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The Crescenta Valley
Despite being within the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the Crescenta Valley manages to retain its small town flavor due to its geography--a small valley nestled between two mountain ranges--and the people who prefer this way of life. The community is marked not only by what has changed, but more importantly, by what has not.
Crescenta Valley Pioneers & Their Legacies
Their names run deep through local history and lore, adorning street signs, canyons, historical buildings, homes and ranches in the swath of suburbia between Pasadena and Tujunga, where the towns of La Crescenta and La Ca ada took shape, along with the unique community of Montrose. Profiled in the pages of Crescenta Valley Pioneers and Their Legacies by author Jo Anne Sadler, a researcher and frequent writer for the Historical Society of the Crescenta Valley, are such singularly important local characters as Theodor Pickens, the first permanent settler; Dr. Benjamin B. Briggs, the founder of La Crescenta; Jacob L. Lanterman and Adolphus W. Williams, the original developers of Rancho La Ca ada; and the Le Mesnager family, whose historic wine barn still stands in Deukmejian Wilderness Park.
Crescenta Valley History
The Crescenta Valley is a typical suburb of the metropolis of Los Angeles, containing residential neighborhoods nestled in chaparral-covered hills. But hidden in these typical neighborhoods are remnants of an atypical past, a past made up of Hollywood legends, Prohibition-era bootleggers, and pioneers in women's rights. Crescenta Valley History: Hidden in Plain Sight tells the stories behind six places in the community that residents pass by every day, with no idea of the amazing events that took place there--six innocuous locations with impressive histories. A little shack behind an apartment that was once the home of John Steinbeck; the overgrown ruins of a former speakeasy; an abandoned sanitarium that once housed aging Hollywood stars, and now houses their ghosts; a mystical religious sanctuary run entirely by women; a former resort and Olympic training site buried deep under a suburban shopping mall; and a park created by professional baseball players and movie stars. All these sites are right here in your neighborhood! You'll never look at the Crescenta Valley the same way again.
La Crescenta
Though it has specific geographic borders, La Crescenta is politically split, straddling portions of unincorporated Los Angeles County, Glendale, and even a portion of Los Angeles itself. The Tongva Indians roamed the valley for hundreds of years until cattlemen moved in and loggers harvested the tall trees in the canyons above. Then came orchards, sanitariums, resort hotels, and, ultimately, suburban sprawl. These bucolic hills belied a penchant for archly conservative politics, but the peace of the valley was shattered not by Nazis or Klansmen, but rather by forces of nature: windstorms, fires, earthquakes, and, most severely, flash floods. In his book Man in Control of Nature, naturalist John McPhee wrote extensively about the La Crescenta floods. Despite the turbulence, La Crescenta has evolved into a quiet bedroom community in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.
Montrose
On February 22, 1913, the Holmes-Walton real estate agency hosted a huge barbecue to promote its new community of Montrose. It had purchased 250 acres of mostly sage brush in the foothills north of Glendale and held a contest to name the development. Or was this contest just a stunt? No matter where the name Montrose came from, Holmes-Walton thoroughly embraced the mountain rose theme, laying out the streets in the fanciful pattern of a rose with the planned town center at the heart of the flower. The construction of the 210 freeway in the 1960s pruned off the top of the rose, but the remaining curved roads still confuse drivers today. Though the town center formed two blocks south of the intended location, Montrose has as much heart and remains as charming today as when it blossomed 100 years ago.
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La Crescenta
Though it has specific geographic borders, La Crescenta is politically split, straddling portions of unincorporated Los Angeles County, Glendale, and even a portion of Los Angeles itself. The Tongva Indians roamed the valley for hundreds of years until cattlemen moved in and loggers harvested the tall trees in the canyons above. Then came orchards, sanitariums, resort hotels, and, ultimately, suburban sprawl. These bucolic hills belied a penchant for archly conservative politics, but the peace of the valley was shattered not by Nazis or Klansmen, but rather by forces of nature: windstorms, fires, earthquakes, and, most severely, flash floods. In his book Man in Control of Nature, naturalist John McPhee wrote extensively about the La Crescenta floods. Despite the turbulence, La Crescenta has evolved into a quiet bedroom community in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.
Glendale, 1940-2000
The Second World War changed Glendale in the same way that it overhauled many cities in Southern California, with new war-related industries requiring more workers in bigger facilities. Many men and women of the armed forces decided to make Glendale their home after the war. The population stabilized in the 1960s, but a new wave of development swept through Glendale as it became surrounded by freeways, as the Galleria mall was built, and as Brand Boulevard became a center of commerce. The city's cultural composition also changed when more Latinos, Armenians, Asians, and other distinct peoples began to make Glendale home, boosting Los Angeles County's third most populous city over the 200,000 brink. The year 2006 marked the city's centennial and the bicentennial of Jose Maria Verdugo's Rancho San Rafael, from which the city grew.
The Great Crescenta Valley Flood: New Year's Day 1934
As Crescenta Valley residents gathered to ring in the 1934 New Year, a cloudburst broke over Southern California's San Gabriel Mountains, unleashing a deluge on mountainsides denuded by recent fires. A roaring wall of rocks, mud and water crashed down the canyons, uprooting trees, tossing boulders and automobiles like toys and carving a path of destruction. Using painstaking research and heart-rending firsthand accounts, historian Art Cobery paints a picture of survival and redemption in the face of natural disaster, including the heroic efforts of eleven-year-old Marcie Warfield to save her father and younger brother, the devastating debris flow that claimed the lives of refugees and aid workers at the American Legion Hall and the selfless acts of neighbors caught in the storm of events.
Frontier Days in Crescenta Valley
Modern Crescenta Valley practically defines the notion of quiet suburbia with its lovely homes and tree-lined streets. Yet the communities that lie north of Los Angeles between the Verdugo and San Gabriel Mountains once formed a vast, isolated, treeless, windstorm-swept dell. The settlers who stayed in this valley found day-to-day subsistence challenging. They farmed, hunted, tried bee ranching, gathered greasewood, cultivated vineyards and dodged rattlesnakes. As settlement in the area continued to develop, such refinements as literature and photography flourished. Join author Jo Anne Sadler as she brings the Valley's frontier days to life, recounting such quirks as a visit from a "rainmaker" and the reasons behind the construction of the gaudy local landmark the Gould Castle.
