Sunland-Tujunga, Los Angeles
Sunland-Tujunga is a neighborhood in Los Angeles, California, within the Crescenta Valley and Verdugo Mountains. Sunland and Tujunga began as separate settlements and today are linked through a single police station, branch library, neighborhood council, chamber of commerce, city council district, and high school. The merging of these communities under a hyphenated name goes back as far as 1928. Sunland-Tujunga contains the highest point of the city, Mount Lukens.
History
Pre-colonial and Mexican eras
Sunland and Tujunga were originally home to the Tongva people. In 1840, the area was part of the Rancho Tujunga Mexican land grant, but later developers marked off a plot of land known as the Tejunga Park, or the Tujunga Park Tract.The name "Tujunga" is assumed to have meant "old woman's place" in the Fernandeño language, a dialect of the extinct Tongva language, where tuxu, "old woman", is a term for Mother Earth in Tongva mythology. The term is thought to relate to an ethnohistoric narrative, known as Khra'wiyawi, collected by Carobeth Laird from Juan and Juana Menendez at the Leonis Adobe in 1916. In the narrative, the wife of Khra'wiyawi is stricken with grief over the untimely loss of her daughter. In her sadness, she retreats to the mountains and turns to stone. It is this event that is thought to be the basis for the village name. In fact, a large rock in Little Tujunga Canyon looks like an old woman in a sitting position.
Early Sunland: 1885–1925
Sunland began as Monte Vista in 1885, when of the Tejunga Park tract were divided into lots ranging from five to. One of the first uses of the new tract was the planting of of olives, which made it the largest olive orchard in Los Angeles County. In 1887, the Monte Vista Hotel was being served by the Sunland Post Office. By 1906, the appellation "Sunland" was being used by the Los Angeles Times rather than "Monte Vista". A 1907 story noted that Sunland was the "first supply store, and a good one, about seven miles from the railroad" at San Fernando, at the mouth of the Little Tejunga and Big Tejunga canyons.In 1908, Sunland was referred to as difficult to access, at a height of "over rough mountain roads". An automobile trip from Los Angeles took "a long day" to complete. In 1910, a Los Angeles Times correspondent wrote about Sunland:
The place is aptly named.... one gets no inkling of the beauties till he is right in the town. Great live oaks, scattered with Nature's reckless disregard for expense, give the place a stately quiet.... In the center of town the oaks are so thick that the sun is baffled, and this section has been made a public park, which is the Fourth of July and general hot-weather rendezvous of the country round, from Glendale to San Fernando.
By 1923, Sunland had a population of about 2,000 and an active chamber of commerce. The sloping hills of what was called the Monte Vista Valley were the site of vineyards for table grapes, and the town's sole industry, a cannery, specialized in packing olives from local trees. Monte Vista Park in the center of town attracted picnickers, with a county home for children, sponsored by women's clubs and other organizations. This charity was a descendant of the Monte Vista Lodge, a home for "undernourished children" organized by social worker Belle N. Hall and opened in 1921 by the Council of Community Service. It had 45 rooms in a former hotel on of land. just a block from Sunland Park.
After Tujunga was organized as a city in 1925, a move sprang up in Sunland to be annexed to the new municipality, but the idea was rejected "by a heavy vote" in October of that year, and activists in the then-Monte Vista School District turned their attention to a proposed $21,000 bond issue for a new school building.
Early Tujunga: 1907–1929
In 1907, social philosopher and community organizer William Ellsworth Smythe joined forces with real estate speculator Marshall V. Hartranft to found what Smythe believed would be a kind of utopia. The movement had been successful in establishing colonies in San Ysidro, California, and in Idaho. The utopianists had as their slogan, "A Little Land and a Lot of Living," and the founders divided their community into lots, which they called "little lands". A community center built from local river rock, Bolton Hall, was dedicated in August 1913 and still stands as a historical monument and museum operated by the Little Landers Historical Society.An early advertising slogan was "Move to Tujunga with a trowel and a bag of cement, and build your own." After the end of World War I, hundreds of "rent-oppressed" people from Los Angeles did exactly that, and they built their houses with foundations fashioned from the "great masses of stones and boulders" that lay throughout the town. For the most part, the "Indian pueblo idea" was followed, or a "rustic hills" style, and homes without boulder foundations were rare. By 1927, Tujunga had about 4,000 residents, having surpassed Sunland in population. Many of the settlers maintained small farms with gardens, poultry, rabbits, bees, and various other livestock.
Image:John S McGroarty 1893.jpg|150px|thumb|right|John Steven McGroarty, a Tujunga-based poet laureate, in 1893
Tujunga was home to John Steven McGroarty, playwright, U.S. congressman, and California Poet Laureate. He lived in a home he built himself and completed in 1923, known as Rancho Chupa Rosa. The building is an Historic Cultural Monument of the City of Los Angeles and is now known as the McGroarty Arts Center.
On Tujunga's main street in the 1920s was a place called "Dean's store, the locale of the 'Millionaire's Club of Happiness and Contentment', a little group of the town's pioneers that is featured in the writings of John Steven McGroarty". Tujungans led by McGroarty first wanted to become a city of the sixth class to be called "Verdugo Hills" in 1924, and a petition to that effect was submitted to the board of supervisors, which postponed the idea indefinitely because of concerns about the proposed boundaries.
Tujunga was nevertheless incorporated after an election on April 21, 1925, with the southern border following the Rancho Tujunga boundary. A. Adams was elected treasurer, and Mrs. Bertha A. Morgan was chosen as city clerk. Bolton Hall served as the city hall until Tujunga was consolidated with Los Angeles in 1932.
One of the first orders of business for the new city of Tujunga in 1925 was an attempt to enlarge the municipality by taking in the foothills south and southwest of the new city, bounded on the east by the "La Crescenta Rancho line, south to Big Tuna Canyon" and west to the then-Los Angeles boundary and Wicks Road. The attempt failed because Los Angeles annexed the area first.
Tujunga's elevation and geographic isolation from the San Fernando Valley and the Los Angeles Basin freed it from some of the air pollution that was a problem in many other parts of Greater Los Angeles. Because of this, it attracted many asthmatics early on. In 1929, the Tujunga City Council set policy to establish zones where "sanitariums and other institutions for the care of tubercular patients" could be established.
Joining Los Angeles: 1926–1932
Most of today's Sunland was annexed to the city of Los Angeles, effective August 4, 1926. La Tuna Canyon was annexed in 1927. On June 23, 1927, the city of Los Angeles held an election for much of the same territory as claimed by Tujunga, above, and the annexation passed, "based largely on a big block of votes within an old-folks' home at Sunland, which can participate in the Community Chest funds when and if they are within the city limits of the greater city". The result was a legal dispute that had to be settled in the courts.The famous grove of oak trees, owned by the county, and widely known as the Monte Vista Park of Sunland, is involved in the dispute. The municipality of Tujunga has already agreed to release its authority over the park to the county authorities, so that administration... will continue for ten years without change, except as to police protection in event of disorders.
The first election for Tujunga to be consolidated with Los Angeles was held on February 15, 1927. In heavy rain, voters turned down the idea by a vote of 594 to 354. A second election held in March 1930 also resulted in defeat for annexation, "by a large majority". John Steven McGroarty was on a committee opposing annexation called "All for Tujunga". The third and final election in January 1932 resulted in a vote to join Los Angeles, although the actual transfer was delayed by inaction of state authorities. Tujunga abandoned its independence and joined the city on March 8, 1932.
Tuna Canyon Detention Station: 1941–1943
Tuna Canyon Detention Station was a temporary holding facility used for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II in the Tujunga community of Los Angeles, California. Some Italian Americans, German Americans, and Japanese Peruvians were also interned there. From this detention station, prisoners were later transferred to permanent internment camps.Gravel pit: 1950s–1960s
In 1959, a trial court held that the city had no authority to refuse a zoning variance to Consolidated Rock Company to continue operating a gravel pit in the Big Tujunga Wash. An appellate court overturned that decision, but in 1962, the California Supreme Court upheld the right of the city to ban the pit. The decision was a victory for local people who had battled the project for more than three years: They contended that the dust from the existing pit affected the area's reputation as a "haven for asthma sufferers". Attorney Peter R. Rice argued as a friend of the court that climate was more important than commercial mining operations.City Council redistricting: 1986–2002
Los Angeles City Councilman Howard Finn of Sunland died in office on August 12, 1986, and his Northeast San Fernando Valley First District was left without an incumbent.At the same time, the City Council was under a court order to redistrict itself to provide more representation for Latinos. After a bitter contest in which Finn's semirural constituents fought against being combined with more built-up areas and amid traces of ethnic animosity, the result was to move the vacant First District seat into a redrawn, 69% Latino area north and west of downtown Los Angeles and to place Sunland-Tujunga into a reshaped Second Council District, already represented by Joel Wachs. It was a Y-shaped configuration "with only a long, thin finger of territory" connecting Sunland-Tujunga on the north with Van Nuys on the south. A lawsuit against the plan was dismissed in late September by U.S. District Judge James M. Ideman.
Despite the fact that Wachs had struggled to prevent being assigned to a district that was 90% new to him, the councilman was warmly greeted when he arrived to meet his new constituents in a reception at the Sunland-Tujunga Municipal Building. He found an area with a down-home, rural flavor and about 30% of the voters in his new district. He told a reporter:
There hasn't been one nasty person, one hostile... They want to be friends.... In the second-largest city in the U.S., that you can have an area like this to live in is just fantastic. Wherever I've gone, preserving the lifestyle seems to be the No. 1 issue.
Wachs served on the council for 15 more years. He resigned effective 2001, and a city redistricting commission took the opportunity to propose a shakeup in boundaries, splitting the Second District in two. Before that could be considered, though, Wendy Greuel was elected to the city council. In March 2002, she reopened the Sunland-Tujunga field office, and the redistricting plan was never heard of again. Greuel served until July 2009. She was succeeded by Paul Krekorian.