Country Living With City Perks

Melody Acres is not exactly in tune with Los Angeles.

With its huge lots, heavy foliage and barnyard animals, this tiny Tarzana neighborhood seems more like Hooterville, the fictional setting of the “Green Acres” TV show.

Forty years of surrounding development has bypassed this enclave, and its nature-loving residents--including one who keeps a donkey that is the neighborhood alarm clock--seem to like it that way. Neighbors recently gathered for a block party, lining Shirley Avenue with hay bales.

“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.”

It is a plot of heaven that sits just north of the Ventura Freeway. Only three blocks long, Melody Acres is shielded by Tampa and Corbin avenues to the east and west and Topham Street on the north.

It is horse property, but there are more pigs. Neighbors even have 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 in daily life for most residents, whether they like it or not. Determined to be different, though, the Melody folks don’t rely on roosters. Gweebo, one of two donkeys in the neighborhood, awakens people within four blocks with his 5:30 a.m. braying.

Melody Skinner told her neighbors during the annual block party what gets Gweebo 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.”

Other exclusive communities have gates to keep outsiders away. Melody Acres relies on potholes.

Commuters looking to skirt congestion on Ventura Boulevard or the freeway sometimes turn into Melody Acres. They rarely make the same mistake twice. There are so many potholes that 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.

“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.

The 220 homes are not exactly tucked away in rolling meadows. But by metropolitan Los Angeles standards, the half-acre and larger 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 earthquake 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 lemon trees. A hundred paces deeper into the yard, he showed off 10,000 freesia and narcissus bulbs, all sprouting in neat rows.

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 are 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 San Fernando Valley 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 that smoothing their streets and adding sidewalks would cost them some of their precious property, as well as about $12,000 each.

Residents own the streets, so the city does not maintain them. The neighborhood association took a survey in 1995 to find out if residents wanted to allow the city to install sidewalks, curbs and gutters and street lights.

Nearly all said they preferred the potholes. For the city to build streets to Valley standards, it would have had to widen them and cut into some of the frontyards. Right now, parts of Melvin Avenue are so narrow that 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.”