North Hills, known previously as Sepulveda, is a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, California.
North Hills was originally part of an agricultural community known as Mission Acres. After World War II, the newly developed suburban community was renamed Sepulveda, after the prominent Sepúlveda family of California. In 1991, it was renamed North Hills.
Geography
Location The neighborhood of North Hills is located in the central San Fernando Valley, a region of the city of Los Angeles. It is intersected by the 405 Freeway and lies between Bull Creek and the Pacoima Wash. By road, it is 21 miles northwest of downtown; In relation to the cities surrounding Los Angeles, the neighborhood is about 17 miles north of Santa Monica, 16 miles east of Simi Valley, 14 miles northeast of Calabasas, 13 miles northwest of Burbank, 12 miles south of Santa Clarita, and 4 miles southwest of San Fernando. Surrounding neighborhoods are Northridge to the west, Panorama City to the east, Van Nuys to the south, and Granada Hills and Mission Hills to the north.
Overlapping Area codes 747 and 818 serve the area. The North Hills ZIP code is 91343.
Boundaries
Neighborhood council district boundaries While neighborhood boundaries in the Los Angeles area are generally informal, the official boundaries used by the North Hills East and West neighborhood council districts would make the neighborhood a area between Bull Creek and the Pacoima Wash on the west and east respectively. The southern boundary is Roscoe Boulevard between Bull Creek and the Pacoima Wash; North Hills East neighborhood council district includes a panhandle of land extending south of Roscoe Boulevard to the Coast Line railroad between the 405 Freeway and Sepulveda Boulevard. The northern boundary is Lassen Street from the Pacoima Wash to Woodley Avenue; Since 2012, the northwest of North Hills is bounds the community of Woodley Hill in Northridge, which occupies the square area which bounds North Hills on Woodley Avenue in the west and Plummer Street in the south. The neighborhood council districts are separated by the 405 Freeway. The West district has an area of and the East has an area of .
ZIP code area When ZIP codes were introduced in 1963, the 91343 code designated for Sepulveda, now North Hills, was applied to an area which extended further than what was considered part of Sepulveda. This broad boundary has informed politics regarding neighborhood nomenclature. Some sources, notably the Los Angeles Times' Mapping L.A. project, extend the neighborhood's boundaries to Balboa Boulevard and Bull Creek ("the wash") on the west, and Lassen and Devonshire Street on the north, mostly conforming to the 91343 ZIP code area.
The area which had been considered part of Granada Hills, bounded by Devonshire and Lassen streets on the north and south, and Balboa Boulevard and the San Diego Freeway on the west and east, was made part of North Hills following a petition by its residents in August, 1991; however, the North Hills Fashion center was not included in the petition, as shop owners opted to remain in Granada Hills and its chamber of commerce, and this whole area north of Lassen Street is now included in the Granada Hills South Neighborhood Council District.
The portion of the 91343 ZIP code area west of Bull Creek to Balboa Boulevard, between the North Hills Shopping Center to the north and Roscoe Boulevard in the south, has historically been considered part of Northridge and is included in the Northridge South and East neighborhood council districts. Despite efforts by residents to have a ZIP code coinciding with their neighborhood, they fall under the area that was designated for North Hills.
Toponymy The current name, "North Hills," originated in 1991, when residents of the western half of the neighborhood, formerly named Sepulveda, voted to secede from the eastern section, divided by the 405 freeway, and form a new community with that name; the city subsequently applied the name to the entirety of Sepulveda. Eventually, the city divided the neighborhood council district into "North Hills West" and "North Hills East" along the same lines proposed in 1991. Sepulveda continues to be a recognized name for addresses in the ZIP code covering North Hills.
Historically, the community has gone by two previous names. When it began as an agricultural-residential community in 1914, the land tracts corresponding to the modern community of North Hills in San Fernando Mission Land, then owned by the homonymous land company, were advertised as "Mission Acres." The name stuck until 1927 when residents renamed the community "Sepulveda." It had been proposed that the community be named "Brand", but residents rallied around the name Sepulveda because of the newly named Sepulveda Boulevard crossing the town, and the formal name change was celebrated on May 6.
In 1930 valley newspaper article noted that valley communities' names were pronounced inconsistently and outline what valley a businessman, Charles E. Racha, considered to be correct pronunciations for several of them; for Sepulveda, he wrote that the pronunciation "should be 'say-pull-vay-da' with the accent on the second syllable," and that "the pronunciation in common use would be correct if the second syllable were pronounced like our English word 'pull'." A 2021 explanation of the pronunciation of the name "Sepulveda" noted that while previous explanations "emphasized the penultimate 'E,' [...] the correct pronunciation is 'seh-POOL-vay-dah, [...] Anglicized as 'seh-PULL-vuh-duh.'"
History
The San Fernando Valley is in the traditional homeland of Tongva people, as well as Tataviam and Chumash people. In the valley, most native settlements, later called rancherías by the Spanish, were located in the south, where the land had better irrigation in the dry season and provided shelter from winter floods. The north valley was the location of the settlements of Paséknga in the area of San Fernando city, Pakoinga, of Tataviam etymology, located in modern Pacoima, and Ceegenga, a Tongva village in the area of Granada Hills. The area of North Hills would have been a flatland in the center of the valley, subject to winter floods from the Pacoima Wash and located between the northern and southern valley rancherías.
Colonization and mission era
Europeans first arrived at the valley during the Spanish Portolá expedition on August 5, 1769, and named it Valle de Santa Catalina de Bononia de los Encinos. They set up camp in the southern valley and had friendly encounters with the native people. The expedition left their camp on August 7 and followed native routes to cross the valley, likely passing through the area where North Hills is now located, and set up camp at the northern valley foothills before proceeding in their expedition. The colonization of the upper Californias began with the Portolá expedition and advanced in the following years. The San Gabriel Mission was founded in 1771, and the Pueblo de Los Ángeles was settled in 1781.Guinn, J. M. A History of California and an Extended History of Los Angeles and Environs, Vol. 1. (Los Angeles: Historic Record Company, 1915), 74. Book 4, Title 5, Law VI of the Recompilación de Leyes de Indias and Ordinances 88 and 89 of the Ordinances Concerning Discoveries.
With the pueblo's founding and by royal edict, all the waters of the Porciúncula River were reserved for use by the new pueblo, including valley lands, and royal concessions for grazing land were issued. Francisco Reyes, alcalde of Los Ángeles from 1793 to 1795, established a grazing operation of Rancho Los Encinos near Paséknga which included the agricultural settlement of Achooykomenga, worked by Chumash, Tongva, and Tataviam laborers. The rancho was acquired by Franciscan missionaries after being identified as a suitable site for a mission, and on September 8, 1797, the San Fernando Rey de España Mission was founded, placing most of the valley's land, including the area of North Hills, and its indigenous inhabitants under the mission's jurisdiction.
After the independence of Mexico from Spain, an 1833 government decree led to the secularization of the missions in Alta and Baja California and the San Fernando Mission was officially secularized in 1834. The mission became the head of a parish and the government commissioned a mayordomo to oversee the process of secularization and to administer the former mission land.
Rancho land
In 1845, governor Pío Pico signed a 9-year land lease, at $1,120 per year, to his brother Andrés Pico and his business partner Juan Manso who used it for cattle ranching. In the wake of the American intervention in Mexico, the governor put the land up for sale as the Rancho Ex-Misión de San Fernando to raise funds. The ranch lands were sold to Spanish merchant Eulogio de Celis for $14,000 on June 17, 1846. A portion of land lying just north of modern North Hills surrounding the mission complex was reserved for Andrés Pico and became known as the Pico Reserve."Andreas Pico Adobe" , The Branding Iron, December 1976, Number 124; reprinted by the San Fernando Valley Historical Society, 1977; accessed 11 October 2011
The Mexican armed resistance to the American intervention ceased in the beginning of 1848 and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded the California Territory to the United States. The Treaty provided that the Mexican land grants would be honored and American officials acquired Spanish and Mexican records to confirm titles.Beck, Warren A. and Ynez D. Haase, Historical Atlas of California, first edition, p.24
Eulogio de Celis filed his claim to the rancho lands in October 1852, but the land grant was not formally upheld by the U.S. District Court until January 1873,Report of the Surveyor General 1844–1886 after he had returned to Spain and four years after his death. In the meantime, Andrés Pico paid de Celis' lawyer, Edward Vischer, $15,000 for an undivided half-interest in the rancho in 1854, the same year Pico's lease expired. The land was divided along a line which roughly follows Roscoe Boulevard, now considered North Hills' southern boundary, and the southern half was sold to Pico. Andrés eventually sold his half-interest in the rancho to his brother Pío in 1862, retaining the 2,000-acre Pico Reserve; in turn, Pío sold the interest to the San Fernando Farm Homestead Association for $115,000 in 1869; this association went through several name changes, eventually becoming the Los Angeles Farming and Milling Company.
In a 1871 plat of the rancho, the North Hills area is shown to be an undeveloped land crossed by a road which led to the Pico Reserve and the mission in the north from the Rancho Los Encinos in the south. A sheep camp is shown to have been located just north of the ranch partition line on the west bank of the Pacoima Wash, which corresponds to the southeast end of modern North Hills. De Celis died in Spain in 1869 and his son Eulogio F. de Celis returned as the administrator of his father's estate which was later finally patented to his father by the government on January 8, 1873. After negotiations between the heirs of de Celis and the San Fernando Farm Homestead Association, the valley was formally divided into north and south. The heirs then sold the remaining northern half of the rancho, which includes present-day North Hills, to Charles Maclay and George K. Porter in 1875 for $125,000. With this, the Rancho era essentially ended in the San Fernando Valley; land divisions continued, what remained of the original mission agriculture fell into disuse, and the remaining indigenous population nearly disappeared from the region.
Porter land