Sunland-Tujunga

Tujunga doesn’t attract your typical tourist. The area is part of LA but lies high above the city, located mostly north of the 210 and west of the 2 freeways, bridging the San Gabriel and Verdugo mountains and the metropolis spread out below. The air feels cleaner here, refreshing, breezes coming in from the coast and the hills. Both above and below busy Foothill Boulevard lined with retail and services, there’s a sense of privacy too, a bit of “hands off” for its inhabitants that suits them just fine. Perhaps that is why it attracted bikers and gangs half a century ago along with today’s nature lovers and workforce dwellers who want quiet streets for their families along with easy access to downtown to the south, the coast to the west, or Pasadena and points east. Tujunga’s geography and urbanscape reflects that chameleon-like spectrum of personalities as well. Shady, narrow country roads with shaggy Deodor cedars and Coast Live oaks wind along the foothills hiding horse properties; a moment later the scene changes: now sunny streets, flat lots, and an almost bewildering mix of houses of every description, vintage, style, and size ... and then it shifts again, now to soft rolling hills of mid-century ranch homes on streets such as Crystal View Drive. Even the heritage of Tujunga’s name stamps it as somewhere different: the original people here, the Tongva Indians, named the area “Tuxunga,” from tuxu, meaning Mother Earth, related to their story about a chief’s wife who retreated up to the hills after her daughter’s death. Later, with its mountain air and astonishing views of rugged mountain skylines (views unknown to many Angelinos), it was—not surprisingly—first marketed as a utopia at the turn of the century. Its proponents built an extraordinary Arts and Crafts stone building, named after a progressive back-to-the-land Bostonian reformer, Bolton Hall (1854 – 1938), as a community center in 1913. (Now surrounded by a jumbled urban fabric on Commerce Street, it is the home of the “Little Landers Historical Society” and sometimes open to visitors.) Today, the hills where the Tongva wise woman sought refuge are alive with hikers, dog walkers, families, some trails well-worn, others hardly known. That tinge of mystery still lives in the heart of Tujunga. 

While it’s been known as “Sunland-Tujunga” since 1928, Sunland, land of the sun, has a different character to its neighbor to the east. While it also enjoys the proximity of the San Gabriel and Verdugo mountain ranges (in the 1880s the area was named Monte Vista, or Mount Vista), it’s flatter than Tujunga. Historically, that landscape was put to good use as one of Southern California’s largest orange and olive producers, with grape vineyards planted on the slopes. In 1908, a Los Angeles Times reporter complained that at 1,500 feet above sea level, it was difficult to access, and to travel by automobile from LA took a whole “long day” to complete. Two years later, another writer told of his disbelief at the beauties of the area and all the “great live oaks” there. Sunland was annexed to the City of Los Angeles in 1926; in the 1950s and ‘60s successfully fought off a gravel pit that would have endangered its reputation as a “haven for asthma sufferers” and to preserve its rural feeling, decades later stopped the construction of a big box store. Like Tujunga, today Sunland has a full spectrum of housing types and styles, along with properties owned by horse and golf lovers, especially given its proximity to golf courses with spectacular views. A nearby wildlife sanctuary offers walking, birdwatching, roaming on horseback, and fishing; hikers, families and mountain cyclists traverse Big Tujunga Canyon Wash and the Verdugo Mountains. And yet it’s easy to get away from the rural and back to the city. One of Sunland’s biggest draws is its central location, a stone’s throw from the 210 freeway. Sunland Boulevard leads right to North Hollywood, the Hollywood-Burbank Airport, and the 5 freeway to get downtown or the studios, or north to ... the North.