The Dirt on Eton

Every time Ramona Moloski looks out her front door, she’s reminded of the uniqueness of the neighborhood she chose a quarter-century ago as ideal for raising her four daughters.

Never mind that the girls, except for the 19-year-old youngest, are long since gone to adulthood and living elsewhere. Never mind, either, that Valley suburbanization has trapped the little two-block neighborhood in its asphalt-and-concrete grid.

For when Ramona Moloski opens her front door, she sees before her a living remnant of the Valley’s quickly buried rural past--a dirt road such as might bisect a sleepy settlement far removed from the hurry and spoiled air of Los Angeles. Although tract housing and low-income apartments lurk just a block or two away, a person walking that stretch of Eton Avenue still may hear the vibrato complaining of goats above the thrum of unseen traffic on close-by thoroughfares. At least for the present.

Eton Avenue east of Canoga Avenue and north of Roscoe Boulevard is 2 1/2 blocks of the 32 miles of unpaved roads that still lie within L.A.’s city limits. The unpaved streets represent but a tiny fraction of the 6,468-mile city total, and most are to be found in the thinly populated high hills and extremities of the metropolis.

Eton Avenue is unusual. It and a similar length of lesser Canoga Avenue (which lies east of the asphalt thoroughfare that bears the same name), and the block of Chase Street that joins them, are among the relative handful of unpaved streets that survive in the fleshiest areas of the city’s sprawling and congested body.

“You feel like you’re in your own, different little world,” says Moloski, an amiable woman of 59. “We like the privacy. We like the feel.”

Moloski discovered the neighborhood in 1971. She’d been taking her older daughters to a riding stable not far away, and was determined to find a home where the girls could keep horses. Besides, her husband, Tony, a motion picture construction worker, longed for a place where he could raise chickens and have the sort of garden a man could be proud of. The lots in the Eton area, which are at least a half-acre, are zoned residential-agricultural, meaning farm animals may be kept.

“I spotted this neighborhood just riding around, and I thought, ‘This is our spot,’ ” she says. “I scouted the neighborhood every day until I saw a ‘For Sale’ sign go up, and we made them an offer the same day.”

In time, the Moloskis of Eton Avenue kept horses, pigs, ducks, chickens and goats on the place. The Moloski girls could ride their horses down Eton to Chase, and across Chase to the dirt-skirted railroad right-of-way along Canoga Avenue, and thence up into the foothills of the Santa Susana Mountains.

The neighborhood kids were heavily involved in 4-H. The boy next door yearned to become a veterinarian, and kept 65 sheep. While adjacent to city amenities, Moloski’s daughters gained something of the earthbound perspective of rural upbringing.

“There is nothing like having to care for animals that develops a sense of responsibility,” Moloski says. “Once you get the point across to the kids that those animals depend on them to survive, they respond. My girls are such good mothers now, and I think living in the country atmosphere played a big part. It’s more the kind of life God intended for us, I believe.”

Time, however, is a whittler, and it has pared Eton Avenue’s idyll. Mobile home parks now crowd the once-open vista north of Parthenia Street. Light industry lines formerly vacant Canoga Avenue on the other side of the tracks. The would-be-veterinarian died in a traffic accident at age 18.

Although ostriches, turkeys and goats are still in evidence, fewer animals graze or waddle in the neighborhood’s spacious backyards. People move in and out more frequently. Some use the large lots to park trucks and other business-related vehicles. Residents have learned to be watchful of unfamiliar persons.

Moloski, now a grandmother of six, preserves what she can of the old ways. In a small corral behind the house lazes Jobina the white Arabian, who can still give a good ride, even though she’s 25. Fannie, the 12-year-old part-shepherd, part-chow, has the run of the well-trodden yard. In a small block of cages, Feline the rabbit tends her half-dozen week-old kits, within sight of other Dutch does named Flower and Princess, and of Thumper, the colony’s lone buck.

“We have 35 acres in Lockwood Valley, and my husband wants us to move there, but I’m not ready,” Moloski says. “I have beautiful memories here, and the grandkids are so close and still love coming over and playing in this yard.”

The dirt road remains the very emblem of the neighborhood’s special character, but it has become problematical beyond its usual summer dustiness. Water runoff from new apartment buildings on Eton at Parthenia tends to pool in one section of the unpaved street. The potholes that come with the winter rains have deepened beneath the increased traffic. Young drivers sometimes race up Eton and slam on their brakes to see how far their cars will skid on the dirt.

“At this point, I’d like to see it paved,” Moloski admits. “I didn’t for a long time.”

Under municipal law, property owners must pay to asphalt the unpaved public streets on which their properties front. Costs run between $75 and $100 per front foot, and a decision to pave can be made by majority vote of owners.

A plan being pondered by one of Moloski’s neighbors might catalyze that eventuality. Robert Smith, a retired real estate finance specialist who’s lived on Eton for more than 25 years, is thinking of having the two contiguous properties he owns rezoned for single-family residences.

Smith’s neighbor to the east already did so, and half a dozen tract homes now abut the horse barn and exercise ring on Smith’s property.

As a retirement project, Smith is considering constructing a cul-de-sac, as is envisioned in the city’s master plan, and placing around it as many as 11 new houses, three of which would face Eton. The salability of those houses might hinge on the condition of the street they face.

Smith admits to ambivalent feelings about the paving of Eton.

“But it’s inevitable,” he says. “It’s just supply and demand. In 20 years, regardless of what I do, all of this will be gone.”