Why you should experience Mission Hills in Los Angeles, California.
Mission Hills is a storied enclave where the North San Fernando Valley's suburban character meets Spanish-era settlement, broad postwar residential blocks and a strategic position at the foot of the northern valley passes.
Positioned between Granada Hills, North Hills, and Pacoima, the neighborhood occupies the north-Central San Fernando Valley extending through Sepulveda Boulevard, San Fernando Mission Boulevard and Devonshire Street between the Interstate 405 and Interstate 5 corridors. Detached houses dominate the interior streets, shifting between compact postwar tracts, earlier residences and larger parcels surrounding the oldest developed ground near the northern edge. Movement through Mission Hills follows a largely rectilinear street pattern interrupted by major transportation corridors converging near the foothills, creating pronounced differences between quiet residential interiors and the heavily traveled routes surrounding them. The northern reaches acquire a lower-density scale as the street grid approaches the historic ground beneath the Santa Susana Mountains and the valley narrows toward Newhall Pass. The result is a neighborhood whose residential fabric, northern-valley position, major crossroads and proximity to the foothills preserve the spatial divide between metropolitan Los Angeles and the older settlement corridor from which the San Fernando Valley developed.
What you should know about Mission Hills.
Mission Hills is best known for occupying the ground where Mission San Fernando Rey de España created one of the San Fernando Valley's earliest permanent colonial settlements. Franciscan missionaries founded the mission on September 8, 1797, making it the seventeenth of the twenty-one Spanish missions established in Alta California and placing it midway between San Buenaventura and San Gabriel Arcángel. Native people brought into the mission came from nearby Tongva-speaking villages, Chumash territory beyond the western hills and settlements farther inland, supplying the labor on which its agricultural economy depended. Construction produced a church between 1804 and 1806 and the long convento between 1810 and 1812, with the latter surviving as the principal original building from the complex. Water from northern foothill streams reached the property through a clay-pipe aqueduct by 1811, supporting domestic use and cultivation across mission ground where wheat production and cattle grazing became major activities. An earthquake severely damaged the church in 1812, and a replacement reached completion in 1818. Mexican secularization during the 1830s dismantled the mission land system, and Governor Pío Pico sold 116,858 acres of former mission territory to Eulogio de Celís in 1846 as Rancho Ex-Mission San Fernando. The mission nonetheless remained a geographic anchor long after its enormous agricultural domain had passed into private hands, leaving Mission Hills with a surviving concentration of structures tied directly to the earliest colonial development of the northern valley.
Transportation and agriculture produced a separate period of change as metropolitan Los Angeles reached the northern valley during the early twentieth century. Southern Pacific had completed twenty-one miles of track between Burbank and Chatsworth in 1893, and the route became part of the Coast Main Line linking Los Angeles and San Francisco through Santa Susana Pass in 1904. Pacific Electric extended its electric railway to San Fernando in 1911 through Van Nuys Boulevard, Parthenia Street, Sepulveda Boulevard and Brand Boulevard, placing the Mission Hills vicinity on a direct passenger connection with Central Los Angeles. Excursions to the old mission became popular during the 1920s as preservation work revived interest in the deteriorated complex and adjoining Brand Park. Completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913 simultaneously increased agricultural development across surrounding ground, where citrus joined cattle, sheep and other cultivation as dominant uses through the first half of the century. Residential construction expanded after World War II as open agricultural acreage across the northern valley gave way to detached-house subdivisions built for Los Angeles's rapidly growing population. The 1971 Sylmar earthquake brought another major physical rupture when severe damage left the old mission church beyond repair, leading to reconstruction on the historic site. Mission Hills consequently developed around an unusual continuity, with twentieth-century rail connections, agriculture and suburban construction accumulating beside a settlement nucleus whose origins predated the surrounding metropolis by generations.
How to fold Mission Hills into your trip.
Mission Hills works as the anchor for a daytime outing connecting a nineteenth-century adobe associated with the Pico family, a pioneering aviation burial ground and an automobile collection built around J. B. Nethercutt's exacting approach to restoration.
Begin at Rómulo Pico Adobe, whose oldest section dates to 1834 and was constructed by Native laborers after the secularization of Mission San Fernando. Eulogio de Celís enlarged the adobe in 1846, the same year he acquired the immense Rancho Ex-Mission San Fernando from Governor Pío Pico. Rómulo Pico, Pío Pico's nephew, subsequently occupied the property and added a second story in 1874, transforming the earlier adobe into a more substantial ranch residence. The building survived decades of changing ownership before Mark and Jessie Harrington purchased it and completed a restoration in 1930. Its layered construction preserves three distinct periods within a single house, joining the former mission workforce, de Celís's rancho ownership and the Pico family's later occupation. Continue to Portal of the Folded Wings Shrine to Aviation, conceived originally as the entrance to Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery before becoming a burial place dedicated to figures from early flight. Architect Kenneth A. MacDonald Jr. and sculptor Federico A. Giorgi created the elaborate structure in 1924, combining tiled domes, mosaic work and sculptural figures within the cemetery entrance. Its aviation association deepened after the burial there of James Floyd Smith, an early pilot and parachute developer, and cemetery leaders subsequently dedicated the structure to aviation in 1953. The shrine became the resting place for pioneers including Elizabeth Lippincott McQueen, Matilde Moisant and Charles Taylor, the mechanic who built the engine for the Wright brothers' 1903 aircraft. Conclude at The Nethercutt Collection, whose origins lie in J. B. and Dorothy Nethercutt's 1956 purchase of two automobiles requiring extensive restoration. J. B. paid $500 for a 1930 DuPont Town Car and spent nineteen months and more than $65,000 returning it to concours condition. The finished DuPont won Best of Show at Pebble Beach in 1958, beginning a run that ultimately gave Nethercutt a record six Best of Show victories. The collection founded in 1971 grew to encompass more than 250 American and European automobiles alongside mechanical musical instruments, antique furniture and a restored steam locomotive and private railcar. The progression moves from a surviving house spanning the mission and rancho eras through a shrine devoted to the pioneers of aviation and culminates with Nethercutt's pursuit of automotive restoration, connecting three distinct chapters of San Fernando Valley history through exceptionally preserved objects and architecture.
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