La Cañada Flintridge History

Mike Kobeissi has worked the La Cañada Flintridge market for three decades, and the entries in this index trace how that town came to be, from the people who lived along the Arroyo Seco to the vote that joined two communities into one city.

A finding aid for the Lanterman House collection on the Online Archive of California records that La Cañada was founded in the early 1870s by homesteaders and health seekers looking for land and a healthy climate, that the Lanterman family reached the valley in 1875, and that former Senator Frank Putnam Flint created the Flintridge development between the 1920s and the early 1930s. The Lanterman holdings and Flint’s land were both subdivided into what is now the city.¹

The place names are older than either community. Crescenta Valley Weekly explains that La Cañada is Spanish for a valley between two mountains, a name apparently given by Jose Verdugo to the northern part of his Rancho San Rafael, that early residents wrote it as Canyada to keep the pronunciation, and that Flintridge took its name from the senator who bought the southern part of the valley.² The two stayed apart until 1976. The Los Angeles Times reported that La Cañada and Flintridge, then unincorporated parts of Los Angeles County, chose cityhood together when annexation by Glendale or Pasadena loomed, and that residents left a hyphen out of the new name on purpose so it would not suggest a lasting division. When one turned up anyway in the state’s incorporation papers, the city council voted in 1985 to take it out.³

The eight entries are The Tongva and the Arroyo Seco, The Ranchos of the Crescenta Valley, Lanterman House, Descanso Gardens, The Arroyo Seco, Hahamongna and Devil’s Gate Dam, The Arroyo Seco Parkway and The Pacific Electric and the Streetcar Suburbs.