Why you should experience Tujunga in Los Angeles, California.
Tujunga is a rugged enclave where the Northeast San Fernando Valley's foothill character meets boulder-strewn washes, early homestead streets and residential slopes pressed against the San Gabriel Mountains.
Positioned between Sunland, La Crescenta-Montrose, and Shadow Hills, the neighborhood occupies rising terrain extending through Foothill Boulevard, Tujunga Canyon Boulevard and Commerce Avenue from the Lower Verdugo foothills toward the mouth of Big Tujunga Canyon. Residential streets climb from the commercial corridor into irregular hillside blocks where cottages, stone houses and later detached residences follow the changing contours of the ground. Movement through Tujunga repeatedly crosses washes and sloping streets, with locally gathered stone appearing in retaining walls, foundations and early houses as a direct architectural consequence of the rocky terrain. The mountain front becomes increasingly dominant toward the north, where developed streets narrow against canyon mouths and steep chaparral slopes. The result is a neighborhood whose stone architecture, irregular streets, wash corridors and mountain setting preserve an unusually legible connection between early twentieth-century settlement and the demanding foothill landscape that shaped it.
What you should know about Tujunga.
Tujunga is best known for the Little Landers experiment that attempted to build an independent small-farm community in the Verdugo foothills during the years before World War I. M. V. Hartranft organized the Western Empire Suburban Home Association in 1911 and divided 1,726 acres into two- and ten-acre properties, with more than 300 shareholders converting their financial interests into land. William Ellsworth Smythe followed in 1913 with the Little Landers Company, assembling 273 acres with additional unsold Western Empire property for a colony based on the concept that families could sustain themselves from small irrigated farms. Settlers arrived from the Midwest and East and attempted to raise crops in rocky soil where limited water made cultivation considerably harder than the promotional vision suggested. The community nevertheless reached 500 settlers and 200 houses by 1915, accompanied by a post office, library and cooperative store. George Harris, a stonemason who called himself a nature builder, gave the settlement its architectural centerpiece in 1913 when residents gathered local boulders from fields, hillsides and the nearby wash for Bolton Hall. Houses of stone or with heavy boulder foundations subsequently spread through Tujunga, turning a difficult local resource into one of the community's most distinctive architectural signatures. World War I drew residents toward better-paying employment as the agricultural experiment weakened, leaving the surviving stone buildings as physical remnants of a settlement founded around an unusually ambitious vision of small-scale self-sufficiency.
Tujunga's foothill climate generated a separate period of growth as Southern Californians increasingly associated dry mountain air with reco from respiratory illness during the early twentieth century. Small health retreats and residences for people seeking relief appeared throughout the Sunland-Tujunga Valley, reinforcing a reputation for clean air that drew newcomers beyond the original agricultural colonies. John Steven McGroarty became one of the foothills' most prominent residents after moving to Southern California in 1901 and building a succession of homes among the Verdugo slopes. His career joined journalism, poetry, theater and politics: The Mission Play, first performed in 1912, accumulated more than 3,200 performances over subsequent decades. Two of McGroarty's houses were destroyed by fire in successive years before architect Arthur B. Benton designed Rancho Chupa Rosa, completed in 1924 with broad stone terraces overlooking the valley. California named McGroarty its third poet laureate in 1933, and voters sent him to the United States House of Representatives in 1934 and again in 1936. Tujunga itself had incorporated during the 1920s before joining Los Angeles in 1932, ending its brief existence as an independent municipality as metropolitan development reached farther into the northeastern foothills. McGroarty's career and the health seekers drawn to the surrounding slopes gave Tujunga a cultural dimension distinct from the Little Landers period, connecting its mountain setting with literature, theater and the early Southern California fascination with climate as a source of physical renewal.
How to fold Tujunga into your trip.
Tujunga works as the anchor for a daytime outing connecting a native-plant institution descended from the work of an English horticulturist, a nineteenth-century adobe associated with one of the San Fernando Valley's earliest families and a botanical collection assembled from a private foothill estate.
Begin at Theodore Payne Foundation, established in 1960 to continue the work of horticulturist Theodore Payne, who had arrived in Southern California from England in 1893 and devoted much of his career to California native plants. Payne operated nurseries, collected and distributed wildflower seed and assisted important botanical projects, including the original Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden during the 1920s. After his death in 1963, nurseryman Eddie Merrill donated a twenty-acre Sun Valley property to the foundation in 1966, giving the organization the canyon setting that became its permanent home. An adjoining two acres followed in 1969, and the property gained a trail across Wild Flower Hill in 1972. Seed collecting had already begun as the foundation's first program in 1962, followed by propagation instruction in 1976 and the Wild Flower Hotline in 1983. The twenty-two-acre site now places demonstration plantings and a native-plant nursery directly within coastal sage scrub and chaparral overlooking the Verdugo Mountains. Continue to Rómulo Pico Adobe, whose surviving rooms belong to an adobe complex erected during the Mexican period on former Mission San Fernando ground. Rómulo Pico, son of Andrés Pico and nephew of California governor Pío Pico, enlarged the building during the 1850s and occupied it with his family. The residence passed through multiple owners after the Pico period before the San Fernando Valley Historical Society began caring for the property during the middle twentieth century, preserving one of the valley's oldest surviving domestic structures. Conclude at Descanso Gardens, where newspaper publisher Elias Manchester Boddy purchased 165 undeveloped acres during the late 1930s and commissioned James E. Dolena to design his residence. Boddy developed an extensive camellia collection with horticulturist Howard Asper and expanded it dramatically in 1942 through plants acquired from Japanese American growers forced to dispose of nursery stock before wartime incarceration. F. M. Uyematsu and the Yoshimura family supplied plants that became foundational to the collection. Los Angeles County acquired the property in 1953, Theodore Payne designed its California native garden in 1959 and Eijiro Nunokawa designed the Japanese Garden opened in 1966. The progression moves from Payne's lifelong campaign for California flora through a surviving Mexican-period residence and culminates among Boddy's foothill plantings, connecting three distinct inheritances shaped by the valleys and mountains surrounding Tujunga.
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