North Hollywood Park

North Hollywood Park. . , Orchards to Parkland , In 1890, a pair of brothers, Alfred and Harry Prince, came west from Ohio and bought themselves nearly 70 acres to plant an orchard at what is now Magnolia Boulevard and Tujunga Avenue. , Harry moonlighted as a teacher in Los Angeles, riding his bicycle over the Cahuenga Pass, and Alfred doubled as a telegrapher for the Santa Fe Railroad. Alfred’s wife, Emma, soon joined her husband, and decades later, she told the Los Angeles Times about the family home on Lankershim Boulevard. It’s living room was 30 feet long, the floors were oak, and her husband had hand-pressed patterns into the concrete blocks. Emma would end up living to be more than 100 years old. , In the area’s agricultural heyday, she recalled, workers came from across the country during the fruit-drying season, laboring by the light of kerosene torches. By 1927, the year the area became North Hollywood, voters approved a park bond measure, and the Prince family joined the Weddington family to sell more than 90 acres for the park, where pioneering families held annual picnics. , A Home for Books , As North Hollywood matured, it acquired it’s own city library. When the present branch opened in 1929, it was named for the literary figure Sidney Lanier, a Southern poet and Civil War veteran. By the early 1980s, library patrons and local civic organizations passed a motion to change the name to North Hollywood Amelia M Earhart Regional Branch, in honor of the local legend and record-setting aviatrix. Lanier, one librarian told the Los Angeles Times, “will never be missed”. But the two lines of his poetry endure, memorialized in Spanish tile above the library fireplace, and they could serve as an epitaph for Earhart: “I am but a small-winged bird / But I will conquer the world.“ , Noho High’s High and Mighty , Of course, Earhart never went to school at North Hollywood High, but another renowned woman did. Writer and social critic Susan Sontag edited the school newspaper, The Arcade, and she wrote some of its most powerful editorials at the branch library, including analysis of nuclear weapons, and a thumbs-up review of Lawrence Olivier’s “Hamlet.“ Her biographer, Carl Edmond Rollyson, wrote that she labored over an editorial calling for a traffic light near the school , and the city installed one. , , Another student, Alan Ladd, climbed out of the recreation center’s swimming pool and into the movies. He was a star swimmer and diver at North Hollywood High School, and performed in a water pageant in July 1933. A month later he signed a film contract, although stardom proved to be some years away. , Ladd also earned his keep as a lifeguard at the Recreation Center’s pool where he swam, and , playing on his nickname, “Tiny” , he opened a burger joint across the street called “Tiny‘s Patio.“