Garage Conversion West Hills, California

Geography

Location

West Hills (formerly allied with Canoga Park) is located in the western San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles County and approximately 60 minutes (depending upon traffic) from downtown Los Angeles. It is off of U.S. 101 (the Ventura Freeway) via the Valley Circle Boulevard/Mullholland Highway off-ramp.

Mapping L.A.

According to the 2008 Mapping L.A. project of the Los Angeles Times, West Hills is flanked upon the north by the Chatsworth Reservoir, on the east by Canoga Park, on the south by Woodland Hills, on the southwest by Hidden Hills and on the west by Bell Canyon in Ventura County.

Neighborhood Council boundaries

In 1987, Los Angeles approved the following bill of the boundaries of West Hills Neighborhood Council:

Nearby areas

Nearby areas, not necessarily adjacent:

Water resources

Bell and Dayton creeks in West Hills are several of the headwaters of the Los Angeles River that originate in the Northwest San Fernando Valley. The Los Angeles River itself begins at the confluence of Arroyo Calabasas (Calabasas Creek) and Bell Creek in Canoga Park. These and other little creeks supply stormwater and suburban runoff water to the Los Angeles River, and several are considered year-round creeks. Although the creeks are now channeled and rule within real walls, they pull off form a significant urban wildlife landscape and contribute to the population of indigenous wildlife left within the San Fernando Valley.

Both Bell Creek and Dayton Creek in particular have established attention due to their headwaters origins inside the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in the Simi Hills. The SSFL is mandated for an environmental cleanup due to its uses as a testing center for rocket and missile engines, nuclear reactor research and fuel reprocessing, and high technology explanation systems. It was along with the site of a partial nuclear core meltdown in 1959. Prominent contaminants total radionuclides, VOCs-volatile organic compounds, Chromium, Lead, Benzene, and other components of rocket engine fuel and cleaning compounds.

This region experiences warm and ascetic summers behind average temperatures peaking at 96 degree highs throughout August. West Hills has a climate thesame to supplementary locations in the west San Fernando Valley, such as straightforward Woodland Hills in the make public of a long conventional weather station at Pierce College. According to the Köppen Climate Classification system, West Hills has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate, abbreviated “Csa” on climate maps.

History

Pre-Spanish way in history

The present day West Hills Place was the homeland of Native Americans in the Tongva-Fernandeño and Chumash-Venturaño tribes, that lived in the Simi Hills and near to Bell Creek and additional local tributaries to the Los Angeles River. Native American civilizations had inhabited the San Fernando Valley for an estimated 8,000 years. The village, Hu’wam, of the Chumash-Venturaños, was located at the base of Escorpión Peak (Castle Peak) near present-day Bell Canyon Park. It was a meeting and trading reduction for them considering the Tongva-Fernandeño and Tataviam-Fernandeño people. A cave close Hu’wam, known as the Cave of Munits, is the believed house of a mythical Chumash shaman named Munits, who was killed by an eagle after murdering the son of a Chumash chief. Escorpión Peak is one of nine alignment points in the ancestral Chumash homelands, believed necessary to maintaining the explanation of the natural world.

Spanish and Mexican history

From 1797 to 1846, the area (future West Hills) was part of Mission San Fernando Rey de España (Mission San Fernando). After Mexico won independence from Spain, it future became part of Rancho Ex-Mission San Fernando in Alta California. In 1845, a sever land consent for Rancho El Escorpión was issued by Governor Pío Pico to three Chumash people: Odón Eusebia, Urbano, and Urbano’s son Mañuel. It encompassed the home west of present-day Woodlake Avenue in West Hills, with its adobe ranch buildings (present 1840s—1960s) sited adjacent to Bell Creek near present-day Bell Canyon Park.

American history

Land grants

California was admitted to the United States in 1850, with Spanish and Mexican estate grants requiring a federal land patent to sustain ownership. The United States Public Land Commission patented the Rancho to native grantees Odón Eusebia, Urbano, and Mañuel in 1876. In 1912 the Chumash heirs sold Rancho El Escorpión to George Platt. He expected a dairy operation on renamed Platt Ranch variously called Ferndale, ‘escorpion,’ or Cloverdale Dairy. The Rancho El Escorpión-Platt Ranch was not incorporated into Los Angeles and its water system until 1958 and was left undeveloped until 1961.

Separation from Canoga Park

West Hills was originally share of Owensmouth (founded 1912) and renamed Canoga Park (1931).

Under the leadership of Joel Schiffman, residents of a three-square-mile Place in western Canoga Park began a petition stir uphill opinion in 1987 to disaffect the larger community and uphold a neighborhood of their own to be called West Hills, the same name that a 303-home subdivision in a understandable unincorporated area had carried for years. The Los Angeles city district of 4,700 single-family homes and 35 businesses would be bounded by Roscoe Boulevard upon the north, Woodlake Avenue, Sherman Way and Platt Avenue upon the east, Victory Boulevard upon the south and the county line upon the west. Proponents said the change would come occurring with the allowance for the area “political clout” and accrual property values. The drive, which was opposed by the Canoga Park Chamber of Commerce, was partially financed by a real estate firm, whose owner, Lynn Garvanian, said the name alter would “add 5% to the value of homes.” The stir was quickly criticized as “snobby and greedy” by members of the Canoga Park Chamber of Commerce but defended by supporters who said it would allow the neighborhood to maintain its residential character. Petition leaders said they hoped a other name would sever the more successful West Hills Place from Canoga Park’s “fading factories, aging subdivisions and X-rated bars and theaters.”

As the petition motivation expanded to count up three more areas – two on the edge of the Chatsworth Reservoir and one on the western edge of Canoga Park – the Canoga Park Chamber of Commerce took an attributed stand adjacent to the separation, with president William Vietinghoff calling it “a source of estrangement and disharmony . . . an extremely risky precedent for the sum up San Fernando Valley.” Council advocate Hal Bernson, however, said he did not “look at it as a slam against Canoga Park – just as a outfit of people wanting identity.”

On January 16, 1987, Councilwoman Joy Picus in style petitions representing 3,364, or 77% of the 4,333 households in the Place within her councilmanic district, and she hurriedly said she would deliver the city’s transportation department to put going on boundary signs as the residents requested. Many of the latter traditional the name fine-tune to accumulate thousands of dollars of value to their properties. Two weeks well ahead Picus extra another two-mile-wide section of Canoga Park that gave West Hills the Fallbrook Mall and Platt Village shopping centers, along similar to several smaller retail strips and some older residential tracts built in flatland areas. This auxiliary was denounced by Schiffman, who said it did “a lot to erode the community identity we sought.”

In what was called a “stampede,” other areas sought right to use into West Hills, one homeowner on Santa Susana Place saying residents there wanted to “divorce ourselves from Canoga Park’s element.” Council enthusiast Hal Bernson enormously to mount up a square-mile area with 423 households bounded by Roscoe Boulevard upon the south, Parthenia Street upon the north, Shoup Avenue on the west and Topanga Canyon Boulevard upon the east, although the announcement northwest corner of Roscoe and Topanga Canyon boulevards was to remain in Canoga Park. Those additions designed that from nearly a third to approximately half of the former Canoga Park was to be allocation of the further West Hills.

Still, a demand continued for right of entry to West Hills. A community meeting scheduled for August 31, 1987, had to be repeated well along the similar evening behind some four hundred people packed a meeting room at the Fallbrook Mall to wrestle considering the decision upon where the resolved boundary should be. The higher event drew three hundred. A poll was taken among nearly 8,500 residents in an area between Topanga Canyon Boulevard and the recently adopted West Hills affix at Woodlake and Platt avenues to pick an eastern border. More than a hundred protestors gathered in stomach of Ficus’s office to objection any accrual of West Hills, chanting “Hell, no, we won’t grow!” But extra residents wound through the area in car caravans, shouting from megaphones and waving signs urging “Vote to Fallbrook.” In the end, Picus made a controversial decision to impinge on the eastern boundary of West Hills from Platt and Woodlake avenues to Shoup Avenue, a decision that did not absorb everybody.

In 1994, the Canoga Park and West Hills communities achieved a “partial rapprochement” when event leaders voted to form a allied Canoga Park/West Hills Chamber of Commerce, which is yet in existence.