They Did Go Home Again

The next time someone gives you that old saw about how L.A. is rootless because everyone is from someplace else, consider Kathleen Chikato Hanson, who at 35 is still known by certain neighbors as “the Chikato girl.” Two kids, and they call her by her maiden name, the way people do in small towns. But she lives in the soulless shadow of downtown Los Angeles.

Her house, in the stucco tract they call Mt. Washington West, is just up the hill from where a toddler died in a gang ambush in 1995. It has been years since a kid could safely walk to the corner store to buy licorice, the way Hanson used to.

Still, she didn’t think twice when the for-sale sign went up in 1986 at the trilevel down the street from her mom and dad. Her kids now sell Girl Scout cookies to people who watched her grow up. She has dinner with her parents at least twice a week. “My kids are friends with the kids of a guy I used to baby-sit for,” she said with a laugh.

Hanson is a curiosity among her friends, some of whom get claustrophobic at the thought of a place where everybody knows your maiden name. But the fact is, Southern California--where one person in three is a native--has plenty of people like her, people who move back to settle in the neighborhoods, the blocks, even the very houses where they grew up.

They are people like Mary Byrnes, who grew up in Westwood, traveled the country and then came back to the old block to raise her kids. Or Lori Villanueva of San Pedro, who married her high school sweetheart and settled on the street where both her mother and his mother live. Or Michael and Michel Brooks, who live across from her grandma in Culver City.

With as much passion as New Yorkers or Philadelphians or Clevelandites feel for their hometowns, these Angelenos have been drawn back to their roots. They return for family, or their jobs, but also because they know this place not only as it is, but also as it used to be.

A walk in their shoes could start in any number of neighborhoods, but Hanson’s is particularly interesting: In the last few years, one family after another has been pleasantly surprised to see their grown children return to settle in Mt. Washington West.

Katherine Ng, an artist who grew up on Sunny Heights Drive, lives in a five-bedroom house up the street from her parents. Kimberly Chan, who used to be Kimberly Wong, lives with her husband and new baby on the same street, a half-dozen doors up from her mom.

Vicky Hoggatt, who used to be Vicky Yamamoto, bought her mother’s house after her father died and her mother retired to Las Vegas. Nancy Brooks and her husband bought the house across the street from her mom, with the same floor plan as the old homestead, only flipped.

The president of the homeowners’ association has found the phenomenon happily puzzling. As neighborhoods go, Mt. Washington West is pleasant but nothing to run home about: boxy houses in the $200,000 to $300,000 range, nice yards, good elementary school, more crime than there used to be.

But behind the rationales for moving back--aging parents, young kids--there is the yearning for security, for the comfort of a known quantity.

“It just feels real family-ish,” said Kimberly Chan, 31, who persuaded her husband, Myron, to move from Northern California and buy into her old block two years ago.

Although to a visitor Mt. Washington West might seem to be little more than a collection of split-level houses on the Elyria Canyon side of Mt. Washington, a native can tell you all sorts of things about the place: That ground was broken for the first homes in 1964; that they came in six “award-winning” floor plans, with intercoms and rumpus rooms; that the subdivision lacked some of the cachet of the older, upper sections of the hill, but was nonetheless a peachy place to raise kids.

If the native were someone like 32-year-old Katherine Ng, she could also tell you that Mt. Washington West is a stone’s throw from Chinatown. This bit of geography meant that from the moment the first model homes were sold by developer Ray Watt, Mt. Washington West would be the sort of “suburb” where the word “suburban” would not be entirely synonymous with “white.”

Born in China and raised in Hong Kong, Ng’s mother had considered a number of things when she went shopping for a house, from her husband’s workplace (a county probation office in Glendale) to her driving preferences (surface streets over freeways, any day). But most of all, she wanted to raise her three daughters in a neighborhood where she would not be the only Asian on her block.

Ng was 9 months old when her family moved to Sunny Heights Drive. And now, where others might see a typical pastel Los Angeles neighborhood, she sees the poignant juxtaposition of the old world and the new. The house where her parents live--15 doors from her own house, as her sister in Davis never tires of reminding her--is not just the swanky, four-bedroom Diamond Head model, but the Diamond Head model with the front door painted red, the Chinese symbol of good luck.

The drive down San Fernando Road is not only the road to the freeway but the route her family used to take to get Sunday lunch. When they’d cross the railroad tracks on the way to Chinatown, her mother would tell Ng and her two sisters the Cantonese word for “train.” Ng herself could not speak Cantonese at the time, and she still can’t make the drive without remembering how the word--fo che--sounded to her like a New Yorker saying “four chairs.”

The winding lanes that traverse the subdivision remind her of the time she was doing middle-school homework in her bedroom and heard something she had never heard outside of Chinatown: a traditional Chinese funeral procession, wending slowly past the double garages and flower beds.

“You kind of hear these horns and this drum banging, and it’s not always on key,” she recalled, smiling. “There were these sounds, and I remember the hearse. I wondered if somebody’s grandfather had died.”

So vivid is her childhood topography that Ng, a printmaker, has tapped into it for her art. Not long ago, she created a postcard-sized graphic and poem inspired by a set of concrete stairs terraced into the hillside near her house.

“Fourteen steps from the bottom path to another, 123 strides along the path to the next stairway, 12 steps to the landing, 25 steps to the top of the cul-de-sac,” it begins. She knows these things not only because she walks there every day with her dad, but also because this was the shortcut she and her sisters used to take to school.

“As I climb the first set of stairs, the dogs that barked at me 20 years ago are no longer there,” the text recalls. “Walking up the path, I step on worn graffiti. . . . I used to walk up the gutter along the side of the last stairway. When I reached the top, I would turn around to see the neighborhood below where Mom, parked in her car, waited to see us wave.”

Some people might feel overwhelmed by such intimacy, but Ng, a self-professed “late bloomer,” has found it comforting. She describes an overwhelming depression that set in when she went away to college at UC Santa Cruz and did not lift until she moved back in with her parents a couple of years later. A linguistics major, she tried a second time to find her calling, enrolling in art courses at Los Angeles City College and Cal State Northridge. In 1993, with her projects overtaking their home, her parents helped her buy a five-bedroom house with a studio-sized garage down the street.

“I was kind of brought up that I should look after my parents, and my two sisters have moved away,” she explained. “Here, I can still check on my parents and they can check on me.”

But on a walk one sunny morning down that path from her old elementary school, it was clear there was something more that drew Ng back. Framed by brilliant green foliage, with birds chirping and flowers blooming among the black walnut trees, she pointed out landmark after landmark: The spot where some kids with a magnifying glass once touched off a brush fire, the spot where she once fell and tore her school clothes and had to lie about it afterward, the roof of her own cream-and-seafoam-green house, just to the right of a stand of cypress trees below.

“This is pretty much where I’ve spent my whole life,” she said, looking down at the rooftops of her girlhood and the expanse of the megalopolis beyond.

The Contour of the Land

Her neighbors across the street, Vicky and Jim Hoggatt, have feelings that are similar, though less poetically expressed. A visit to their house (the Hillhaven model, “the hit of the 1964 Los Angeles Home Show,” according to the developer’s original brochure) is less of a trip down memory lane than a Southern California in-joke.

Ask about their pet bird, for instance, and they’ll tell you that he and his late partner were named Al and Roger after Jim’s favorite L.A. radio team, Al Lohman and Roger Barkley. Ask how they met, and they’ll ask whether you remember the big LAPD raid at the old Elks Lodge in MacArthur Park, when it was a punk-rock hangout.

Ask why they bought her mother’s house--the trilevel he calls “the Rubber Soul house” because of the Beatles album that was released the year it was built--and Jim will tell you that it was really at his insistence. At 42, “I’ve lived all my life within eyeball distance of City Hall,” he says.

When they began looking to buy a house last year while renting in East Los Angeles, they concentrated on the east San Gabriel Valley because Vicky, who recently became a pharmacist, knew of job openings there. But the more they looked, the more depressed Jim became.

“I’d always hoped we’d find something here, in what people like to think of as the rotten inner core of the city,” he said, laughing. He feels closer to nature in places like Echo Park, Silver Lake and East Los Angeles than in, say, the neatly drawn tracts of Orange County or the San Fernando Valley.

“As you move out from downtown, the streets are straight lines and right angles,” he said. “But if you look at the center of L.A., the streets are like spaghetti, conforming to the land. I’ve always liked that--the shape of the land, rather than a developer having been the determining factor. That nature dictated, not man.”

Finally it came to him: Vicky’s mother was a widow and wanted to move. Why not buy her place?

They moved in in September and began sorting through 35 years’ worth of Vicky’s family’s things. Out went her childhood playhouse and her old swing set. Down came the 20-year-old posters of Ted Nugent and the Sex Pistols glued onto her bedroom walls.

Down came the “chandelier from hell” with the green velvet swag that her mother had in the dining room. Down came the dart board in the rumpus room. Down by the score came Vicky’s mother’s shelves and all the knickknacks they once had held.

But some things remained: The big green couch where Vicky spent so much time as a kid watching “All in the Family” on the RCA console TV; the receipts and blueprints marking “everything that has ever gone wrong with this house.”

And the memories: her first car, an orange 1978 Datsun 510 hatchback, parked outside the double garage, and her birthday parties, when her mom, an art teacher, would draw a big cartoon of Vicky and have the kids try, blindfolded, to pin hair ribbons on her pigtails.

She, too, evokes astonishment when she tells people that she and Jim now live in the house where she grew up.

“But to me, it feels very natural,” she said. “You know all the streets. You know all the shortcuts. You know all about the place.”

Knowing the Local Hangouts

Out at the beach, Lori Villanueva and her husband, Eddie, can talk just as intimately about their slice of Los Angeles. He’s an aircraft mechanic, she’s a homemaker, and they and their six kids live in San Pedro, on Carolina Street, where they both grew up.

They were high school sweethearts, and they rented their house for five years before buying it in 1986. It was a 600-square-foot pink beach shack with blue shag carpets and a concrete front yard. Over the last 10 years, Lori has single-handedly renovated it into a two-story home.

“My husband went to Pt. Fermin Elementary School, and so do my kids. Some of them even had his kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Berchad,” she said. “Some of the older people here will say to him, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember when you used to run around in your underwear,’ or ‘I remember when you and your mother owned a coffee shop,’ or ‘Aren’t you Margaret’s son?’ ”

Sometimes, she said, “I think I maybe missed seeing a lot of things. I’ve lived here all my life, but until, like, five years ago, I’d never been to a Rose Parade.”

But the upside is that she knows a corner of Los Angeles County in a way few others can: She knows that the favored breakfast joint for local San Pedrans is the Pacific Diner. She can name the local Little Leagues (Eastview and Block Field). She knows there was a time when you could walk across the train tracks near Beacon Street to get to Ports o’ Call, which you can’t do now because it’s fenced off.

Mary Byrnes of Westwood, a 44-year-old mother of four, lives across the street from her parents in “a house like Donna Reed, with a picket fence.” The house is in a neighborhood five blocks from UCLA: “They call it Little Holmby, but all of us who have lived here call it Westwood.” She never expected to settle in Los Angeles; her husband was a career naval officer, and relocation was a fact of their life. But when their second child was a toddler, her husband left the service, and they began house-hunting here.

They ended up buying the house of an elderly friend who “was like a grandma to us,” Byrnes said. The house, as it happened, was across the street from Byrnes’ folks.

Now, Byrnes’ teenage daughter attends her old Catholic high school, and her younger kids set up their lemonade stands in the summer on the same corner where hers used to be. “A UCLA professor and his wife live four blocks away,” she said, “and every time we drive by, I say to my daughter, ‘Did I tell you that this is the first house in which I ever baby-sat?’ ”

Time has begun to play tricks on her. It seems only yesterday that she was flirting at the same school mixers her daughter now attends. Yet she and that old UCLA professor seem the same age. And her parents are her neighbors!

It is a disorientation she relishes. “We go to dinner parties and people say, ‘Oh, we have to get out of L.A., there’s so much crime and it’s such a bad place to raise children.’ And we sit there thinking, ‘Is there something wrong with us?’

“But then, on a Sunday morning, to call Mom and Dad and say, ‘I’ve got fresh oranges, come over for breakfast’--well, it’s wonderful to have that kind of closeness that isn’t always planned.”

It’s a closeness, locals say, that tends to extend out of their neighborhoods and out toward the much-maligned metropolis that is their hometown.

When Michel Brooks’ company relocated to Napa Valley five years ago, she realized she’d rather find a new job than leave Culver City, where she and her husband, Mike, both grew up.

“People thought I was crazy,” she recalled, laughing. They told her Napa was “crime-free.” They pointed out the rustic beauty of its wineries. She told them she didn’t like the country, and she didn’t drink wine. But the unspeakable truth was this: She actually likes it here.

“I used to work with a lady from France,” Brooks said. “She’d complain about this, complain about that. She didn’t like the restaurants here, she didn’t like the stores. She didn’t like the pay, and how expensive everything was.

“Every day, I’d have to bite my tongue to keep from saying, ‘Well, then go back to France!’ The fact is, it’s not any better anywhere else, not even in so-called crime-free Napa.

“I like it here, and I don’t like change,” Brooks said. “I don’t want to go somewhere else and figure out how to live there. People say, ‘How can you stand it?’

“Well,” she said, laughing, “I guess I don’t know any better.”