A Busy February Gives Way to March It has been a very busy February by way of events and I am glad to be entering March (Madness). Here’s what the Crescenta Valley Town Council is up to in terms of service to the Crescenta Valley: Both Corresponding Secretary Sophal Ear and I were honored in […]
Chicken City – La Crescenta in the 1920s Los Angeles, and its suburb of La Crescenta, was booming in the 1920s. The population was doubling and tripling, and the orchards and ranches in all the suburbs were being divided up into city lots. La Crescenta was no exception, but chicken ranching locally was holding fast […]
The February meeting of the Crescenta Valley Community Association on Thursday opened with a discussion of the mixed-use condo/commercial project at 3037-3045 Foothill Blvd. in the unincorporated portion of La Crescenta. Sharon Raghavachary has reviewed the revised plans submitted by the developer to LA County Planning and determined the project is still not in compliance […]
The Rattlesnake Murders For those of you who have read “Murder and Mayhem in the Crescenta Valley,” this story will be familiar as it was written up by Gary Keyes for that book. But this murder was so bizarre, so twisted, that I just had to cover it again. In 1935, Robert James and […]
Turkey’s Descent Into Authoritarianism There are few countries with which the United States has a more complex relationship than Turkey. Turkey is a member of NATO, hosts a major U.S. airbase in Incirlik, and has long boasted a vigorous, if flawed, democracy in a strategically important Muslim country. For decades, the United States has cultivated […]
Parking Major Concern As a Montrose business owner of Grayson’s Tune Town, established in 1953, and an active Montrose merchant for 40 years, I am writing about my parking concern for the 2300 and 2400 blocks of the Montrose Shopping Park. I learned just recently that Glendale College is in escrow to buy the vacated […]
The Granite Quarry at Devil’s Gate The mining and quarrying of minerals and stone has gone on in our local mountains since Europeans first arrived – gold, graphite, gravel and granite. One significant gravel quarry existed in the 1880s at Devil’s Gate in the Arroyo Seco at the eastern edge of La Cañada. Local […]
Montrose Search and Rescue – Busy Thanksgiving Weekend The pressure on the Montrose Search and Rescue team increases on holiday weekends. This account of two rescues on Sunday of the Thanksgiving weekend in 1986 shows how this brave rescue team often sacrifices its holidays to save lives. At the same moment that particular Sunday, […]
Getting Into Action Late last month, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors passed, with a 4-1 vote, a motion that asked the California Legislature to alter the way the state defines “gravely disabled.” The motion was put forth by Supervisors Kathryn Barger and Mark Ridley-Thomas after Supervisor Barger spent time on skid row and […]
In January 1988, two different Boy Scout troops were getting experience in cold-weather camping in the San Gabriel Mountains when an unexpectedly powerful storm blew in, dropping a heavy covering of snow. Troop 108 from Culver City had parked their cars on a turnout of Angeles Crest Highway and then hiked about a mile down […]