The Last Pumpkin Patch

The last pumpkin patch in the land of pumpkins was harvested Monday to make way for a parking lot.

Calabasas homeowner Joe Brenner plucked a handful of the tennis ball-sized gourds from an untended vine growing next to Old Topanga Canyon Road. The weed-covered field that surrounds the vine is earmarked to become the parking lot for a $15-million private school.

Brenner and 50 of his neighbors stood near the wild pumpkins to protest the development proposal as Los Angeles County planning commissioners inspected the 17 1/2-acre construction site.

“Calabasas” means pumpkin in Spanish. The name was bestowed about 200 years ago by Spanish explorers who discovered huge fields of tiny wild gourds growing at the southwestern corner of the San Fernando Valley.

The pumpkins are known to botanists as Cucurbita foetidissima, or “stinking gourds.” Ancient Chumash Indians pounded the pumpkins into soap and Spanish settlers later used the gourds as darning balls.

Hopes to Plant Seeds

Brenner said he was turning the pumpkins he gathered over to the Calabasas Historical Society in hopes their seeds could be planted at the nearby Leonis Adobe, a local landmark.

“We realize we can’t fight progress,” he said. “But these were here when the Spaniards came. It’s a shame to see history lost.”

Homeowners said Monday it is also a shame that the oak-studded, creek-lined site is being proposed for the new 682-student Oakwood School campus. They contend the 12-building kindergarten-through-high school facility would be intrusive and out of place among their expensive homes.

The Oakwood site is bordered on one side by Calabasas’ oldest neighborhood, the 1927 Park Moderne subdivision. The town’s newest development, Calabasas Park, is on another side.

Planning commissioners would not allow homeowners to voice their complaints during their brief visit. Officials said a public hearing on the school’s request for conditional-use and oak tree-removal permits will be held June 18.

The homeowners grumbled to one another about the school plans after the planners climbed into a county van and drove away.

“It’s not right to put a quasi-commercial project in the middle of a residential area,” said Wendy Fassberg, who is building a house nearby.

Said Adelle Casden, who has lived in the neighborhood for 17 years: “Everyone who bought here expected this land to be developed as single-family homes. This is such a shock to us.”

6 Other Schools in Area

Six other public and private schools in the area provide ample classroom space for children in the area, said Rosemary Lichtman, also a 17-year resident. She said she is worried that Oakwood School will add hundreds of additional cars to area streets each day.

Oakwood School’s building committee chairman and its project architect were at the project site to show county planners where grading will occur and how buildings, ball fields and the student-faculty parking lot will be distributed on the hilly site.

School headmaster James Alan Astman missed the commissioners’ tour, however. He was playing in a traditional faculty vs. sixth-grade, end-of-the-school-year baseball game at Oakwood’s crowded North Hollywood campus.

“I’d rather face a stern group of residents than a stern group of sixth-graders,” Astman said after the game. “But our future neighbors have a mistaken impression of our plans.”

Astman said the school would be built in two phases, with the high school opening in the fall of 1989 and the elementary classrooms opening three years later.

The $2.5-million Calabasas site was picked after Oakwood officials looked at about 300 other parcels, he said. The new campus would replace a 2 1/2-acre elementary school site and a separate one-acre high school facility, both in North Hollywood.

“We’re not taking out the stream that runs through the site out there,” Astman said. “Our architects have been told to honor the topography of the land. We want to build a school that is very sensitive to the environment and to the neighborhood.”

He said the school, founded in 1951, has a rigorous academic program. Its tuition this year is $6,500 for high school students and $5,900 for elementary school youngsters; a total of 560 students are enrolled.

Calabasas homeowners said they hope to jam the county’s planning commission meeting room with protesters at next week’s hearing.

“I’ve hiked throughout the area with my son, and this is the last patch of wild pumpkins there is,” Brenner said. “There was a lot of it up on Calabasas Road until they built the Ralphs shopping center there.”

However, Cucurbita foetidissima is in no danger of becoming extinct, according to Tim Thomas, a resource management specialist with the National Park Service.

He said the pumpkins are found from coastal California to Texas and Nebraska. If they disappear from Calabasas, they will still be found in abundance in Malibu Creek State Park in Agoura.