Verdugo Views: Tiny stone house played a big part in CV history

Italian immigrants Tommaso and Josephine Bonetto bought acreage in the still-wide-open Crescenta Valley in 1905 and with their two small sons, Bart and Tom, moved into a tiny one-room, stone house already on the property.

The origin of the stone house is a mystery, according to Michael Morgan, writing in the Historical Society of the Crescenta Valley’s Ledger.

“The property record books that Los Angeles County has for the Crescenta Valley prior to 1905 used to be lent out and they have been lost,” he said.

The house faced southward and would have “welcomed all travelers coming up from Glendale along Verdugo Road, then Los Angeles Avenue,” he added.

When Bonetto moved onto the land, he planted a vineyard as well as a cherry and plum orchard extending south from the stone house, approximately to where the American Legion Hall now stands.

He added a wood-frame addition on the side of the stone house with a basement beneath for making wine, according to Mike Lawler, founder of the Crescenta Valley Historical Society, which provided much of the information for this story.

In their teens, Bonetto’s two sons worked in the orchards on the nearby Onandarka Ranch and in the vineyards on what is now Oakmont Country Club’s golf course.

In the early 1920s, the two brothers started a business, Bonetto Feed and Fuel, at the corner of La Crescenta and Montrose avenues. They built a large brick structure with barns in the back for hay and coal.

The business was right on the Glendale and Montrose Railway trolley line, where electric freight cars dropped off coal and grain and where farmers loaded their produce for the short trip to the markets in Los Angeles. The store was a landmark for 50 years, Lawler added.

Both brothers built homes on sections of their father’s property on Manhattan Avenue. Son Tom and his bride, Florence, lived in the old stone house in 1931 while they waited for their new brick house to be completed next door at what is now 2819 Manhattan Ave.

The stone house continued to be the center of the Bonetto family’s wine-making operations.

The brothers and their wives became leaders in the community, volunteering with many local charities and service groups, including the Sunshine Society, which operated Twelve Oaks Lodge for many years.

After Tom and Florence Bonetto died, the lot, with its spreading oak tree and tiny stone house, was sold. It sat undisturbed until now.

The brick Bonetto House was declared a Glendale Historic Landmark ”because of the pioneering Bonetto’s leadership in building La Crescenta,” Lawler said, adding that the wine-making equipment was donated to the city to be used in a museum at Deukmejian Park.

Earlier this spring, the tiny stone house was torn down.

“Various community activists explored saving the old house, but it was not architecturally significant enough to generate much traction,” Lawler said.

The house “evoked in her small frame all the rugged individualism that captures what it must have been like to be first to come into this vast valley and put down roots,” Morgan wrote in the Ledger. “We are poorer for its demise, but richer in that it was in our valley.”

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Readers Write

John Hammell Jr. wrote with a question about drive-in movie theaters.

“If I’m not mistaken, Glendale never has had a drive-in movie theater,” he wrote in a letter. “I do remember four that were close to Glendale, but not in Glendale.”

One drive-in theater, the San Val in Burbank, was one of the first in the area and closed in the mid-1970s. The second, the Pickwick in Burbank, was the last of the four to close in the late 1980s and was replaced by Pavilions and other stores.

The third, the Los Feliz near the Hyperion Bridge, was open from 1950 to 1956, he believes. It was closed to make room for the new Golden State (5) freeway. The fourth, the Sunland, was open until the mid-1970s.

Hammell looks forward to hearing from other readers about these or other nearby drive-in movie theaters.

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