COMMUNITY COMMENTARY:Plaques help provide community pride

By Mike Lawler

Sept. 18, 2006 12 AM PT

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I would like to respond to Keith Palmer’s letter from Aug. 29 “Plaques would help celebrate history,” which described the need for more plaques commemorating the past in Glendale and Crescenta Valley.

As president of the Historical Society of the Crescenta Valley, my answer is “We’re working on it!” We have built a monument to the 1934 flood at the corner of Fairway and Rosemont avenues in Montrose.

With the Montrose Shopping Park Assn., we placed a plaque at the War Memorial on Honolulu Avenue that remembers that National Flag Week was started by a group of Montrose merchants. Early this year a Cub Scout troop and ourselves rebuilt a monument and plaque at the corner of Mira Vista Drive and Orangedale Avenue — destroyed decades ago by vandals — that memorialized a young Eagle Scout who died tragically in the ‘20s. In May, we joined with the Glendale School District to place a plaque at Clark High School that describes who Andy Clark was. At that time, several old school plaques were refurbished and remounted next to the new one.

Many plaques are in the pipeline for the near future:

Two plaques for the new spot park on Foothill Boulevard describing the great, and not-so-great, contributions of Benjamin Briggs and Theodore Pickens, representing a sort of “yin-yang” of early Crescenta Valley history.

One for Dunsmore Park, describing the life of Milton Hofert, a prodigal son of a wealthy Los Angeles family, who spent an entire decade in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s single-handedly creating the crazy-but-beautiful walls at the park as artwork. He can be thought of as the Simon Rodia [creator of the Watts Towers] of La Crescenta.

A memorial for the Zwick brothers, the only two sons of the Zwick family, who in World War II died within a month of each other in identical circumstances. Zwick Plaza on Honolulu Avenue is named for them, and their childhood handprints have been preserved there.

Hindenberg Park, with its famous Nazi rallies, Verdugo Golf Course, former site of an World War II internment camp that held thousands of Japanese, German, Italians, and South Americans, the Tongva Indians who lived in the Crescenta Valley for thousands of years before we got here, and the rich and often amusing history of the Montrose Shopping Park.

I could go on and on.

The bottom line is, plaques are being placed in the Crescenta Valley by our organization and others, but labor and money are needed for these projects.

Plaques are expensive, but they’re worth it. They give the community a feeling of pride and a sense of place. They instill the value that our community is not just another suburb of Los Angeles, but is something special. When a historical plaque is placed in a neighborhood, the result is community pride, and with that, property values go up.

So I ask Palmer to please join us. Together we’ll keep the fascinating history of our community alive and make it a better place for the future. Join the Historical Society of the Crescenta Valley in our quest to make this an even better place to live.

MIKE LAWLER is a La Crescenta resident.