The Story Behind Fehlhaber-Houk Park On a busy Tujunga Canyon Boulevard, where heavy traffic grinds along between Sunland-Tujunga and the 210 Freeway, lies a small park, little noticed by the cars rushing by. It’s little used as well, as it is truly a “passive park” – no tennis courts, playground equipment, not even a dedicated […]
Cable TV Wars – The Story of Crescenta Valley Cable When we think of TV reception in the ‘50s and ‘60s, we think of “rabbit ears” on top of the TV set or of space-age looking antennas mounted on our roofs. Both these options often involved elaborate adjusting of the antennas depending on the location […]
The First Wedding in the Valley On a May morning in 1887, high up among the sagebrush and rocks on the upper slopes of the Crescenta Valley, two young people from Indiana pledged their lives to each other in the first marriage ceremony in La Crescenta. The groom was Fred Foster, a young man from […]
La Crescenta was the Center of Wealth and Culture – in 1886 La Cañada is one of the wealthiest and most highly educated communities in the state. By contrast, La Crescenta is generally middle-class, a bedroom community with a limited selection of arts and literature to offer its residents. It’s not as affluent as La […]
La Crescenta Elementary’s Class of 1888 Last week I wrote about the La Crescenta Elementary School bell which was hung in the steeple of the new schoolhouse in 1890. But there was a school before that, in a little one-room cement structure on the northeast corner of Foothill and Dyer, where the library parking lot […]
The recent Sand Fire has brought attention to the amazing level of efficiency that modern firefighters have achieved. They fight fires with military precision, using an array of modern technologies. Massive airpower can knock down flare-ups, and can save homes that are engulfed in flame. But for the firefighters of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) […]
The Historical Floor Plaque of La Crescenta Library In 2010 La Crescenta was blessed with a new library. The building itself, located at La Crescenta Avenue and Foothill Boulevard, is a modern interpretation of Craftsman architecture. The interior spaces are beautifully lit by indirect natural light streaming in through strategically placed high windows. As the […]
The Three Civilian Conservation Corp Camps of CV The story of the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) in the early 1930s is one of the brightest chapters in American history. In the dark depths of the Great Depression, a newly elected President Roosevelt formed a corps of young out-of-work men to perform conservation work on state […]
Yes, We Have Native Bees When I told a co-worker I was going to a lecture about local native bees, he said, “I thought there weren’t any native bees, just European honey bees.” That’s what I thought, too. As a matter of fact, I even naively thought that before the introduction of honey bees 400 […]
Verdugo Hills Cemetery Today This column wraps up a short history of the Verdugo Hills Cemetery in Tujunga. Although the graveyard is a historical treasure, it has also taken an infamous place in L.A. history. For it was here in 1978 that the cemetery hillside containing long dead bodies gave way during a rainstorm and […]