FIND YOUR TUJUNGA HOME

Tujunga /təˈhʌŋɡə/ is a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley region of the city of Los Angeles located by the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in the Crescenta Valley. Though Sunland and Tujunga began as separate settlements, they are today linked through a single police station, branch library, neighborhood council, chamber of commerce, City Council district, and high school and various civic organizations. The merging of these communities under a hyphenated name goes back as far as 1928. Sunland-Tujunga contains the highest point of the city, Mount Lukens.

The neighborhood lies between the Verdugo Mountains and the San Gabriel Mountains. It is contiguous on the east with La Crescenta-Montrose. Sunland and Tujunga are divided by Mount Gleason Avenue, with Sunland on the west and Tujunga on the east. Mount Lukens within Tujunga is the highest point in Los Angeles at 5,074 ft (1,547 m).^[3][4]

In 1907, social philosopher and community organizer William Ellsworth Smythe joined forces with real estate speculator Marshall V. Hartranft to found what Smythe believed would be a kind of utopia. The movement had been successful in establishing colonies in San Ysidro, California, and in Idaho. The utopianists had as their slogan, “A Little Land and a Lot of Living,” and the founders divided their community into 1.5-acre (6,100 m²) lots which they called “little lands.” A community center built from local river rock, Bolton Hall, was dedicated in August 1913 and still stands as a historical monument and museum operated by the Little Landers Historical Society.

An early advertising slogan was “Move to Tujunga with a trowel and a bag of cement, and build your own.” After the end of World War I, hundreds of “rent-oppressed” people from Los Angeles did exactly that, and they built their houses with foundations fashioned from the “great masses of stones and boulders” that lay throughout the town. For the most part, the “Indian pueblo idea” was followed, or a “rustic hills” style, and homes without boulder foundations were rare. By 1927 Tujunga had about 4,000 residents, having surpassed Sunland in population. Many of the settlers maintained small farms with gardens, poultry, rabbits, bees and various other livestock.

History abstract above is courtesy of the City of Tujunga.

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