COLUMN ONE : The Valley: An Urban Evolution : ‘America’s suburb’ looks more like a city these days. Apartments displace single-family homes on the flats, $1-million tract houses invade hills, and the area’s politics splinter.

With the heat and haze, the air of the San Fernando Valley is thick these days with nostalgia--for olive groves and dirt roads, for the ducklings and chickens and piglets raised by thousands of schoolchildren in suburban back yards, for the summer nights spent cruising Van Nuys Boulevard.

The Valley stood for something once. Neighborhood schools. Proposition 13. Tract houses. Corner stores. It had its own weather (hotter), its own geography (insular) and its own politics (isolationist). Periodically, it threatened to secede from Los Angeles or, at least, form its own school district. It even shunned the 1984 Olympics.

Scorned by intellectuals--”Nowhere on earth has the land been so wretchedly violated,” wrote architectural historian Robert Winter--the Valley led the nation in the construction of swimming pools, shopping malls and single-family homes. For Look magazine and much of the national press it was America’s suburb.

The old imagery hardly seems appropriate anymore. With a population of well over a million--almost as large as Philadelphia--the Valley has acquired much of the heft and glitter, drawbacks and dangers of a big city. When people in Los Angeles talk about “the City” and “the Valley” now, it’s to emphasize the similarities.

But the Valley acts uncomfortable in its urban garb: balking at the notion of building a courthouse in this neighborhood, a theater in that one, voting down a proposed subway route, preferring to see its growth push out toward the mountains rather than intensify along the boulevards. As it grows larger, the Valley also grows farther apart, segmenting itself, by geography, class and race, and the identity that once seemed so clear starts to disappear, like the outline of the San Gabriels on an August afternoon.

“The San Fernando Valley is finished, as far as I’m concerned,” said Al DeGeyeter, who has been selling pearl onions, corn, strawberries and squash for 40 years from his roadside stand on Sherman Way in Reseda. This is a lean year for DeGeyeter. First came the drought, and then worms. He points to a fallow field nearby where one crop was infested.

“You can’t spray in the middle of the city like this. So you let it go,” he said. DeGeyeter, 71, said he will retire in a year or two. “There’s no money in this dirt anymore.”

Catherine Mulholland, her family’s name emblazoned on the history of Los Angeles, and with it the Valley, feels much the same way.

“I don’t belong anymore,” Mulholland said. “I am like the coyotes and the rattlesnakes and the other animal species that are getting pushed out.”

Mulholland, 67, is the granddaughter of William Mulholland, the self-taught engineer who designed the aqueduct that brought the water from Owens Valley to Los Angeles and made it possible for millions of people to settle.

Today, Catherine Mulholland lives in a subdivision in Chatsworth. Six miles away is the land, now the site of a K mart, where her grandfather built the family’s ranch and where she grew up. She recalls a charmed life, her friends drawn from the families of nearby merchants, ranch hands and celebrities.

“Barbara Stanwyck had a ranch nearby and so did Roy Rogers,” she said. “Sabu the Elephant Boy (the late actor Sabu Dastagir) actually had elephants. People used to complain about the trumpeting.” Mulholland laughed at the memory. “Today, it’s boomboxes and jet planes.”

What she misses most about the old Valley, Mulholland said, is the easy mixing of people, races and classes.

“We were a community of rich and poor. I had a friend whose father sold chickens for a living on Winnetka Avenue. On hot nights, we used to sleep on top of the coops. . . . There was a Mexican boy in school whose family lived in a boxcar. His clothes were pretty ragged and he smelled. I’m sure he got teased. But he was there. You knew him.”

There’s a lot of talk in the Valley now of a lost sense of community.

“The Valley is breaking up,” said Arnold Steinberg, a political consultant who has been taking public opinion surveys there for 20 years. The new boundaries, he said, are being defined by ethnicity, by income and by taste. Telling distinctions are drawn. People will say they live in the heavily Anglo “West Valley,” or the largely Latino “East Valley.” Others say they live “south of the boulevard,” a reference to the expensive hillside neighborhoods south of Ventura Boulevard.

“No one says, ‘I’m from the Valley’ anymore,” Steinberg said.

In the hillier and posher quarters of Canoga Park, residents recently renamed their neighborhood West Hills and ended their affiliation with one of the Valley’s most historically significant communities. The 1911 subdivision of Canoga Park and 47,000 acres of surrounding ranch land marked the Valley’s first major step toward urbanization.

Throughout the Valley, communities have circled the wagons to protect against unwanted intruders. In Hidden Hills, a gated enclave of million-dollar homes bordering Ventura County, residents are waging a legal battle to keep out an apartment complex for senior citizens. People in Chatsworth don’t want a courthouse on their doorstep, and in the Sunland-Tujunga horse country, residents wary of new development have opposed the expansion of a religious school and even fought to keep out a convent.

As the price of housing rises in the hills and new apartments fill up the flats, the prospect of a two-tiered society becomes increasingly real. It is a vision of a Valley floor crowded with poor people who don’t speak English, don’t vote and don’t own property, surrounded by Anglo homeowners who control the wealth and the politics from hillside enclaves.

Steinberg referred to it as “the coming schizoid society,” and evidence of it is already on display.

In Calabasas, a phalanx of pink-roofed chateaus spirals up a freshly graded hilltop. By definition, these are tract homes--800 of them are planned. But each costs a minimum of $1 million, and the project is designed to meet a growing demand for luxurious country living in the Valley. Inside the houses, rooms soar from Italian marble foyers to 20-foot ceilings. Outside, lawns are set off by lushly landscaped fountains where the children of prospective buyers dip their toes on hot afternoons.

Just 20 freeway minutes to the east, on Tobias Avenue in the Sepulveda flats, the Valley is catering to another market. Here, the remnants of a neighborhood built 40 years ago for an earlier generation of suburban homesteaders are boarded up and marked for demolition. Soon, new apartments will go up. Immigrants will move in. In the meantime, the back yards of the condemned homes have become an arena for a makeshift city sport. Each afternoon, small crowds gather there to watch daring young skateboarders careen up the sides of empty swimming pools.

State Assemblyman Richard Katz, a Sylmar Democrat who for 10 years has represented a broad segment of the northern San Fernando Valley, including Tobias Avenue, has watched the forces of change at work, and he fears that the Valley is losing its traditional ballast.

“What has worried me most over the past seven or eight years,” Katz said, “has been that the middle class is disappearing.”

Katz sees the trend reflected in the loss of single-family homes--close to 1,400 were bulldozed to make way for new apartments during the first half of the decade--and in the region’s shifting economy. Even before Lockheed announced it was shutting down its Burbank operations earlier this year, manufacturing jobs had declined by nearly 50% since 1970, according to David Hornbeck, a professor of economics and geography at Cal State Northridge.

As jobs disappear, so do blue-collar Democrats who once anchored the east end of Katz’s district. As these voters move to the outlying Santa Clarita, Simi and Antelope valleys--San Fernando’s nascent suburbs--their place is taken by unskilled, non-voting immigrants.

Katz’s district, as much as anyplace in the Valley, bears witness to the widening gap between rich and poor. At the west end, around Northridge, the majority of residents are Anglo, own their homes and make annual salaries averaging well over $50,000. At the eastern end of the district, in communities like Pacoima and San Fernando, there are more people--but fewer voters. About two-thirds of the population is Latino. Fewer than half the residents own their own homes, and the average income is less than $30,000.

Katz has survived longer in the district than most of his predecessors, but the job does not get any easier. He must provide services to the east, while asking the more conservative west, which controls the votes, to foot the bill. It makes for delicate politics.

“The resistance will come when the voters in the west end feel they are picking up the whole tab and not getting any bang for their buck,” Katz said. “If you raise their taxes and the schools don’t get better . . . if you ask them to pay more for social services for the poor and it doesn’t lead to lower crime . . . then, people will balk.”

It wasn’t long ago that politics in the Valley were far simpler: lower taxes, more police. This was the familiar battle cry back when the Valley spoke with one voice. Then, politicians claimed the Valley was being bilked by City Hall in downtown Los Angeles--paying 40 cents of every dollar collected in city taxes, but getting back only 15 cents of every dollar spent on municipal services.

The demand for the Valley’s “fair share” fueled the secessionist movement of the 1970s, and was one of the last crusades, along with the campaign against mandatory school busing, that seemed to unite Valley voters.

“Today, there’s no single issue, no one leader that you could say represents the Valley,” consultant Steinberg said. “Things are so diffuse, the changes so severe, they have weakened traditional causes and alliances.”

As veteran politicians try to get their bearings in the new urban environment, some find it harder to stay in sync with their constituents.

State Sen. Alan Robbins, a Tarzana Democrat who should know his constituents well after 17 years in office, spent much of last year supporting an extension of the proposed Metro Rail subway from downtown into the Valley, only to have his constituents reject it overwhelmingly in a June vote.

After 13 years on the City Council, Joy Picus ran into unexpected resistance when she backed a movement to build an arts complex in the Sepulveda Basin. With a museum and a performing arts theater, the arts complex would have given the Valley a cultural presence that it has long lacked. But it also would have consumed a valued piece of open space in the fast-developing West Valley. And for many residents, the trade-off wasn’t worth it.

“What you have are a bunch of politicians trying to come to grips with the Valley’s love-hate relationship with development,” said one council aide, who asked not to be identified.

History shows that the Valley has been of two minds about growth for the better part of a century. Ironically, some of the people who cherished its rustic heritage worked hardest to destroy it.

Author Edgar Rice Burroughs was among those who loved the splendid isolation of the Valley but who could not resist tampering with it. In 1919, Burroughs bought 550 acres of undeveloped land teeming with deer, coyote and bobcat. He named it Tarzana after the vine-swinging hero of his jungle books, who expressed Burroughs’ love of nature and contempt for civilization. But, within three years, Burroughs had succumbed to the worst impulses of Tarzan’s enemies. Obsessed with making money from his land, he decided to build a town.

By 1925, Tarzana was subdivided into 63 commercial and 139 residential lots. Burroughs departed for downtown Los Angeles, according to biographer Roger Dionne. Late in his life, the author tried to return to Tarzana, but couldn’t find a place to live; his town was full up.

By the 1940s, the Valley was on the way to becoming an industrial giant with an annual output of $700 million in aircraft, automobiles and motion pictures. Before long, it was growing faster than any other metropolitan region of the nation. The rural basin was becoming something quite different, not a city really, but something else. Developers called it “rurban.”

Raymond Chandler described its harsher tones when he wrote about a drive through the Valley: “I drove on past the gaudy neons and the false fronts behind them, the sleazy hamburger joints that look like palaces under the colours, the circular drive-ins as gay as circuses with the chipper hard-eyed car hops, the brilliant counters, and the sweaty greasy kitchens that would have poisoned a toad . . . “

A much more appealing image had fired the imaginations of the emigres who had poured in since the end of World War II. Their Valley offered the bucolic setting evoked by actor Robert Taylor, who talked about the simple life on his alfalfa ranch in Chatsworth. It was the wide-open land of the new lease on life immortalized in a Gordon Jenkins’ song:

I’ll forget my sins/ I’ll be makin’ new friends/ Where the West begins and the sunset ends./ Cause I’ve decided where yours truly should be./ And it’s the San Fernando Valley for me.

Even today, amid the crush of freeway traffic, pastoral imagery plays a role in the marketing of the Valley. Boosters still talk about a simpler, safer life. Realtors promote new “horse properties”--tract houses with split-rail fences and hay ricks that look like gazebos. Corporate recruiters describe Warner Center with its emerging skyline and 35,000 commuters as a suburban office environment, just minutes away from genteel country living.

And the hype still works. Sylmar in the northern Valley was the fastest-growing community in the city during the 1980s. Nearly 50% of all new homes built in the city during the last decade were built in the Valley. Much of the new construction occurred in the foothills surrounding Chatsworth, where ridge lines were gouged, oak trees uprooted and barns razed to make way for new “country estates.”

But there is more than a grain of truth to the hype. The Valley, in some ways, remains a place apart. In the most crowded neighborhoods--North Hollywood and Van Nuys--population density is still only a third of what it is along the Wilshire corridor. Although the average cost of a home, $260,000, is more than the citywide average, Valley home prices are still substantially lower than those in West Los Angeles.

The rate of serious crime also is markedly lower than the citywide rate. While a great deal of attention has been focused on the growth of gang violence, veteran police officers say they think the quality of life in the Valley, even in the poorest neighborhoods, will prevent gang culture from taking root as deeply as it has elsewhere in the city.

“Life is still a little bit better in the San Fernando Valley, even for poor people,” said Los Angeles Police Department Detective Cliff Ruff, who spent the last eight years in charge of the Valley’s anti-street-gang unit before retiring in June. “Kids join gangs because it’s the macho thing to do. They’re not doing it so much out of desperation. They’re not looking for a father figure. The family structure is more visible. The idea that there can be a life outside the gang has some meaning.”

He calls the Valley’s gang problem “manageable.”

People of all walks of life still pay homage to the Valley’s traditional values, tastes and conveniences.

Restaurant owner Peiro Selvaggio is one of a growing number of West Side business people to expand their operations into the Valley. The owner of Valentino, one of the West Side’s most fashionable eating places, Selvaggio is about to open a new restaurant in Sherman Oaks.

Like others hoping to find a niche in the new Valley, Selvaggio said it is important not to see it as a clone of Brentwood or Pacific Palisades. He said that Posto, his Valley establishment, will be quite different from Valentino.

“Valentino is elegant but a little pretentious,” Selvaggio said. “In the Valley a place like that could make people feel too scrutinized. I don’t want them to feel undercapitalized or underdressed. In the Valley, a restaurant should be a comforting hangout that happens to be elegant.”

In the Valley, Selvaggio said, one must set one’s sights carefully. “The middle is what I’m aiming at,” he said, “because that’s where the Valley abounds.”

Flip Smith is of that middle-class stock. He sells tires.

One night 20 years ago, Smith drove to a spot on Mulholland Drive overlooking the Valley, looked out at the sea of lights and vowed to sell a set of tires to every one of the households twinkling below him.

Today, he is advancing on that goal. A salesman then, he now owns a tire store in Van Nuys. It makes, he said, about $4 million in sales each year. Living in the Valley has not always been easy. His kids were bused to schools on the other side of the city. Many of his friends have moved away. The proud old street, Van Nuys Boulevard, where his business stands and where he cruised as a teen-ager, has become a disheveled strip.

But the changes have not dulled his enthusiasm for life in the Valley.

“I haven’t gotten rich,” he said, “but I have what matters.”

Both of his sons, now grown up, work for him. The family gets together around Smith’s back yard pool on Sundays. And after 19 years, Smith’s home in Reseda is still five minutes from work.

Even with all the changes, the Valley can still look today like it always did. Viewed from that spot on Mulholland Drive, where two decades ago Smith surveyed a great, untapped tire market, the Valley shimmers below like one great, sprawling neighborhood. A flat and placid place, safe from the city; a beguiling mirage.

The San Fernando Valley Extending 24 miles from east to west and about 12 miles from north to south, the San Fernando Valley encompasses about 275 square miles and is generally bounded by the San Gabriel Mountains on the north, the Verdugo Mountains on the east, the Santa Monica Mountains and Hollywood Hills on the south and the Agoura Hills, Simi Hills and Santa Susana Mountains on the west.