Melody Acres Hits Right Note

If, as legend has it, Melody Acres was named by a songwriter, he’s more likely to have penned the “Green Acres” theme than “Inner City Blues.”

Except for the sport utility vehicles in the driveways and the remodeled tract homes, the small neighborhood seems out of place in this freeway-bisected area of the West Valley. The huge lots, heavy foliage, pet pigs and other barnyard animals clattering about call to mind Hooterville, the fictional setting of the “Green Acres” TV series.

Forty years of development has passed this enclave by, and the nature-loving residents, who have a donkey for an alarm clock, love it.

They gathered recently for a block party, lining Shirley Avenue with hay bales to celebrate the neighborhood’s rustic charm.

“It’s great to be in the middle of the San Fernando Valley and feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere,” resident Beth Nelson said.

Her neighbor Linnea Murphy added: “This is like God’s little acre.”

If so, then a plot of heaven sits just north of what morning commuters may call the highway from hell, the 101 Freeway. A three-block neighborhood, Melody Acres is shielded by Tampa and Corbin avenues to the east and west and Topham Street to the north.

It is horse property, but pigs actually outnumber horses, so much so that the neighbors have formed a porcine rescue network.

“A neighbor’s pig got out and somebody called Beth,” Murphy said. “She was at a school basketball game. She called me. I got down here, and they had already got him back into the yard. But the system worked the way we set it up.”

Farm animals figure into daily life for most of the Melody Acres residents, whether they like it or not. Determined to be different, though, the Melody folks couldn’t have a simple rooster crowing for an alarm clock.

Gweebo, one of two donkeys in the neighborhood, awakens people for four blocks with his 5:30 a.m. brays.

Melody Skinner informed her neighbors during the annual block party what gets Gweebo--and everyone within earshot--stirring so early.

“Now everybody will know what I’m doing at 5:30, but here goes,” Skinner said. “When I flush the toilet in the morning, it wakes the rooster. He wakes up Gweebo. Gweebo wakes up everybody else.”

Potholes Keep Outsiders Away

While other exclusive communities are gated to keep outsiders away, Melody Acres relies on potholes.

Commuters looking to skirt congestion on Ventura Boulevard or the San Diego Freeway sometimes turn into Melody Acres. They rarely make the same mistake twice. The potholes are so many and so multifaceted that the neighbors held a pothole naming contest during the block party.

The winner, “Michael Jordan Going to the Hole,” very closely resembled the basketball star’s silhouette used on his line of athletic wear.

“We don’t want fancy streets,” Murphy said. “We want to keep our streets this way so people know it’s no shortcut, to drive through all our potholes.”

Complementing the potholes are streets without sidewalks and a little more than a handful of street lights.

The 220 homes are not exactly tucked away in rolling meadows, but by metropolitan Los Angeles standards, the minimum half-acre lots are expansive. Perhaps no one takes advantage of that space more than Albert Alfi, who was left with an open field after the Northridge quake ruined his home.

“I’m rebuilding, but for now, look at what I can grow here,” Alfi said, stepping into a cluttered garden of pineapple guavas, miniature roses and sweet lemon trees. A hundred paces deeper into the yard, he showed off 10,000 freesia and narcissus bulbs, sprouting in neat rows.

Singing Cowboy Believed Founder

Neighborhood lore has it that the community was started in the late 1920s by a singing cowboy, but records have been lost and the details are hazy, residents said. Joe Siracusa, who was a drummer for Spike Jones, has one of the original homes in the neighborhood. The notes on his split-rail fence denote the melody to “Home on the Range.”

The neighborhood continued to develop in the 1930s, becoming a country escape for city dwellers. Such rural enclaves were not uncommon in the Valley then, before the tract housing boom, commercial development and freeway construction that followed World War II.

Renee Bucher, who shares her home with six talking birds, said Melody Acres combines the best of rural and urban worlds.

“We’re two blocks away from civilization, but we retreat to our homes in the country,” Bucher said. “If you really live in the country, you miss out on everything we do in the city, like going to the theater. If you just live in the city, you miss out on nature like we have here.”

The community claims architects, financial analysts and art dealers among its residents. They realize smoothing out their streets and adding sidewalks would cost them some of their precious property and about $12,000 each.

Residents Voted Against Sidewalks

Residents have kept ownership of the rights of way since the development sprung up in the ‘30s, so the city does not maintain them. The neighborhood association took a survey in 1995--one of a number over the years--to find out if the residents wanted to allow the city to install sidewalks, curbs and gutters and street lights.

Nearly all, 95%, said they would prefer potholes to smaller lots. For the city to build streets to Valley standards, it would have had to widen them and cut into some of the frontyards in the neighborhood. Right now, parts of Melvin Avenue are so narrow two Lincoln Navigators could not pass side-by-side.

Anywhere else, that would be suburban sacrilege. But here in “God’s little acre,” no one seems to mind.

“Who would trade all this for a castle in Beverly Hills?” Alfi asked. “I wouldn’t.”