Sun Valley, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Sun Valley in Los Angeles, California.

Sun Valley is a workmanlike enclave where the Northeast San Fernando Valley's foothill character meets an old railroad settlement, equestrian residential pockets and a landscape shaped by the meeting of urban Los Angeles with the Tujunga foothills.

Positioned between Pacoima, Shadow Hills, and North Hollywood, the neighborhood occupies the eastern Valley floor beneath the Verdugo and San Gabriel foothills, where broad commercial corridors and industrial parcels give way to residential streets climbing toward increasingly rugged ground. Low houses on deep lots, mature trees, horse properties and pockets of native vegetation create abrupt changes in scale across terrain whose eastern edge rises toward La Tuna Canyon. Sunland Boulevard supplies the primary encounter through a long diagonal corridor that crosses the neighborhood's residential and commercial fabric before tightening against the foothills. Tuxford Street and the smaller roads branching eastward create a secondary passage into quieter terrain where larger parcels, washes and rising slopes loosen the regular street grid of the Valley floor. The result is a neighborhood whose unusually broad range of landscapes preserves traces of railroad settlement, rural Valley development and foothill habitation within one continuous section of northeastern Los Angeles.

What you should know about Sun Valley.

Sun Valley is best known for developing from the tiny railroad settlement of Roberts into Roscoe and then into an industrial and residential center of the Northeast San Fernando Valley. Charles Maclay acquired a vast portion of the northern Valley in 1874, and the eastern share of that land entered his holdings after Maclay, George K. Porter and Benjamin F. Porter divided their interests. Southern Pacific tracks crossed the eastern Valley during the late 1870s, with a water tank established near the present intersection of Sunland Boulevard and San Fernando Road. Roberts General Store became the focal business of the small settlement that formed beside the railroad, lending the place its earliest community name. Roberts had become Roscoe by the opening years of the twentieth century, and only seven families lived in the settlement in 1905. Roscoe School opened in 1917 as population increased, and the highway linking Los Angeles with Bakersfield strengthened access to the surrounding land. Rock extraction had begun near Tujunga Wash in 1909, placing heavy industry beside the agricultural and residential uses spreading across the Valley floor. World War II accelerated industrial growth as aerospace manufacturing expanded through the eastern San Fernando Valley and Lockheed generated large numbers of factory jobs nearby. A campaign led by residents and local businesses replaced the Roscoe name with Sun Valley at midcentury, completing the succession from railroad stop to industrialized Los Angeles neighborhood.

Dan Montelongo created one of Sun Valley's most distinctive residential chapters during the 1920s through a concentrated group of river-rock houses now known as Stonehurst. The local artisan and stonemason gathered native stone from nearby washes and the Tujunga foothills, converting an abundant geological resource into walls, chimneys, porches and façades across a compact group of houses. Most of his surviving Stonehurst buildings date from 1923 through 1925 and combine Craftsman principles with rough-stacked masonry in a locally specific form known as Stonemason Vernacular. Small bungalows occupy unusually generous parcels, and the combination of stone construction with horse-keeping properties gives the streets a rural scale distinct from denser sections of the Valley. Montelongo extended his work beyond individual houses to the Stonehurst Park Community Building, completed by the close of the decade. More than 100 stone structures once stood across Stonehurst and its surroundings, with 60 of the original examples surviving when Los Angeles examined the district during the twenty-first century. The protected area encompasses 92 parcels and represents the highest concentration of Los Angeles houses using native river rock as a primary building component. Stonehurst consequently preserves a rare architectural episode in which the geology of the northeastern Valley became the literal substance of a residential district.

How to fold Sun Valley into your trip.

Sun Valley works as the anchor for an outing connecting California native-plant conservation, among the earliest Thai Buddhist institutions in the United States and an aviation memorial whose history developed beside the Valley's aircraft industry.

Begin at Theodore Payne Foundation, established in 1960 to continue the work of English-born horticulturist Theodore Payne, who had spent decades promoting California wildflowers and native plants after arriving in Southern California in 1893. Nurseryman Eddie Merrill gave the organization a 20-acre Sun Valley property in 1966, an adjoining two acres followed in 1969, and the canyon site developed into the foundation's permanent headquarters. Seed collecting had become its first program in 1962; Wild Flower Hill received a trail in 1972, propagation instruction began in 1976 and the Wild Flower Hotline followed in 1983. The 22-acre property now combines native-plant cultivation with demonstration gardens and a trail passing through chaparral and coastal sage scrub, carrying Payne's early conservation work into the foothill ecology of Sun Valley. Continue to Wat Thai of Los Angeles, whose origins reach 1970, when three Thai monks spent a Buddhist rains retreat in Los Angeles amid growing community efforts to create a permanent temple. A converted house on Sepulveda Boulevard became their first residence in 1971, and donated funds enabled the institution to acquire 2.2 acres on Cantara Street the following year. Construction of its two-story Thai-style main hall began in 1972, the Wat Thai name arrived in 1979 and the Supreme Patriarch of Thailand presided over the ceremony installing its gable spire that October. King Bhumibol Adulyadej and Queen Sirikit presided over the casting of the principal Buddha image at Wat Pho in Bangkok later that year, and the image reached Los Angeles in 1980. Consecration of the assembly hall boundary in 1982 completed Wat Thai's development into a full monastery, establishing an enduring Thai Buddhist center in the eastern Valley. Conclude at Portal of the Folded Wings Shrine to Aviation and Museum, the elaborate rotunda created in 1924 by architect Kenneth McDonald Jr. and Italian-born sculptor Federico A. Giorgi as the original entrance to Valhalla Memorial Park. Its Spanish Colonial Revival and Churrigueresque composition stood amid farms before nearby aviation development changed the surrounding landscape, and aircraft using the emerging Burbank airfield passed close above the structure. Aviation advocate James Gillette pursued its conversion into a memorial to American flight, culminating in its dedication as the Portal of the Folded Wings on December 17, 1953, the fiftieth anniversary of the Wright brothers' powered flight. Aviation pioneers interred there include Charles E. Taylor, the mechanic who built the engine for the Wright Flyer, and the structure entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1998. The progression moves from the preservation of California flora through the creation of a major Thai American religious institution and culminates at a memorial to the aviation pioneers whose field reshaped the eastern San Fernando Valley, joining three consequential strands of the region surrounding Sun Valley.

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