The hilltop portion of Castle Heights has been called part of both Cheviot Hills and Monte-Mar Vista. The most magnificent home in the neighborhood was in the Castle Heights section, where Harry H. Culver had a mansion on 3 acres with stables, tennis courts, and a pool across from the California Country Club he founded and overlooking his domain: Culver City.
Tract 7156, marketed as Country Club Highlands, was registered with the City of Los Angeles on November 26, 1923, several months after the area was incorporated into the city through the “Ambassador Annexation” (a.k.a. Ambassador Addition).
Frans Nelson & Sons “opened” Cheviot Hills on August 19, 1923, offered lots for sale starting November 11, 1923, and began installing infrastructure in October 1923, with construction chief E. E. Mix (whose name is stamped on some sidewalks) overseeing a “small army of men and 40 mules working overtime” to transform a barley field into a “high class residential section.”
Tract 10440 broke up the block between Rountree Road, Exposition Boulevard (now Northvale Road), Overland Avenue, Ashby Avenue, and Manning Avenue with a southern extension of Putney Road and an alley to make room for 49 homes. In 1932, 29 of its lots were resubdivided into a 4½ acre parcel (Tract 9976) for Overland Avenue Elementary School. The remaining 20 homes were excluded when the Cheviot Hills Home Owners’ Association formed in 1963 “to cope with problems created by high-rise development at Century City” (i.e., traffic).
Sanford Adler followed the success of his California Country Club Estates development with the 68-lot (immodestly named) “Sanford Adler’s Hillcrest View Estates” (Tract 19015, filed October 22, 1953).
Gordon & Bailey Provonsha, Paul & Constance Hornaday, and Ruth Hunstock recorded Tract 17327, setting out 21 lots along Provon Lane covering what had been an orchard. (Gordon Provonsha is shown at left.)
On August 18, 1954, Roy B. Warring filed Tract no. 19364 with the City of Los Angeles, laying out ten homesites along a new street – Girla Way – between Sanford Adler’s contemporaneous developments: California Country Club Estates and Hillcrest View Estates.
Cheviot Hills is an amalgam of housing tracts big and small, named and unnamed, situated in hills formerly called the “Palms Hills,” for the earliest (1886) subdivision in the area, “The Palms” (later, simply “Palms”). Developed from 1920s through the 1950s, Cheviot Hills covers parts of two Spanish and Mexican land grants, Rancho Rincón de Los Bueyes and Rancho La Ballona.
