Fall, 1954

Postcard view of Citrus Avenue north from Badillo Street in Covina, California, in Fall, 1954. which just happens to be when I was born here. I can peg the date because both films on the Covina Theater's marquee are from 1954, and the later of the two—"Down Three Dark Streets"—was released on Sep. 2. It might be as late as early November, though, because of the snow in the mountains and the ladies wearing winter coats. It can't be after Thanksgiving, however, otherwise Citrus would be decked out in its traditional Christmas decorations!

Correction: According to an ad in the Covina Argus-Citizen, the twin bill of "Lucky Me" and "Down Three Dark Streets" played at the Covina Theatre only on January 16 and 17 of 1955—a Sunday and Monday respectively—and since none of the retail businesses on Citrus would have been open on a Sunday, the photo of this busy street scene must have been taken precisely on Monday, January 17, 1955. Q.E.D. :-)

 

Oak Canyon Road

Probably not a lot people from Covina ever heard of Oak Canyon Road, but growing up in the hills east of town, I became aware of it at a very early age. Whenever we'd drive past Oak Canyon, its picturesque colonnade of old palm trees would catch my eye, and I'd wonder how they got there. Seven decades would pass before I finally found answers to all of the questions I had about this pioneer-era byway.

Detail of Joseph M. Bloom map showing Oak Canyon Road (green), Covina Hills Road (yellow) and surrounding streets in 1963.

First called Park Street, the now-secluded track southeast of Covina was laid out by the McCarthy Company in 1895: the same year as the westernmost mile of today's Covina Hills Road.¹

Tract map from 1895 showing Park Street (green) and the new County Road (yellow) in the McCarthy subdivision of Block 1 of the Hollenbeck Ranch.
Courtesy Los Angeles Dept. of Public Works.

In 1902, Col. Frank Marion Chapman acquired 1,470 acres south of the Pomona-Covina Road,² and Park Street became the palm-lined carriageway entrance to his Chapman Heights Ranch.

Following the Colonel's death in 1909, pioneer scion Harvey M. Houser bought the northernmost 100-acre portion of the former Chapman ranch.³ In March, 1925, Houser then sold the property to Mr. and Mrs. John H. Henry,⁴ and the following year, a renamed Palm Drive became the picturesque gateway to the Henrys' new California Preparatory School for Boys located atop the mesa overlooking Walnut Creek.

Aerial view of the new Cal Prep campus and what is now Oak Canyon Road at left, 1927. Courtesy U.C. Santa Barbara Geospatial Collection.

The palms lining the school's entrance road were evidently a kind of mascot to Cal Prep's academic community. Their emblem prominently featured the tropical tree, and they even named their yearbook "The Palm."

Frontispiece of the 1928 Cal Prep annual.⁵

Looking south on Cal Prep's Palm Drive, 1928.⁵

After the California Preparatory School moved to Ojai in 1942, the campus was taken over by the Theosopical Society Point Loma,⁶ and it was in 1945 that the first mentions of Oak Canyon Road began appearing in the local newspaper.

The campus changed hands yet again in 1951, then becoming the new home of the California Baptist Theological Seminary.⁷ This was how I knew the place when our family moved to the Covina Hills in 1959, and I first saw the palms.

As curious as I was back then about Oak Canyon Road, I strictly avoided that area when I was younger, as it had a rather notorious local reputation. Invading swarms of "bad" teenagers took advantage of the secluded road to party and make out. The L. A. County Sheriffs patrolled that road constantly, and in my day it was mostly known as a really good place to go to get busted. The delinquency problem was solved once and for all, though, when Oak Canyon Road was finally closed to all vehicle traffic in the late 1970s when the seminary property was acquired by redevelopers.

The cars and juvies went away, but the palms endured as always—or at least some of them did. The trees used to extend in a uniform line all the way from the base of the bluff to the intersection with Covina Hills Road. I wish I had taken a picture of the palm drive as it looked before a suburban housing development destroyed the trees north of Walnut Creek in 1977 and obscured the view of those that remained. That vista that so inspired me in my childhood only survives in memory now, alas.

Fortunately, though, the southern half of the palms live on, and the old road itself today serves as the gateway to the 82.8-mile-long Schabarum-Skyline Equestrian Trail. I'm very pleased that at least one section of this pioneer-era relic will now be preserved for future generations.

This is my favorite picture from my visit last year to this quiet refugium. It was so amazing to finally walk among these palms and contemplate just how ancient they are. Planted 110 years ago, they are older than almost every man-made structure in the eastern San Gabriel Valley. Living history, hidden in plain sight, yet now no longer the mystery lost to the passage of time that they once were.

Photo ©2011 by J Scott Shannon.

(N.b., The foregoing is a complete rewrite of the original article which, over time, I discovered contained multiple factual errors. This revised version also includes a lot of new information and illustrations that were not available to me 14 years ago. I think you'll agree, this is a much more satisfactory and worthwhile read! —JSS, May 1, 2026.)

References:

¹ Map of the McCarthy subdivision of Block 1 of the Hollenbeck Tract, surveyed August, 1895.
² Covina Argus, May 31, 1902, p.1.
³ Covina Argus, May 14, 1910, p.2.
⁴ Covina Argus, March 6, 1925, p.1.
⁵ The Palm, 1928, Annual of the California Preparatory School for Boys, Covina, California, 84pp.
⁶ Los Angeles Times, May 22, 1942, p.30.
⁷ Covina Argus-Citizen, January 26, 1951, p.1.

 

The Baptist Seminary

In 1926, the California Preparatory School for Boys (shown below c.1938) was built on the 100-acre H. M. Houser ranch on former Hollenbeck lands southeast of Covina.

Click any image on this page for an enlargement.

The prep school did well until the onset of WWII, when the ownership, fearing enemy attack (not joking!), moved the entire school to the mountains in Ojai. Consequently, in 1942, the Covina property was sold to the Theosophical Society Point Loma. The south-to-north view below shows the campus in the mid-Forties.

In 1951, the property changed hands again and became the California Baptist Theological Seminary. In this aerial view from c.1955 (below), we're looking generally eastward here; the road to the immediate left of the campus is Covina Hills Road.

Seminary classrooms (left) and one of the dormitories (right). In the early 1960s, that dormitory was also the headquarters of Wally Moon's Baseball Summer Camp. It was the first place I can ever remember sleeping overnight away from home.

The Baptist Seminary conferred its last ministry degrees at Covina in 1974 and moved its central campus to Berkeley. Starting in 1979, the grounds were redeveloped for housing and offices, and almost all of the old buildings were demolished. The gymnasium was initially spared and turned into a racquetball and workout facility, but it was finally torn down in 2005. Today, the only campus structure that remains is the Headmaster's house – Casa Mirasol.