Where L.A. Looks Pretty as a Picture Postcard

If Charles Robinson is lucky this morning, he will be living in a postcard.

If the weather cooperates, this week’s rains will have washed every trace of smog from the air and a breeze will have chased away the storm clouds.

And glistening before him in the crystal-clear sunshine will be a sharply defined downtown Los Angeles skyline, rising like a glittering gemstone set against a backdrop of snow-covered mountains in the distance.

It’s land baron Elias Jackson “Lucky” Baldwin’s gift to Los Angeles: A palm-tree-framed view of Southern California at its best that is delivered from a place that 40 years ago was the centerpiece of one of the city’s darkest hours.

These days, man and nature seem to come together in harmony in Baldwin Hills after every winter storm.

That’s when photographers grab their cameras and hurry to the Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area off La Cienega Boulevard to take pictures for Visitors Bureau advertising and tourist postcards.

“To me, it really is California at its finest,” said Robinson, a 76-year-old retired bus driver who lives at the base of Baldwin Hills and was at the park Monday to watch this week’s storm clouds roll in over the city. He visits the hilltop every day.

“People come back if they’ve been here once on one of those sparkling days,” he said. “They always come back.”

Rony Manzo, a 22-year-old student who lives in the Mid-City area, described it as the ultimate L.A.-watching spot on the day after a cold winter rain.

“It’s the only place you can see this view, the high-rises with snow behind them. And you don’t have to freeze to do it,” he said as this week’s rain clouds gathered. “Not many people know it’s here.”

Five finger-like ridges at Baldwin Hills’ highest point -- 500 feet above the Los Angeles Basin -- have been turned into landscaped viewpoints by county parks workers who run the recreation area for the state. They’ve turned it into a nice legacy for Baldwin.

Baldwin was a colorful Los Angeles land investor and racehorse breeder who created the towns of Monrovia and Arcadia in the San Gabriel Valley.

In 1875, he also acquired part of the Rancho La Cienega from the family of Vicente Sanchez. The marshy flatland bound by hills on the south had been given to Sanchez, a onetime mayor of Los Angeles, as a land grant from the king of Spain.

Baldwin raised cattle on the flat area and used the hills for hunting. He held off subdividing the land, calculating that eventually its value would balloon when Los Angeles expanded westward.

His daughter, Clara Baldwin Stocker, inherited the land when he died in 1909.

Oil was discovered there seven years later. The development of a sprawling oilfield there in 1924 limited the construction of homes when the city’s westward expansion finally reached Baldwin Hills.

In the late 1940s, the city began building a 19-acre reservoir at the top of the hills to provide adequate water pressure for its growing Westside neighborhoods. The state-of-the-art $10-million project was hailed when it opened in 1951.

But an earthen dam that helped form the 66-foot-deep lake ruptured on Dec. 14, 1963. It sent 292 million gallons of water racing down Cloverdale Avenue and slamming into homes in a large V-shaped northward path of destruction between La Brea Avenue, Jefferson Boulevard and La Cienega Boulevard.

Sixty-five houses were destroyed and 210 other homes and apartments were damaged by the wall of water.

Five people were killed, and authorities said the toll would have been much higher had it not been for dam keeper Revere G. Wells.

He investigated a gurgling sound and discovered a pencil-wide crack. His alertness gave officials three hours to evacuate homes below the dam.

Although some at first suspected that a nearby earthquake fault was to blame, federal geologists in 1976 concluded that the dam’s failure was due “largely or entirely to the exploitation of the Inglewood oil field” beneath Baldwin Hills that caused land under the dam to sink.

The conversion of unused sections of the oilfield into a park was proposed by then-county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn in 1968.

A 50-acre state recreation area was dedicated 15 years later and eventually expanded to 320 acres. As Baldwin Hills’ oil peters out (only about 400 of its 1,130 wells are still active) there are plans to expand the recreation area to about 1,200 acres -- or about two square miles.

The park now includes an artificial stream that feeds a stocked fishing lake, hiking trails and an “Olympic Forest” planted with trees from each of the 140 nations that took part in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Its highest point is also the site of numerous public agency communications towers.

The doomed Baldwin Hills Reservoir was never rebuilt. Instead, truckloads of dirt were hauled in and the empty lake was half-filled. Today it forms a grassy, tree-studded valley next to the overlook at the top of the recreation area.

A paved pathway encircles the old reservoir site. On Monday, 19-year-old German-born nanny Julia Zanders was pushing her 1-year-old charge along it in a stroller. Zanders was eager for the storm to come, and for snow to cover Mt. Baldy and other San Gabriel Mountains peaks rising beyond the downtown Los Angeles high-rises.

“I’ve seen the Alps. In Germany there are no big cities like this next to the mountains -- just villages,” she said. “Seeing a city so close to pure nature like this is so beautiful.”

At the very top of the Baldwin Hills, Karen Earl paused to take in the view. Behind her was Malibu, Pacific Palisades and Santa Monica against a backdrop of the ocean. In front of her was a city standing beneath its mountain backdrop.

“This is an urban surprise, a cure for the stress of the city,” explained Earl, a woman’s shelter director who lives in Culver City.

Lucky Baldwin had a sense of that 100 years ago. “We’re giving away the land. We’re selling the climate,” he was fond of saying.

And today, if we’re lucky, Baldwin Hills will be picture-postcard perfect.