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What's left of the Jue Joe ranch in the San Fernando Valley. Photos: LA Observed.
It's getting harder to find remnants of the Valley's agricultural past hidden in the aging postwar suburbs. The last two visible pastures where I would take visitors to see cattle in residential areas of the nation's second largest city have moved on just in recent years. Quite a few of the unimproved dirt streets that were on my personal tours in Sylmar and Chatsworth have also been newly paved. What's this city coming to?
So I was pleased the other day to find the last ranch buildings still standing on the remaining vestige of the former Jue Joe Ranch in, pardon the expression, Lake Balboa. Fascinating story behind the ranch, which was the home place for a Chinese immigrant farming family that supplied asparagus to the downtown produce market in Los Angeles. A blog by the great-grandson of the ranch's late patriarch, Jue Joe, who died in 1941, tells the story and gathers accounts from family members who spent time at the spread, which once covered 100 acres of the floor of the Valley. There used to be numerous houses and work buildings clustered on the property. Now there's only a small barn and what seems to be an asparagus packing shed visible from Vanowen Street, just east of the crossing of Bull Creek wash — that's between Balboa Boulevard and Hayvenhurst Avenue. The main family home and swimming pool, dating only from the mid-1940s, also remain behind a back wall, not in use but connected to a tennis club that occupies a piece of the old ranch.
Jack Jue Jr., a physician in Elk Grove in northern California, has a bunch of family pictures and maps of the old ranch at JueJoeClan.blogspot. His is one of the better LA family history websites. He details how Jue Joe came to skirt the anti-Chinese laws of the early 20th century and buy the ranch, with help from Otto F. Brant, the Title Insurance and Trust mogul who was one of the chosen few invited to invest in San Fernando Valley acreage before the water in William Mulholland's aqueduct irrigated the former wheat fields into fertile ranches and sprawling suburbs.
My photos peeking through the shrubbery on the fence are from a few days ago. There's also an aerial from 1947 from Mr. Jue's website. Vanowen Street is behind the trees on the left of the frame.
