scott, or other veterans of the war of secession.

“Getting somebody to listen is step No. 1,” he said. “Step No. 2 is getting equity.”

It’s still to be seen whether breaking away from the city of Los Angeles will be the greatest thing since Mulholland turned on the faucets, or the worst thing since the Great Valley Grain Fire charred 18,000 acres in 1878.

The only thing that seems certain is that these two squabbling siblings, the downtown sophisticate and her arty friends, and the suburban van-pooler and doyenne of the backyard barbecue, will continue to snipe at and complain about one another. Safe in the knowledge that their fates are so entwined that, for better or worse, they can never really be rid of each other.