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| Valley View Road in the Brockmont Park Historic District. |
Glendale City Council
recently voted to designate the city’s sixth historic district - Brockmont Park. This beautiful neighborhood in Northwest
Glendale is notable not only for its excellent architecture, but also for its
interesting history.
The area’s 59 homes
are located north of Kenneth Road and roughly bounded by Merriman Drive on the
west, Valley View Road on the east, and Cumberland Road and Arbor Drive at the
north. Most of the houses were built
between the late 1920s and middle 1950s and almost every major architectural
style of those decades is represented. The neighborhood’s streets are distinctive for their mature trees, with
entire blocks lined with either white pines, Canary pines, or fan palms.
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| The Brockman Clock Tower. |
The new district is
located on part of the former 140-acre estate of John Brockman, a self-made
millionaire who struck it rich in the gold and silver mines of New Mexico and
Arizona. Eventually settling in Los
Angeles, he invested in real estate and became important in the growth and
development of downtown – the Brockman Building at 7
th and Grand still
bears his name. In 1909, he bought land
at the foot of the Verdugo Mountains to build his retirement home, which he
called “Brockmont.” Along with the grand
mansion, he built a four-story clock tower and created extensively landscaped
grounds that included a lake with an island and a deer park. The house and the tower are both listed on
the Glendale Register of Historic Resources and now look out over the new
historic district. The district consists
of the southern portion of the estate, which was laid out and developed as “Brockmont Park” by the Home
Realty Company shortly after Brockman’s death in 1925. Promotional literature hailed the tract as “The
Ideal Home Community” – a sentiment that local residents continue to share!
Brockmont Park joins the city’s five other
historic districts,
which help manage change in designated districts by making sure that
alterations and additions visible from the street keep the historic character
that makes Glendale’s older neighborhoods so desirable.
